Why Reparations are a Terrible Idea
So, I've been hearing this a lot lately. From Black Hitler (referred to as Gazi Kodzo on YouTube) to various universities like American University who want this in order to pay for tuition and be given more leniency, people are talking more and more about reparations. I'm so sick of this discussion. It seems to become more and more dishonest and irrelevant. I did a little research with it, and I'd like some critique and challenge to see if this is good enough. I believe there are many arguments as to why reparations is a terrible idea.
1. You're basically profiting from slavery, much like the slave masters. You're condensing the lives of tons of slaves from centuries into a luxury item from reparations (and yes, that includes education because people go to universities not to survive, but to benefit). If you need food, water, shelter and other necessities, you might as well obtain it yourself or go on welfare. It just seems like these people just want an excuse for making money without really improving their lives.
2. Only 1.4% of whites (4.8% of white Southerners) owned slaves in the United States before slavery was abolished. Should we punish every white person because of that 1%?
Sidenote: This fact-checker does not state how he got the 7.4% figure from the data he has gathered, and did my own math and got my own numbers, presented here. I am currently waiting for a response. Therefore, I discarded this Politifact source for now.
3. Some whites are also immigrants. Their ancestors weren't even involved in slavery and in some cases were slaves or indentured servants themselves. What happens to them? Would their existence even matter?
4. Technically, Native Americans have ancestral claims and treaty rights to the land that has been taken. So, you're essentially taking the land of Natives, not white people, if we're talking about land. Native Americans also owned slaves. So did black people.
5. Remember, there were African merchants (Barbary pirates) who sold slaves to Europeans and slave catchers. What about their descendants?
6. What if there was a white person who had a slave in his lineage, or a non-white individual? Does he get reparations? What about mixed people? How much of the reparations do they get? Remember Plessy vs. Ferguson. All it took was to have a black ancestor to be discriminated against.
7. As I said before, slaves lived a lot worse than blacks today. Why should blacks today receive the money that blacks in the earlier centuries should have had if reparations were implemented?
8. Not all black people that came to the United States come from slave descendants. Some came willingly.
10. This might even cause more racism, and further the tension we have in the US today. This might also not help black people in the long run once those reparations become meaningless, much like Reagan giving $20,000 to each Japanese-American internment camp survivor during WWII, along with the never-ending Native American treaties. Those have, for some reason, not solve the racial tension and other problems of said groups. They were arguably not needed in the first place. Based on writer Thomas Sowell's work, the Japanese had a third-higher income than the average American before a guy like Reagan even came to office, and were represented in profession occupations more so than whites even before that time.
There is also empirical evidence to suggest that reparations won't make black people happy. In 2000, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe kicked out white farmers in Zimbabwe for a dual purpose: he wanted reparations and wanted to regain land power. White farmers made up around 70% of the farmers there, and they went to Zambia in response. The given-up land was then given to priests and other people. In 2015, Mugabe is now asking for those same farmers back, because the economy was declining and $12 billion were lost in agricultural revenue and endured a famine.
It's a very complicated process. If reparations were to be implemented, they should have been done right after the Civil War. It's way too late now.
Frederick Douglass once said that when the slaves were freed, absolutely nothing should be done with them and they should be left on their own two feet, but every since the government and other groups came in to cater to or tamper with black people, the black community has essentially been ruined. This sense of entitlement needs to stop.