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What responsibility do we have as a nation to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? Have we no courage, n

What responsibility do we have as a nation to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? Have we no courage, no sense of moral obligation to make things right? The culture of black communities dealing with poverty and crime that you refer to didn't come from nowhere. It was not simply imported from 17th century Africa, in the way that the apple pie was brought over from England. It is a product of a people who were bravely struggling and striving to cope in the worst possible circumstances. Brutally enslaved for more than 200 years, their literal chains finally removed, they continued to be viciously abused and systematically and savagely oppressed throughout the following century. They weren't event treated as fully human by the federal law until 2 generations ago. Only two generations! Many states had incredibly racist and oppressive laws even more recently than that. The most cursory research reveals an utterly depraved history. One simple and terrible example is redlining, which unfortunately was occurring even after the civil rights act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining). We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. It is impossible to fully mend what we have broken, but we damn well better try.

acituan 6y ago
> We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. 25% percent of the US’s population as a nation is 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, a substantial portion of which arrived after 1965 because desegregation and immigration reforms coincide. [1] Whatever “we” you might be thinking, it risks running an egocentric fallacy to assume it expands to the entirety of the US population. [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation-americans/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation...
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  They moved here knowing some things in the US are broken. They can pitch in to help us fix it. I’d guess that most would be be honored to do so.
  - fastball 6y ago
    What exactly is your solution? If you're talking about reparations, I think you might find that the math doesn't really work in this case.
  - acituan 6y ago
    Most people who come to US are escaping horrid conditions of their home countries (a good portion of which is not unrelated to US foreign policy). Most immigration is not a luxurious, touristic affair but comes out of necessity. There are even people who would consider immigrations as voluntarily getting themselves colonized, coming here for the country to extract their resources in exchange of a promise of better life circumstances. We certainly extract more out of immigrants economically, academically, psychologically, who were raised and educated elsewhere, who are incentivized to work very hard or go back, who also suffer mentally from this process. Requiring them to pitch in assuming they had perfect information and made a completely free preference is at best ignorant. Of course it is the honorable thing to answer the suffering of fellow humans, but that goes both ways, and thinking that that problem is always the one and only problem of this world is plain, pure narcissism.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    That’s rather presumptuous of you. I’m an immigrant (and now a naturalized US Citizen), and I want no part of “reparations”. Only 1 in 5 Americans supports it: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/504511-1-in-5-supports-reparations-in-new-poll https://thehill.com/homenews/news/504511-1-in-5-supports-rep... Also you say this as though the US is the only country that had slaves. Chattel slavery was (unfortunately) the predominate form of labor in the entire world for centuries. The US was the 3rd to last country in the Americas to abolish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... Other societies in the world have largely decided that we’re better off just burying the hatchet.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dwaltrip 6y ago
nemo44x 6y ago
Radical delegitimization of the nuclear family in the late 60’s and early 70’s got intertwined with the black power movement which essentially argued that single mother’s are better off than married. They have more agency and the nuclear family is a patriarchal tool of male supremacy. Then taken further into the black power movement with aid of that eras new feminism, it was argued that the nuclear family is a white European ideal and a tool of oppression. So then the problem became one of the state not doing enough to fund the single mother family. Not only accepting this but making it an ideal. Read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research from the early 1960’s that could have been a corner stone of the civil rights movement. But then it wasn’t. Anyways this rejection of the traditional family structure is essentially what triggered the family values movement on the right in the late 70’s and early 1980’s. Interestingly as the legitimization of single mothers became more and more mainstream we continued to see black kids grow up in entrenched poverty as dropout rates and criminal activity climbed year over year for these kids compared to previous generations. So now the solution is “reparations”. Of course it wasn’t the radical ideas of middle class radicals being experimented on black people that has caused this inescapable spiral. It’s that we need to give money to single mothers and we are here because we simply haven’t given enough. Some misguided people will say blacks did better before the Civil Rights Act. But they are wrong not in that the Civil Rights Act was bad - it is good - mandatory to be sure. It’s that during this same era we rejected rigorous research and science for so called theories that claimed the 2-parent family was a tool of oppression. This got interlaced into the black power movement and we saw the destruction of the black family and the resulting mess we are in today.
- bhupy 6y ago
  Do you have a source on this? I’m interested to see if we’ve actually quantified the effectiveness of this delegitimization.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Marriage_for_White_People%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Marriage_for_White_People%3... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For... https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...
lawnchair_larry 6y ago
We already have. It’s time to stop blaming people who had nothing to do with the problem but are guilty of looking like someone who did.

acituan 6y ago

> We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. 25% percent of the US’s population as a nation is 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, a substantial portion of which arrived after 1965 because desegregation and immigration reforms coincide. [1] Whatever “we” you might be thinking, it risks running an egocentric fallacy to assume it expands to the entirety of the US population. [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation-americans/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation...

dwaltrip 6y ago
They moved here knowing some things in the US are broken. They can pitch in to help us fix it. I’d guess that most would be be honored to do so.
- fastball 6y ago
  What exactly is your solution? If you're talking about reparations, I think you might find that the math doesn't really work in this case.
- acituan 6y ago
  Most people who come to US are escaping horrid conditions of their home countries (a good portion of which is not unrelated to US foreign policy). Most immigration is not a luxurious, touristic affair but comes out of necessity. There are even people who would consider immigrations as voluntarily getting themselves colonized, coming here for the country to extract their resources in exchange of a promise of better life circumstances. We certainly extract more out of immigrants economically, academically, psychologically, who were raised and educated elsewhere, who are incentivized to work very hard or go back, who also suffer mentally from this process. Requiring them to pitch in assuming they had perfect information and made a completely free preference is at best ignorant. Of course it is the honorable thing to answer the suffering of fellow humans, but that goes both ways, and thinking that that problem is always the one and only problem of this world is plain, pure narcissism.
- bhupy 6y ago
  That’s rather presumptuous of you. I’m an immigrant (and now a naturalized US Citizen), and I want no part of “reparations”. Only 1 in 5 Americans supports it: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/504511-1-in-5-supports-reparations-in-new-poll https://thehill.com/homenews/news/504511-1-in-5-supports-rep... Also you say this as though the US is the only country that had slaves. Chattel slavery was (unfortunately) the predominate form of labor in the entire world for centuries. The US was the 3rd to last country in the Americas to abolish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... Other societies in the world have largely decided that we’re better off just burying the hatchet.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dwaltrip 6y ago

nemo44x 6y ago

Radical delegitimization of the nuclear family in the late 60’s and early 70’s got intertwined with the black power movement which essentially argued that single mother’s are better off than married. They have more agency and the nuclear family is a patriarchal tool of male supremacy. Then taken further into the black power movement with aid of that eras new feminism, it was argued that the nuclear family is a white European ideal and a tool of oppression. So then the problem became one of the state not doing enough to fund the single mother family. Not only accepting this but making it an ideal. Read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research from the early 1960’s that could have been a corner stone of the civil rights movement. But then it wasn’t. Anyways this rejection of the traditional family structure is essentially what triggered the family values movement on the right in the late 70’s and early 1980’s. Interestingly as the legitimization of single mothers became more and more mainstream we continued to see black kids grow up in entrenched poverty as dropout rates and criminal activity climbed year over year for these kids compared to previous generations. So now the solution is “reparations”. Of course it wasn’t the radical ideas of middle class radicals being experimented on black people that has caused this inescapable spiral. It’s that we need to give money to single mothers and we are here because we simply haven’t given enough. Some misguided people will say blacks did better before the Civil Rights Act. But they are wrong not in that the Civil Rights Act was bad - it is good - mandatory to be sure. It’s that during this same era we rejected rigorous research and science for so called theories that claimed the 2-parent family was a tool of oppression. This got interlaced into the black power movement and we saw the destruction of the black family and the resulting mess we are in today.

bhupy 6y ago
Do you have a source on this? I’m interested to see if we’ve actually quantified the effectiveness of this delegitimization.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Marriage_for_White_People%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Marriage_for_White_People%3... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For... https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...

lawnchair_larry 6y ago

We already have. It’s time to stop blaming people who had nothing to do with the problem but are guilty of looking like someone who did.