If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
Sunny Hostin, who has loudly called for reparations for slavery, discovered on air that her ancestors were Spanish slaveowners.
So were those of Kamala Harris in Jamaica.
This illustrates the illogic of reparations. The likelihood is that most “African-Americans” are ethnically mixed, and descended from slaveowners as well as from slaves. It is not likely, after all, given human nature, that slaveowners back then denied themselves sex with female slaves.
By contrast, few living “white” Americans will have descended from slaveowners. Most probably trace their ancestry through Ellis Island in more recent years. Even most who don’t will have ancestors who lived in the non-slave North, with four times the population at the time. Their ancestors fought to end slavery. And even those whose ancestors came to the US South, will probably bear no blood guilt. Only 1.4 percent of the white American population owned slaves.
All those Scots-Irish rednecks and hillbillies, the stereotypical white Southerner? Their own ancestors were probably slaves, at least temporary slaves, brought over, often against their will, as indentured servants. That was the common fate for Irish, Scottish, or Acadians (Cajuns).
So “African-Americans” are more likely to be descended from slaveholders than “white” Americans.
Who should pay reparations to whom?
The concept is nonsensical, obviously unjust, and patently ahistorical.
Sunny Hostin, a “black” host on The View, recently learned on-air that her ancestors included slaveowners. Which puts her in an ambiguous situation, since she has been calling for reparations for American blacks over slavery. Kamala Harris is also descended from slaveholders, in Jamaica.
Problem: under slavery, slavers owned their slaves. They could do what they wanted with them. Can anyone doubt they used black slaves for sex?
Probably no Americans tracing descent from the institution of slavery are purely African by genetics. They are probably also descendants of the slaveowners. Even on the African side, they are probably as much descendants of slavers as of slaves; the practice of slavery has been endemic in Africa from ancient times.
So, if any Americans are owed reparations for slavery, they are owed it by themselves. Not by the innocent descendants of European immigrants arriving in America after slavery was abolished, from a continent where the practice was almost unknown, but for the danger of being carried off by Arab slavers from Africa. Not from those whose ancestors laboured alongside the blacks as indentured servants. Only one percent of Americans ever owned slaves.
But of course the whole concept of reparations for those who never experienced slavery is nonsense to begin with. It makes sense only for living survivors of an injustice. We are individuals, responsible for our acts, not for the acts of others. None of us can justly be rewarded or punished for the deeds of our ancestors. The more so since the child of a bad person is most likely already their worst victim.
The idea of inherited guilt or credit is the essence of human inequality. It is what the American Revolution was meant to end forever. It is the notion of inherited privilege; and it is blood libel.
All the same arguments hold for the idea of special “aboriginal rights” in Canada. There are few if any “pure blood” Indians in Canada. We are all Americans, we are all Canadians, we are all brothers and sisters.
The US Supreme Court decision that “affirmative action” programs for university admission are unconstitutional racial discrimination also makes a case that a great number of whites are entitled to reparations.
The left has long demanded reparations be paid out to blacks for slavery. San Francisco’s city government recently proposed giving each black citizen of the city $5 million. Yet nobody who suffered under slavery is still alive. Nobody who perpetrated the peculiar institution is still alive. Almost all American blacks have some European blood, quite possibly from slaveholders taking advantage of their position. Fewer than one percent of the US population, even during slave times, owned slaves. Most white Americans probably descend from more recent immigrants. Accordingly, the average black American is the individual most likely to owe himself or herself reparations, if anyone does; not the innocent general public who just happen to have the wrong colour of skin.
One might argue that, aside rom slavery, reparations are due for Jim Crow laws, for segregation in the US South. But the last of that was overturned by the civil rights acts in 1964-65. To have been personally subject to it, you would have to be over 65 or so now. And it would have affected you only for a brief period at that. To have been discriminated against in college admissions or for a job, you would have to be about 75.
By contrast, affirmative action in college admissions, systemically discriminating against whites and Asians, was introduced in the mid-Sixties and has continued until today. This means that every white native-born American alive today has suffered from systemic discrimination for most or all of their lives, and is justly entitled to reparations, if there is any argument for reparations at all.
This little rap from the new Disney+ series “The (New) Proud Family” is causing a stir. It demands reparations for those of darker skin tone on the grounds that “slaves built this country.”
If the current prosperity of the USA is built on the labour of slaves up to a hundred and fifty years ago, why is it that, even at the time of the Civil War, the South, where there were slaves, was far poorer than the North, where there were none? How did nations like Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, or Japan also get wealthy, without slaves; while any other country you might mention in which African slaves were a large part of the labour force remains relatively poorer: Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, the other islands of the Caribbean?
Why isn’t black Africa rich?
The “slaves built this country” concept is Marxist: it sees manual labour as the only form of labour and the only source of value. And then black slaves as the only labourers.
Remove this materialist assumption, and it makes better sense to say that folks like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson built the USA. And maybe Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Walt Whitman, the Wright Brothers, Stephen Foster, Mark Twain, and the like.
It looks as though the US suffered, rather than profited, from slavery. Enslaved workers, perhaps, do not do a very good job of it. And then the US paid a heavy price, in lives, money, and property destruction, to rid itself of slavery. Perhaps more than the profit slavery ever generated, for anyone.
And of course, it only generated profit for a small number of people, perhap one percent of the US population at the time. Poor whites necessarily suffered, as the jobs taken by slaves were not available to them, and their labour was devalued. They too were victims of slavery.
So perhaps we should trace family lines back to the actual slaveholders? Then their descendants could pay the reparations
If we did so, it is likely that many of their descendants would turn out to be the very blacks demanding reparations. Most modern “African Americans” are of mixed race. Much of this mixing surely occurred on the plantations, with plantation owners taking full advantage of their ownership for sexual services. It all has nothing to do, on the other hand, with the probable majority of “white” Americans whose ancestors arrived in America after the days of slavery.
Of course, there are other reasons to see the demand for reparations as nonsensical. It requires the sort of “blood guilt” that led to the persecution of the Jews for centuries. Everyone who was ever enslaved is now dead. Everyone who enslaved them is also dead. Far from being discriminated against, modern American blacks can point to many laws and “affirmative action” programs that discriminate in their favour.
One might counter with the “lingering effects of slavery.” Then what about the lingering effects of the Holocaust on the Jews? That was worse, and more recent. The lingering effects of the Great Famine and indentured servitude on the modern Irish—now apparently the richest nation per capita in Europe? The lingering effects of the Holodomir on modern Ukrainian-Americans? The Armenians? The Chinese? Why are they not suffering economically as blacks are, and why are they not also deserving of reparations?
One reason these other groups are more successful, perhaps, is that they have never learned to depend on handouts. The result, not of slavery, but of progressive Marxist "Great Society" programs.
One aspect of the current uproar around race is a demand in the US that the government pay reparations for slavery.
The notion is nonsensical.
To whom? There are no former slaves in the USA. To pay reparations to the descendants of slaves becomes a matter of inherited privilege. The Declaration of Independence weighed in against such things in stern terms when it declared that all men are created equal.
And how do you track descendants? As any DNA analysis will demonstrate, essentially no “African-Americans” alive today are of purely African origin. In other words, part of them is slave, and part of them is not—is, possibly, slave owner. Presumably, then, they should pay reparations to themselves, one pocket to the other.
By contrast, given the demographics, it is exceptionally unlikely that the average non-black American living and paying taxes today had an ancestor who owned African slaves. Most have come more cecently from Europe, and even among those whose ancestors were in North America before 1860, the rate of slaveholding was something like 1%. If they came from Europe, slavery had not been a thing in Europe for the past few thousand years. By contrast, among African-Americans, even their African ancestors were likely to have had African slaves, since slavery was an endemic practice in Africa until recent times. Why then are the descendants of those who did not hold slaves paying reparations to the descendants of slaveholders?
It is true that corporations are considered people; accordingly, the US government can be held liable now for injustices perpetrated by the US government in even the distant past.
But here we have another problem. The US government spent a good deal of money, and lost a lot of soldiers’ lives, to end slavery. The governmental organization liable for slavery would be the Confederate States of America. I hear they filed for bankruptcy some time ago.
Perhaps then government responsibility devolves to the individual states. But good luck figuring out whether, and how many of, a given individual’s ancestors were held as slaves in the sovereign state of Mississippi.
And then, what about others whose ancestors were enslaved? What about the Irish, my own forebears, who were commonly held in indentured servitude, slavery by the UN’s current definition, throughout North America and the Caribbean, and who were dying in multitudes by a largely government-induced famine in the same years immediately before the African slaves were freed in the US? Why reparations for the one group, and not the other?
The natural reaction is to point out that modern Irish-Americans do not need the money. By and large, despite coming from such a dark place so recently, they are doing well. The same might be said of the Jews, who were being dispossessed and systematically exterminated in Europe up to 1945, almost a century after the last slave in the US was freed. Yet nobody thinks the Jews need public money. Or the Armenians, or the Lebanese, or the Ukrainians, or the Cambodians, all victims of more recent holocausts.
Reparations are not called for, would not be just, and, on this evidence, would do no good. It is not the legacy of slavery that is holding African-Americans back.
I suppose I should support the campaign. For, after all, if these folks deserve money from modern Britons now for a policy that ended in 1833, I should surely score something nice for the longstanding occupation and mass starvation of my ancestors in Ireland, right up to the 1920s. And then there is the matter of the Irish slave trade.
If only it weren’t for the obvious injustice of the claims.
After all, not a single Briton living today has owned a slave, and not a single Jamaican can claim to have been enslaved. So why should either accuse the other of guilt or responsibility? If this is just, should modern Jews then bear responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?
The advocates of reparations say, ““You can’t have it both ways,” … “Your [British] society was developed. You are enjoying a lifestyle because of the blood, sweat and tears of people in the past.”
Yet this was a past that ended almost two hundred years ago. If it is really responsible for Britain’s current relative wealth, and Jamaica’s poverty, then how to explain the current wealth of Germany, for example, who was never involved in the slave trade, and has risen from utter desolation as recently as 1945? The same could be said for most of Europe, and Japan; or for any number of immigrant families who arrived destitute on America’s or Canada’s shores, and in two or three generations were quite well-off.
The demand overlooks the fact that, in world terms, Britain, France and Holland were actually among the first countries to abolish slavery. It persisted much longer in Africa: in Niger and Mauretania, into the 21st century. Had their ancestors not been transported to the new world, it would probably have taken several generations longer for African-Caribbeaners to have achieved freedom from the practice.
The demand for reparations also overlooks the fact that Britain left the ex-slaves and their modern descendants in possession of several new democratic nations. And that the citizens of these countries, on the whole, are better off financially as well as in terms of personal freedom than African-Caribbeaners would be if they were now living in Africa. Jamaica’s GDP per capita is higher than almost all black African countries, and a full ten times greater than the ethnically comparable nation of Liberia. And Jamaica is one of the poorest of the former British possessions in the Caribbean. The GDP per capita of the Bahamas, for example, is three to four times larger again.
Obviously, such variations in the economic welfare of otherwise similar states have nothing to do with slavery two or three hundred years ago. They have to do with good and bad governments today.
Unfortunately, it is entirely in the interests of bad governments and corrupt elites to demand reparations for slavery. Not just for the free cash, but to distract attention from the real problem, and their own culpability.
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