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I overinterpreted your response to the previous commenter and jumped the gun a bit. Sorry for the exaggerated rhetoric, it wasn't needed and may not have been c

I overinterpreted your response to the previous commenter and jumped the gun a bit. Sorry for the exaggerated rhetoric, it wasn't needed and may not have been correctly aimed (at you). But, to your points, there are historical forces that bring people good/bad fortune - including racism in America. How do you decide which ones are worthy of ex post facto adjustment on a society-wide level? How do you balance and justify that to the orthogonal part of your population; the part that had no role in the history but would still be impacted by the expenditure of communal resources? Keeping in mind here, the wider the net you cast for who need adjustment, the bigger the impact on the orthogonal population.

tptacek 6y ago
I don't so much want to wade into the reparations question. I find a lot to agree with in Rayiner's position and a lot to think about in the concerns of people who worry that it would be impossible to administer. All I have to contribute is the fact that whatever the impact of slavery was, it wasn't confined to our distant past. This country practiced economic apartheid well into my own lifetime, and the aftereffects are impossible to miss. I live near Division and Chicago, just outside of Chicago in Oak Park. If I cross my alley and the street behind it, Austin Blvd, I'm in the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, where, if I'm a teenaged Black kid, my likelihood of being murdered shoots up dramatically. And Austin is a middle-class neighborhood (a typical Black household making $75k/yr lives in a higher-poverty neighborhood than a white family making $40k/yr). What changes when you cross that street is that you cross a famous redlining boundary. A few years back you could easily get a map of Chicago redlining without consulting an encyclopedia or doing any research; you just needed to look at Uber's Chicago service map. The neighborhoods they wouldn't commit to serving were uncannily the redlined neighborhoods of the 1960s. It wasn't because Uber was trying to perpetuate the practice, but because redlining ravaged west- and south-side Chicago, and we are nowhere close to digging our way out of it. Lots of different groups of people have been economically disadvantaged in the United States, but I don't think anything like this, at this scale, with this impact. It fucked my city --- the best city in the country --- right up. It fucked up Detroit. It fucked up STL. It's a big deal and we should all be freshly furious about it.

tptacek 6y ago

I don't so much want to wade into the reparations question. I find a lot to agree with in Rayiner's position and a lot to think about in the concerns of people who worry that it would be impossible to administer. All I have to contribute is the fact that whatever the impact of slavery was, it wasn't confined to our distant past. This country practiced economic apartheid well into my own lifetime, and the aftereffects are impossible to miss. I live near Division and Chicago, just outside of Chicago in Oak Park. If I cross my alley and the street behind it, Austin Blvd, I'm in the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, where, if I'm a teenaged Black kid, my likelihood of being murdered shoots up dramatically. And Austin is a middle-class neighborhood (a typical Black household making $75k/yr lives in a higher-poverty neighborhood than a white family making $40k/yr). What changes when you cross that street is that you cross a famous redlining boundary. A few years back you could easily get a map of Chicago redlining without consulting an encyclopedia or doing any research; you just needed to look at Uber's Chicago service map. The neighborhoods they wouldn't commit to serving were uncannily the redlined neighborhoods of the 1960s. It wasn't because Uber was trying to perpetuate the practice, but because redlining ravaged west- and south-side Chicago, and we are nowhere close to digging our way out of it. Lots of different groups of people have been economically disadvantaged in the United States, but I don't think anything like this, at this scale, with this impact. It fucked my city --- the best city in the country --- right up. It fucked up Detroit. It fucked up STL. It's a big deal and we should all be freshly furious about it.