48 Hours - One Hot Topic

[goldenearring]

Did anyone watch 48 hours tonight?  If this topic doesn't give us something to talk about for months and years to come, I don't know what will.  There are lawsuits in the works for monetary slave reparations to Black America that could go as high as 10 trillion dollars.  There are, of course, as many ideas on how this should be done and whether it should be done at all, as there are stars in the sky.  There is also a guy named Brock charging African Americans $50 a head (a "mandatory donation") to file a claim for reparations telling them that they could be entitled to up to $500,000 per claim!  Now, while I think he is hoodwinking a lot of people, this whole idea of slave reparations intrigues me.  Since there are probably no slaves alive at this point, who would be paid?  And, who would pay?  The Nazis paid concentration camp survivors billions of dollars.  The American government paid out to Japanese Americans for their mistreatment during WWII.  What do you guys think about the slave reparations?  Will it help or hurt race relations in the U.S.?  How could it be done?  Should it be done at all?  

[djpcps]

Personally I don't think reparations for slavery should be paid at all.  The examples of concentration camp survivors and Japanese Americans are completely different - those payments were made to the actual people who suffered who were still alive.  And even then, the only people who received much money at all were the lawyers.



There are no slaves left alive.  To even have been born a slave, much less lived in slavery, they would be 135 years old.  Reparations to descendents is ridiculous, not to mention being an administrative nightware to determine who is truly a descendent - and how far down the family tree are we supposed to go?  



Historically, there is no country in the world where some form of slavery did not exist at some time.  These people make it sound like African Americans are the only people who were ever slaves.  

[yankeestarbuck]

As a white person, I usually feel like there isn't anything for me to say on this subject.  As far as being an American goes, my family are of Italian decenet and did not arrive in this country until after the Civil War was over.  I do not feel responsible for the horrendous acts of other, people I was not related to nor do I share their point of view.  Do I feel that hundreds of thousands of people were wronged?  Of course, and most Americans do as well.  Can we finally get past this?  



We will never get past the Rodney King verdict riots, will we?  We will not see an end to scenes like that young man who was dragged to his death because he was black, will we?  Can we finally understand that we are not the people who did this in the past, we are not the people to whom this was done and we need to move on and never repeat this attrocity?  Do we, as a society, have to apologize forever?  You can't ever forget something like that.  That would be wrong, to say, forget what happened.  But I can ask, can we be forgiven, finally?