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While I don't know if reparations are the right solution, I think it's a bit rich to suggest that descendants of slaves aren't "people affected" given the enorm

While I don't know if reparations are the right solution, I think it's a bit rich to suggest that descendants of slaves aren't "people affected" given the enormous disparity, in almost all metrics, between black and white wellbeing.

Knufen 8y ago
While I agree in principle, how far back do we go? 10? 100? 1000 years? Or somewhere in between?
- rayiner 8y ago
  The focus would not be on the damages suffered by those who are dead, but the residual effect on those who are alive. You don’t need to pick an arbitrary time scale, you can just look to the magnitude of the residual effect (which will attenuate over time). Right now, about two generations after the end of legal segregation, blacks make 1/3 less per capita income on average than the national average. So it seems like the residual damage is still very strong.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Agreed. One might hope the 'residual effects' would attenuate over time, but the jury is still out. In large part because our society still has plenty of white supremacist social structure baked in, it's not just residual effects but ongoing harm.
weberc2 8y ago
But in calculating reparations, wouldn’t you want to compare the wealth disparity between descendants of slavery and the average per-capita wealth of the African countries from which the slaves originally came? As opposed to average white American wealth? Isn’t the former more indicative of the damage caused by slavery? After all, had there not been slavery, the descendants of slaves would certainly have very different economic outcomes, right? But it’s probably not even so simple since many descendants of slaves also have some European ancestry by way of mixing with white Americans, so maybe we would need to figure out the degree to which mixing occurred and weight the calculation accordingly? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but surely they must be answered before the reparations conversation could be advanced.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  We can talk about reparations for colonialism too. Did you know Haiti was paying back it's "debt" to France for Haitian bodies "expropriated" from French slavery until 1947?
  - weberc2 8y ago
    That’s pretty sad, but I don’t see what that has to do with my questions.
    - tptacek 8y ago
      Interestingly, for you in particular, pretty much all of the evils of European colonialism throughout the world are in scope. That's because you downthread hazarded the argument that perhaps (compared, implicitly, to Africans on the African continent) African Americans were better off as a result of slavery. That's a reprehensible argument, but at least it puts you on the hook for points like these.
      - weberc2 8y ago
        African Americans are economically better off as a result of slavery than their African peers. And without slavery, there would be far, far fewer African Americans than there are today. These are facts; no serious person disputes them. It’s not a big jump to suggest that slavery was economically advantageous for the current generation of African Americans. This is simple reasoning; nothing reprehensible here. However, it would be reprehensible if I used this one positive outcome to justify slavery, which I’m very clearly not doing. Slavery is bad even if it did have a positive outcome. Of course, none of this “puts me on the hook” for other other unrelated arguments, nor do they make Haitian slavery relevant to the subject of US reparations.
        tptacek 8y ago
        You've missed my point. The comparison you're drawing between African Americans and Africans in Africa (or, very obviously, for that matter in Haiti) is confounded by the fact that European colonialism set the course for all those people. You're comparing the experience of people oppressed by Europeans and Americans with the experience of people oppressed by Americans.

Knufen 8y ago

While I agree in principle, how far back do we go? 10? 100? 1000 years? Or somewhere in between?

rayiner 8y ago
The focus would not be on the damages suffered by those who are dead, but the residual effect on those who are alive. You don’t need to pick an arbitrary time scale, you can just look to the magnitude of the residual effect (which will attenuate over time). Right now, about two generations after the end of legal segregation, blacks make 1/3 less per capita income on average than the national average. So it seems like the residual damage is still very strong.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  Agreed. One might hope the 'residual effects' would attenuate over time, but the jury is still out. In large part because our society still has plenty of white supremacist social structure baked in, it's not just residual effects but ongoing harm.

weberc2 8y ago

But in calculating reparations, wouldn’t you want to compare the wealth disparity between descendants of slavery and the average per-capita wealth of the African countries from which the slaves originally came? As opposed to average white American wealth? Isn’t the former more indicative of the damage caused by slavery? After all, had there not been slavery, the descendants of slaves would certainly have very different economic outcomes, right? But it’s probably not even so simple since many descendants of slaves also have some European ancestry by way of mixing with white Americans, so maybe we would need to figure out the degree to which mixing occurred and weight the calculation accordingly? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but surely they must be answered before the reparations conversation could be advanced.

jrochkind1 8y ago
We can talk about reparations for colonialism too. Did you know Haiti was paying back it's "debt" to France for Haitian bodies "expropriated" from French slavery until 1947?
- weberc2 8y ago
  That’s pretty sad, but I don’t see what that has to do with my questions.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Interestingly, for you in particular, pretty much all of the evils of European colonialism throughout the world are in scope. That's because you downthread hazarded the argument that perhaps (compared, implicitly, to Africans on the African continent) African Americans were better off as a result of slavery. That's a reprehensible argument, but at least it puts you on the hook for points like these.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      African Americans are economically better off as a result of slavery than their African peers. And without slavery, there would be far, far fewer African Americans than there are today. These are facts; no serious person disputes them. It’s not a big jump to suggest that slavery was economically advantageous for the current generation of African Americans. This is simple reasoning; nothing reprehensible here. However, it would be reprehensible if I used this one positive outcome to justify slavery, which I’m very clearly not doing. Slavery is bad even if it did have a positive outcome. Of course, none of this “puts me on the hook” for other other unrelated arguments, nor do they make Haitian slavery relevant to the subject of US reparations.
      - tptacek 8y ago
        You've missed my point. The comparison you're drawing between African Americans and Africans in Africa (or, very obviously, for that matter in Haiti) is confounded by the fact that European colonialism set the course for all those people. You're comparing the experience of people oppressed by Europeans and Americans with the experience of people oppressed by Americans.