this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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I imagine the hardest part would be determining who was harmed by slavery given that not everyone has records of it. I think it would be nice to do to put that shameful chapter of history behind us. Whatever dollar amount we come up with probably wouldn't be sufficient for the generational wealth destroyed, but it would be an attempt at doing better and very symbolic.
I don't think reparations would work as direct cash payments, I think they would work best as investments into black communities. Your reasoning is exactly why I support reparations though. We cannot fix the harm, but we can try to make it right.
So any public works in a black community counts as reparations to you, but you also think none of that is happening?
Where the hell did you get that idea? Reparations would be separate from regular public works.
You, and what's the difference?
Porque no las dos? Most folks who've looked into it have concluded that it will take direct cash payment as well as community investment and multiple other simultaneous efforts to fully catch the black community up to their white counterparts in terms of opportunities and generational wealth they've been denied access to, and to work against the culture of racism that made all that denial possible in the first place.
I think when most Americans think of reparations, they think of direct payments and no other remedies, so they get upset about it for all manners of reasons. When discussing reparations, it's far easier to get people on board when you don't talk about direct payments. Payments are part of the solution, but they won't solve the problem. If we had to pick a single option, focusing on communities would have the strongest individual impact.
An example of what you discuss shows in the reparations to the Seminole tribe. Many freed slaves or escaped slaves never signed documentation (like a census for the tribe) as they were more worried about getting found/cheated etc. Last I knew there were court cases still open or closed in the past couple decades pertaining to such.
What would the lost wages in their entirety amount to?
Now that would be really hard to figure out, you'd have to determine what sort of jobs were done as slaves and how many hours. I don't think slavers kept those sorts of records in the antebellum South.
Even granting the value of 40 acres and a mule plus 200 years of interest to descendants of slaves would be a challenge.
I think they may have, as slavery was an industry so were plantations. The planters as well as the slavers probably kept meticolous books and records. I assume such as they probably lacked any guilty conscience for their crimes.
I will look it up once I am back home again and have access to the library.
I'd expect large plantations to have records of how many slaves they own and production numbers. Perhaps one could extrapolate from that an estimate of labor hours per slave, but individual slaves' productivity and hours worked, I'd be surprised if this was possible. Smaller scale slave owners might not have been so meticulous about record keeping and much documentation may be lost to time. It is regarded as a shameful institution today, discouraging holding on to such things.
I'm interested in what you find!
Some speculate nothing at this point since generational wealth doesn't tend to stick around for long,
The more sensible solution is instead paying reparations for red lining since the fiscal affects of that are directly observable today without argument over generational entropy, and because it's arguably still ongoing.
You'd need to mitigate the reparations paid by also calculating the generational loss of wealth over the same period by "unaffected" citizens.
What reparations should be paid for is for red lining, as that is a problem that is arguably still ongoing and which has impacts on today's generational wealth recently enough to not have been reduced by the average loss of wealth over generational entropy, not to mention the parallel to the original promise of reparations "40 acres and a mule", not sure how many urban black families would be looking forward to having basically a horse to now take care of but the value of land they were denied access to is deffo something that american black families would be greatly advanced by.