Guest Post by Walter E. Williams
Several Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for Americans to make reparations for slavery. On June 19, the House judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was “to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice.”
Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice demands that all participants in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. That means compensation would have to be paid by Africans and Arabs who captured and sold slaves to Europeans in addition to the people who bought and used slaves. Since slaves and slave traders and owners are no longer with us, compensation is beyond our reach and it’s a matter that will have to be settled in hell or heaven.
Let’s pretend for a moment that the reparations issue makes a modicum of sense. There’s the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white person of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in individual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust. In other words, are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian, and Latin Americans who immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay reparations to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites — who were a majority of Southern whites — should their descendants be made to pay reparations?
Reparations advocates make the unchallenged pronouncement that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That’s utter nonsense. While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn’t have a good record of producing wealth. Slavery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the northern states. Buying into the reparations argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. And the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts.
The reparations movement would be an amusing sideshow were it not for its damaging distractions. It grossly misallocates resources that could be better spent elsewhere. According to the state Department of Education, 75% of black California boys cannot meet state reading standards. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state’s mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. The same story of low education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations. I’d like to see lawyers bring class-action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, and Los Angeles for conferring fraudulent high school diplomas. Such diplomas attest a 12th-grade level of academic achievement when in fact those youngsters often cannot perform at sixth- or seventh-grade levels.
The nation’s most dangerous big cities are Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, Stockton, Birmingham, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The common characteristic of most of these cities is that they have predominantly black populations and blacks have considerable political power as mayors, city councilmen and chiefs of police. Energy spent on reparations should be used to solve those problems.
As of 2014, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution. If money alone were the answer, the many issues facing a large segment of the black community would have been solved.
There’s another possible reparations issue completely ignored: Blacks as well as whites live on land that was taken, sometimes brutally, from American Indians. Do blacks and whites owe American Indians anything?
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Excellent article! Thank you
I want the Blacks and liberals to repay the 20 trillion dollars back that have been wasted on Welfare to Blacks and liberals.
Dem’s don’t really care about this other than its a possible virtue signal hand-out to shore up their black plantation of voters. They believe they own blacks and pay them off, but they need to do more b/c some blacks are waking up to the fact that Dems just want them to be permanent victims and a 90% voting block for the commies. Its all about power, and a tiny bit about PR in terms of the Dems are “good” because they will give you “free” shit, whereas the R’s are bad b/c they expect people to work for stuff. Just like the endless mobs of hispanics are all about creating a voting block that essentially can be used to destroy America, and turn it into a 3rd world type socialist country–with them in charge. Doesn’t matter that hospitals and everything else will be overwhelmed b/c they believe the funny money train won’t stop, or at least they will stay top dogs even if the rest of the country falls apart, they will have their gated communities and armed guards.
It’s all BS. The folks who want this are already on welfare.
what about reparations for taxes for nignog welfare payments?
On a lark, I recently compared two local NJ high schools (Jackson and Lakewood) side-by-side, looking at demographics, graduation rates, NJASK/PARCC/PSAT/SAT test scores, and dollars spent in Federal aid per student.
One high school was about 90% white with the remainder as minorities.
The former school has an economically disadvantaged majority of ESL Hispanics and a 5% white minority.
The graduation rate of the majority white high school was 95% and the graduation rate of the whites in the majority Hispanic school was 55%. The majority white high school met practically all state minimum test scores, but the Hispanic school met NONE, despite Federal spending per student being 10 times higher. Blacks in both districts seemed to graduate at the same rate, but in the majority white school black test scores were barely average.
Another shocker? ALL the Asian minorities who participated in testing were above average or exceeded state requirements.
https://www.nj.gov/education/schools/achievement/
There are large economic disparities between the two school systems and it also shows up in their respective extra-curricular activities and budgets. The results don’t surprise me because money cannot fix an endemic problem.
You have to remember Kneegrow’s have much smaller brains – since it in their dick.
This is semantic crap. We have been paying reparations since 1966 and the Great Society. That has destroyed what little civilization had rubbed off on the niggers. We are just talking about increasing the amount of the payments.
Walter Williams knows perfectly well that giving money to black controlled cities would be a monumental waste and not do one thing to solve the cities problems.
Your article is to the point. Common sense seems lost to most of the population.
Of course, the $64,000 question is always … “WHO pays??”.
I can best answer that question by unequivocally pointing out who does NOT pay;
— All the Northern UNION states. After all, they fought and died to set slaves free.
— Any state whereby the inhabitants marry each other’s cousins …. since this leads to mental retardation, and retards can not be held accountable. This means all the southern states.
— States which weren’t even part of the United States prior to 1860 … which is most of the remaining states.
— CA, OR, and WA ….. also for mental retardation. But, not because of marrying cousins. It’s the water. We now (in 2019) know that there is something in the water that turns the inhabitants of the West Coast into total fucken retards.
— Any and all immigrants who came to the USA!USA!USA! after 1865.
Well, that leaves NO ONE to pay for reparations!!
Except for one exception. There were a bunch of people who actually fought against the Yankees to KEEP slavery in place. These people were Plantation House Kneegrows. That’s right, House Kneegrows had it real real good, and they wanted to keep it that way.
In conclusion, let the Niggas in the Deep South pay for their own fucken reparations.
Us whites have been “conditioned” to accept the so-called “civil-rights (for some)” movement by the “tribe” from the mid 1950s on to the present. The “conditioning” started with the whole “civil-rights (for some)” movement which WAS spearheaded, run and controlled by leftist jews. I personally witnessed the shenanigans, distortions, and downright fraud of this whole “civil-rights (for some)” movement. I didn’t need to be “red pilled” to see where this jewish-run and controlled white dispossession was taking us.
It took the use of federal troops to force us whites (at the point of bayonets) to succumb to this whole “civil-rights (for some)” mess. The use of federal troops to cow us whites into accepting their own destruction was a brilliant move by the jews. As us whites were and still are extremely law-abiding, it was easy to intimidate us. Actually, the use of federal troops for domestic law-enforcement purposes was (and still is) illegal…
Hard times WILL flush out the liberal whites, as well as the environmentalists who care about bunnies and trees over human beings. When that day comes, let ’em starve…
There are more of us whites who know what is going on than most realize. Us whites who are aware keep a low profile due to the volatile atmosphere that we live in. The threat of job loss, real violent threats to our families (that will not be addressed by “the powers that be”) and other considerations keep us from overtly expressing our true feelings on these matters, but the time will come. Us whites are very slow to act (and react), but when we do, look out…when “push comes to shove” we will take back our birthright…
White people’s biggest problem is having a genetic predisposition of empathy for the outsider. This was the result of the “brainwashing” of whites, over decades by jewish interests. It is no secret that jews were behind the so-called “civil-rights” push of the 1950s and 1960s. We used to have a saying: “behind every negro, there is a jew” (instigating violence against whites)…
It is the unique sense of externalized white altruism that has made so-called “civil-rights (for some)” laws possible. “Affirmative action”, contract set-asides and preferences, other government “programs” for minorities only, unrestricted immigration from third-world countries while white immigrants “need not apply”. . .and other unequal treatment has resulted in more-qualified whites being denied opportunities that would rightly be theirs.
This is externalized (white) altruism in action. . . NO OTHER RACE has EVER given people of other races a “break” . .
It has never happened in the history of humanity, save our own. . .if not stopped immediately, externalized white altruism will spell the end of the white race. Will other races adopt the concept of externalized (white) altruism?? I think not . . .
It is only whites that are expected to shed all vestiges of racial cohesiveness, while those of other races take advantage of our largesse and misguided externalized altruism…
Let me get this right…
It is necessary for a black student to sit next to a white student in order to learn. THAT has been the premise since the 1950s with the flawed “Brown v. Board of Education” Supreme Court ruling. The (few) decent blacks in existence should have been outraged by that ruling.
The premise that blacks NEED whites to assure educational opportunities has been proven FALSE, because even a few disruptive blacks are enough to disrupt the “education process” for everyone else.
I personally witnessed the destruction of the Detroit “education system”, which was fueled by blacks, who thought that they were invincible and did not have to conform to (white) societal norms. The public schools in the 1960s were turned into “zoos” where “anything goes”. Teachers did the minimum and just “went through the motions” as attempting to “correct” bad behavior by blacks was not allowed. The black school administrators saw to that…
Once in a great while, there was a teacher who truly cared about education and would covertly see to it that those whites who were “stuck” in these dysfunctional institutions were nurtured and given the proper attention, while disregarding the antics of the feral blacks who actually ran these dysfunctional institutions.
If you were a white child attending these schools, you were routinely harassed, robbed, beaten, and even worse by blacks, with no support from those who should have put a stop to such behavior. As “neighborhood schools” were the norm, there was no way out for white students assigned to these dysfunctional schools.
Since school integration did not work, in the 1970s, court-ordered forced “bussing” of white students into predominantly urban black schools was the next social experiment that ruined many suburban schools and the educational opportunities for whites.
In fact, it was routine for blacks to form “black student organizations” (with jewish civil-rights “handlers” help). Even the American flag was replaced with the “Black Students Union” flag at many Detroit public schools.
Public education has been ruined by blacks. PERIOD. There…I’ve said it…
When it comes to discipline and proper behavior in White society, blacks need a “firm hand” and do not learn the same as Whites and Asians. Logical thinking is reserved for the White and Asian races, whereas blacks learn best by rote memorization. Of course, there are a few exceptions (Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas, etc.) but they are few and far between. The aforementioned blacks are an asset in today’s society.
The reasons blacks were placed in separate schools are just as valid today as they were in the days of segregation.
Go to any majority black urban school and you will see that the majority of blacks do not want to learn. In fact, any black child who truly wants to learn is immediately and violently ostracized by his peers. You see, according to most blacks, “learning is a white-man’s tool for oppression against people of color”.
Of course, once again, according to those of your ilk–you jewish “civil-rights” advocates, blacks need black “role models” (black teachers) in order to learn because forced integration and attending a school with white teachers is still “not good enough”.
Forced integration just doesn’t work.
The “civil-rights social re-engineering” has gone on far enough…
Us White gentiles are tired not only of black dysfunctionality, but the jewish “push” to further impose black dysfunctionality on a permanent basis.
It’s called opting out, going Galt, no longer feeding a corrupt system with your time or sweat or energy. I don’t feed the system, I do enough to get by and no more. If I openly rail against the system I become a target and am attacked, so…..I opt out. I refuse my consent, I do not accept the unacceptable or tolerate the intolerable. No cable, no TV, no social media, no smart phone, I own very little and that’s a choice i made a long time ago. I don’t feed the beast.
Say NO to reparations and YES to repatriation!
Mother Africa is calling for her daughters and sons to return to her bountiful and welcoming bosom.
All those who believe the so called ‘Civil war’ was fought over slavery can pay.
If you’re that stupid, you deserve it.
Yes I second that.
The War of Lincoln’s Aggression was not for the abolition of slavery but it WAS for the forcible reunification of the Union.
I read recently that Lincoln was ” a lawyer and politician of remarkable slipperiness”.
He said “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.
But he didn’t believe that. He believed it COULD stand if reinforced by enough bayonets and mini-balls.
If the government is going to be issuing reparations, then they better start by giving money to the native Americans for the land the white man took and the number of Native Americans killed by the white man. Then if any money is left over the blacks can have it.
Oh wait, the Native Americans already figured out how to get their reparations from the white man. They opened casinos everywhere. Maybe if blacks were a bit smarter they would have done the same thing. I can just see it now: Tyrone’s Alabama Casino on the former planation where Tyone’s great, great, great, great….. grandparents were slaves. Nah, it’s easier to make money selling drugs and collecting free stuff from Uncle Sam.
Trapped – do some research re who gets the money from the casinos? Check it out and get back to me. Hint: it is not the Indians, and it is certainly not all the Indians.
But hey, I want me some of them reparations, if they are passing them out.
Oprah and OBummer figured it out, just 2 examples on long list of elite darker-skinned Americans
Dey be blak, and dey be rich
something i put forward for consideration: remember in non-white countries politics and government serves only to loot and to punish you enemies. if someone promises they will take from your enemies (in a ‘multicultural’ society that usually means other racial groups or tribes) and give their shit to you, you’re going to support for them. this bodes ill for whites with no cohesion in a country which is now near 50% non-white.
also it hurts to imagine what could have been done with that stolen 22T. same with the missing/unaccounted for 20T in ‘defense.’ in 50’s sci-fi they imagined a fantastical future. all the wealth which could have gone into giving me teleportation has instead been thrown into the sarlacc pit of niggerdom.
170 million Negroes in America?
Transatlantic slaves lucky enough to land in the USA: 6%
Transatlantic slaves that went to shitholes like Brazil, Mexico, Carribean: 94%
Fuck off!
I don’t think the last statement is “true” As the Natives held no deed/title to the real estate. They were nomadic communists, weren’t they? Do their descendants now hold title to the real estate of the reservations, or is it still sorta communism there?
Reparations? Sure! I read Exodus and know all about us white people held in slavery by a bunch of Africans. Let’s see… 200 years of slavery times 3,500 years of compounded interest at an average of 5% annually…
I think those white people were Jews. Plus, they took the Egyptians’ gold and jewelry when they left.