News:
- Yahoo! News – Woman demanding reparations at Target gets punched in the face by security guard: ‘Rosa Parks Moment’
- California reparations amount, if any, left to politicians
- Black and White Americans are far apart in their views of reparations for slavery
I’m writing the article only after seeing the Yahoo! News story listed above. The reason I am writing about this issue again is because of the fact that this woman was willing to break the law in an effort to obtain a Target Store. She had her groceries rung up and expected this company which was not even founded until 1903 as Goodfellow Dry Goods in Minneapolis, and over time become Target in 1962. So, she went to a store that had zero tights to slavery in age or location.
There are other reasons that there is no one person alive today that deserve reparations due to slavery. Unless you count for those still being held in slavery that the left tends to gloss over. Those people that are currently enslaved are mostly from Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries. However, per the website, Anti-Slavery the UK still has a problem with slavery.
In many of these countries, the main reasons for slavery in many of these countries are the exploitation of children, domestic slavery, sexual exploitation, and criminal activities dealing with drugs. However, what many on the left don’t want to think about is the slavery that is used to create the fresh-looking shoes, jewelry, or the batteries in those great environmentally safe vehicles. I mean why focus on the current wrongs with people that are currently alive versus wrongs that happened years before any of us was alive to stop it?
Now since I know many on the left want to use the statement that the only reparations that their families did get back then were the 40 acres and a mule, and that was stolen from them at that time. They will remain, everyone, that President Lincoln promised the former slaves the 40 acres and the mule, but once he died it was taken away under President Andrew Johnson. What they fail to remind everyone of, is the fact that Lincoln was a Republican and Johnson was a Democrat. True, at the time both Lincoln and Johnson were part of the National Union Party, but that was a party that was supported by Republicans and War Democrats. After the Civil War Johnson returned to his beloved Democrats where he vetoed any bill that provided protection or any reparations to the now-freed slaves. Due to his repeated vetos to help the former slaves after the war, that was when the Republican-held Congress passed the 14th amendment, that got ratified in 1868.
As to who today is alive that deserves any reparations? No one. Not a person alive today should get something that they never took part in, or felt the effects of. It has been over 150 years since the Civil War and no one today is feeling the effects of the slave trade of the 1800s. Many people that had money back then now have nothing and many that had nothing back then have millions. If the current thought process was correct that what happened 150 years ago is still affecting them today were true, you would see successful people like President Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Candance Owens, Allen West, Jamie Fox, and Densil Washington. From the left or right side of the political aisle, there are successful black people that more than like can find an ancestor who was a former slave.
To further ask about who deserves reparations today, we need to also look at the fact that there were blacks before the Civil War that also owned slaves. So, wouldn’t that mean blacks that have roots not in being a slave, but actually were slave owners should pay reparations instead? According to the website The Root, (Did Black People Own Slaves?), of the numbers that Carter G Woodson gives from 1830, out of the 13.7 Percent (319,599) of freed blacks at the time, 3,776 of them owned 12,907 slaves. Those 3,776 slaves were out of the total of 2,009,043 slaves recorded that year. As they are some 30 years before the Civil War, we would have to assume that the years before and after that had similar numbers.
All of this does not also take into account the number of black immigrants that were never part of the slave trade at all. So, does that mean that every black person should receive reparations if the US ever did start to pay them out? Once again, how would we weed out those that had actual family members who were slaves? Not to mention, what about the former slaves that became slave owners? Should we do DNA to find out? Those that were descendants of slaves get reparations, but those that were former slaves that ended up owning slaves get nothing but also pay nothing, and those that only owned slaves only pay.
But once again, what about those whites and other races that either immigrated after the Civil War or never owned slaves? Should they pay for the burden of paying for something that they never had a part in? Why would we punish those that had no connection to the wrongs of a past they were never a part of? This now begs the question of how to settle who should be taxed to cover this burden. I mean, not every current taxpayer had a hand in the immoral enslavement of the black population over 150 years ago.
