A Blueprint for Reparations

VAiz4hustlaz

Proud ADOS and not afraid to step to da mic!
BGOL Investor
@HNIC This should be a sticky. Don't let BGOL be on the wrong side of history.

With clarity and insight, economist and author William "Sandy" Darity discusses how the grievous injustice of slavery in the US led to the immense wealth gap that currently exists between Black and white Americans. He explains how reparations for descendants of enslaved people would work -- and why it's necessary that the US engage in this act of compensation and redemption to make progress towards true equality.

 

VAiz4hustlaz

Proud ADOS and not afraid to step to da mic!
BGOL Investor
US Conference of Mayors supports commission to study giving reparations to African-Americans
The call for reparations from some Democrats has intensified amid racial injustice protests across the country


The U.S. Conference of Mayors is expressing support for Democratic-proposed legislation introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., to commission a study on reparations to African-Americans.

“We recognize and support your legislation as a concrete first step to guide the actions of both federal and local leaders who have promised to do better by our Black residents,” Greg Fischer, mayor of Louisville and president of the Conference of Mayors, wrote in a letter dated July 10. The conference represents more than 1,400 U.S. cities with populations of greater than 30,000.

The call for reparations to the nation’s 41 million Black Americans has renewed amid racial injustice protests across the country. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has not fully committed reparations but has expressed support for a study on the matter.
Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, recently told Fox News he supported the idea of paying $14 trillion in reparations to African-Americans.

"Nobody talks about cash, but Black people understand cash," Johnson told Fox News.

Under his proposal, an estimated 40 million African-Americans would get $350,000 in direct cash payments over 30 years (costing the average taxpayer roughly $2,900 a year, according to his office). The $350,000 would signify the wealth disparity between African-Americans and white Americans.

The idea is deeply controversial. Some Democratic lawmakers have warmed to the discussion, but often in the form of commissions and other partial measures. A Fox News poll last year found most Americans are opposed to cash reparations. And with the government already spending trillions on coronavirus relief and the national debt pushing past $26 trillion, concerns about the country's fiscal stability would pose an obvious hurdle.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., last year said of the idea: "I think we're always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that, and I don't think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it."
Another study from three college professors on the extreme end of estimates has put the price tag of adequate reparations at $6.2 quadrillion, a payment of $151 million to every Black American.

The study, "Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved,” determined the price tag essentially by calculating the unpaid hours that slaves worked and the cost of discrimination the descendants of slaves faced and adds interest.

When Booker announced his bill last year to study the possibility of reparations he said it was “a way of addressing head-on the persistence of racism, white supremacy, and implicit racial bias in our country. It will bring together the best minds to study the issue and propose solutions that will finally begin to right the economic scales of past harms and make sure we are a country where all dignity and humanity is affirmed.”
Jackson Lee introduced a companion bill in the House, which if passed into law would set up a commission to study the impact of slavery and continued discrimination against black Americans and make recommendations on reparation proposals for the descendants of slaves.

 

VAiz4hustlaz

Proud ADOS and not afraid to step to da mic!
BGOL Investor
Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved


Abstract
We compare the 2018 per capita Black–White wealth gap of about US$352,250 with portions of the estimated total cost of slavery and discrimination to African American descendants of the enslaved. For the period of slavery in the United States, we arrive at estimates of about US$12 to US$13 trillion in 2018 dollars using Darity’s land-based and Marketti’s price-based estimation methods, respectively. Estimates using Craemer’s wage-based method tend to be higher ranging from US$18.6 trillion at 3% interest to US$6.2 quadrillion at 6% interest. The value of lost freedom (LF) based on Japanese American World War II internment reparations is estimated at 3% interest to amount to US$35 trillion and at 6% to US$16 quadrillion. Further research is required to estimate the cost of lost opportunities (LC) and pain and suffering (PS). Further research is also required to estimate the costs of colonial slavery, as well as racial discrimination following the abolition of slavery in the United States to African American descendants of the enslaved. Whether the full cost of slavery and discrimination should be compensated, or only a portion, and at what interest rate remain to be determined by negotiations between the federal government and the descendant community.

 

VAiz4hustlaz

Proud ADOS and not afraid to step to da mic!
BGOL Investor
5 star thread, @VAiz4hustlaz

this is without a doubt THE #1 issue in the community of the so-called black Niiji.

I also like the fact that it was stated that so-called black emigrants that came to this land in droves in the 1960s and after ARE NOT eligible under this plan.

I think that's the reason why this thread won't be stickied! That or HNIC is just a straight-up Confederate.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Right on, brotha... Everyone on this site should add their thoughts in on this debate!! Good thread brotha good azz thread!!!
 

mcguyver

Rising Star
OG Investor

What US slavery reparations and post-Holocaust Germany have in common
August 2, 2019
https://qz.com/author/bernd-reiter/
By Bernd Reiter

The idea of paying reparations for slavery is gaining momentum in the United States, despite being long derided as an unrealistic plan, to compensate for state violence committed by and against people long dead.
The topic saw substantive debate in the July 30 Democratic primary debate, with candidate Marianne Williamson calling slavery “a debt that is owed.” Some Democratic congressional representatives are also pushing for financial recompense for the descendants of enslaved people.

Calls for reparations in the US are generally met with skepticism: What would reparations achieve? Who should receive them, and under what conditions?
Other countries have tackled these questions. In 1995, South Africa established its Truth and Reconciliation Commission and paid reparations to the victims of apartheid. Eight years before, the United States apologized to 82,000 Japanese Americans unduly imprisoned during World War II and paid them $20,000 each to compensate for their suffering.
Even Germany, birthplace of the worst racism ever institutionalized and elevated to official policy, has some lessons for the United States as it considers reparations.
Compensating victims of Nazi enslavement
I am a professor of political science who studies the relationship between democracy, citizenship, and justice. My recent work on Germany examines how the country dealt with the horrors of the Holocaust.
Nazi Germany not only killed millions of Jews between 1933 and 1945. It also forced over 20 million people into slave labor, working them to their death in German industries. By 1944, a quarter of the German workforce was enslaved laborers.

REUTERS/JENS MEYER/POOL
Remembering the past.
After Hitler’s defeat in World War II, the newly democratic government of West Germany knew it had to face the evils of the past.
Nazi industries that used slave labor, such as the steel and artillery producer Krupp, were dismantled. High-ranking Krupp CEOs were judged war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials and imprisoned.

Pressured by Israeli leaders David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer agreed to pay three billion German marks in reparations to Israel between 1953 and 1967. Germany also paid 450 million German marks to the World Jewish Congress, an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations.
Assuming the midcentury rate of four German marks to $1, that’s the equivalent today of $7 billion for Israel and $1 billion for the Jewish Congress.
Some Germans protested against Adenauer’s support for Israel. Their country was just beginning its economic recovery after the war—a process aided, incidentally, by the US-funded Marshall Plan—and many Germans insisted they had nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews.
In negotiating the German reparations agreement of 1952, Ben-Gurion invoked the biblical question, from Kings 21:29, “Have you murdered and also inherited?”

Germany’s post-war Chancellor Adenauer knew that, for the German people, the answer was yes.
“In the name of the German people, unspeakable crimes were committed which create a duty of moral and material restitution,” he said.
By 1956, the German state was supplying 87.5% of Israel’s state revenue. The young new country used the money to buy equipment and raw materials to build up its industry, railways and electrical grid. Mining equipment, irrigation, and fuel were also high on the list of Israel’s reparations-fueled development priorities.
Atonement is a process
Germany’s efforts to atone for the Holocaust were not limited to money.

To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, the 1949 German Constitution—as well as the penal and criminal codes of the country—outlaw the use of symbols that incite hatred against any segment of its population. The Constitution also guarantees asylum to political refugees and all people fleeing war.
In 1952 Germany officially apologized for the Nazis’ crimes, at Israel’s demand.
“The responsibility rests on the German nation as a whole,” replied Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett of making amends for the Holocaust.
Reparations went to individuals, too. In 2000, the German government, together with partner organizations from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the not-for-profit Jewish Claims Conference, created the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation.

By 2007, the organization had paid a total of $4.9 billion to 1.66 million people worldwide who’d been forced into labor and servitude by the Nazis, or to their living descendants—their share of the wealth slavery produced for Germany.
Most recently, the German government in 2013 agreed with the Jewish Claims Conference to pay about $1 billion for the home care of all elderly Holocaust survivors.
As a result of the reparations paid, Germany’s open admission of guilt and the policies it put in place to prevent another Holocaust from occurring, German-Jewish relations have largely normalized since World War II.
Germany’s Jewish population has even begun to recover from genocide. With 150,000 Jewish residents in 2018, Germany is home to Europe’s fourth-largest Jewish community.

AP PHOTO/ODED BALILTY
The German government now pays for the care of elderly Holocaust survivors.Lessons for the United States
Instead of seeking to wipe the Holocaust from its history, the German government has worked hard to ensure remembrance, penance, recompense, and justice.
The United States, in contrast, has no official policy of atoning for slavery.
While the House of Representatives and Senate made separate apologies for slavery in 2008 and 2009, these apologies were never reconciled or signed by President Barack Obama, due to lack of political support.
Racist symbols are openly displayed in the United States, protected by the First Amendment.
Nor has there been any financial compensation for the descendants of formerly enslaved Americans, despite President Abraham Lincoln’s famous promise of “40 acres and a mule” for all freed black men.
The German experience with reparations is, of course, not directly comparable to that of the United States.
Germany had to lose a devastating war before it compensated the Jewish people. And, as in the case of the Japanese American prisoners of war who received reparations, the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime and their descendants were relatively easy to identify.
The US government paying reparations today for state terror that ended 150 years ago poses numerous practical challenges. They include identifying the rightful recipients and sourcing the money appropriately—whether state-based or federal.
Those who say they did not benefit from slavery must be persuaded that reparations are required to right a moral wrong. Polling shows a majority of Americans oppose cash payments as a redress for slavery.
But old injustices don’t simply disappear with time. Left unaddressed, they fuel the kind of division, shame, and resentment that, as America knows well, can divide a nation.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
https://qz.com/emails/daily-brief/
 

KingTaharqa

Greatest Of All Time
BGOL Investor
I think that's the reason why this thread won't be stickied! That or HNIC is just a straight-up Confederate.

HNIC isnt Black American so he doesnt instinctively get it. Like Obama, he sees promoting reperations for ADOS as offensive and unfair to black immigrants who are not eligible. I believe he prioritizes that group over Black America because he is a part of it.
 

God's Gift

The best of the majority of you niggas.
BGOL Investor
I really hope the left and right of this discussion on this board stay out of the thread with their tin foil hat shit.

We must agree on that " ^^^" and...

1. All other immigrants to this country owe the black man as the tip of the "immigration" spear. Without us, they wouldn't be here.

2. The earth is round.

3. White descended from blacks.

4. We lack organization AND leadership.

5. WE ARE THE GENERATION OF CHANGE.

I'll be back after I watch the video.
 

RoomService

Dinner is now being served.
BGOL Investor
This is already in the history forum.... We need to use the other forums besides the main board.
 

VAiz4hustlaz

Proud ADOS and not afraid to step to da mic!
BGOL Investor
This is already in the history forum.... We need to use the other forums besides the main board.

It's not just "history", though. It's a current, relevant issue. And one of future concern as well since Black American wealth will be zero in a generation if we continue along the same path.

Currently, I see stickied threads about Covid, the George Floyd murder, Ahmaud Arbery murder, police killings generally, and ................ a comic strip. A reparations thread should be stickied as well, even if it isn't this one.
 

KingTaharqa

Greatest Of All Time
BGOL Investor
It's not just "history", though. It's a current, relevant issue. And one of future concern as well since Black American wealth will be zero in a generation if we continue along the same path.

Currently, I see stickied threads about Covid, the George Floyd murder, Ahmaud Arbery murder, police killings generally, and ................ a comic strip. A reparations thread should be stickied as well, even if it isn't this one.

I was asked to move the ADOS thread to the history forum months ago. :lol:

Reperations to Black Americans is OFFENSIVE to Black Immigrants. You howling at the wind expecting a sticky on the front page. Truthfully, it would just be people dissing us anyway like all the other threads morphed into. Theres not enough ADOS to have a productive discussion. BGOL is a board for and by non ADOS blacks, we are guest here. Im cool with that.
 

LordSinister

One Punch Mayne
Super Moderator
It's not just "history", though. It's a current, relevant issue. And one of future concern as well since Black American wealth will be zero in a generation if we continue along the same path.

Currently, I see stickied threads about Covid, the George Floyd murder, Ahmaud Arbery murder, police killings generally, and ................ a comic strip. A reparations thread should be stickied as well, even if it isn't this one.
Good point, I didn't know the OG post was moved to the History forum, I thought it got deaded.
 

NightMare Paint

Not A Horse
BGOL Investor
US Conference of Mayors supports commission to study giving reparations to African-Americans
The call for reparations from some Democrats has intensified amid racial injustice protests across the country


The U.S. Conference of Mayors is expressing support for Democratic-proposed legislation introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., to commission a study on reparations to African-Americans.

“We recognize and support your legislation as a concrete first step to guide the actions of both federal and local leaders who have promised to do better by our Black residents,” Greg Fischer, mayor of Louisville and president of the Conference of Mayors, wrote in a letter dated July 10. The conference represents more than 1,400 U.S. cities with populations of greater than 30,000.

The call for reparations to the nation’s 41 million Black Americans has renewed amid racial injustice protests across the country. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has not fully committed reparations but has expressed support for a study on the matter.
Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, recently told Fox News he supported the idea of paying $14 trillion in reparations to African-Americans.

"Nobody talks about cash, but Black people understand cash," Johnson told Fox News.

Under his proposal, an estimated 40 million African-Americans would get $350,000 in direct cash payments over 30 years (costing the average taxpayer roughly $2,900 a year, according to his office). The $350,000 would signify the wealth disparity between African-Americans and white Americans.

The idea is deeply controversial. Some Democratic lawmakers have warmed to the discussion, but often in the form of commissions and other partial measures. A Fox News poll last year found most Americans are opposed to cash reparations. And with the government already spending trillions on coronavirus relief and the national debt pushing past $26 trillion, concerns about the country's fiscal stability would pose an obvious hurdle.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., last year said of the idea: "I think we're always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that, and I don't think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it."
Another study from three college professors on the extreme end of estimates has put the price tag of adequate reparations at $6.2 quadrillion, a payment of $151 million to every Black American.

The study, "Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved,” determined the price tag essentially by calculating the unpaid hours that slaves worked and the cost of discrimination the descendants of slaves faced and adds interest.

When Booker announced his bill last year to study the possibility of reparations he said it was “a way of addressing head-on the persistence of racism, white supremacy, and implicit racial bias in our country. It will bring together the best minds to study the issue and propose solutions that will finally begin to right the economic scales of past harms and make sure we are a country where all dignity and humanity is affirmed.”
Jackson Lee introduced a companion bill in the House, which if passed into law would set up a commission to study the impact of slavery and continued discrimination against black Americans and make recommendations on reparation proposals for the descendants of slaves.

Interesting! I read somewhere that reparations wasn't a local government issue. Great to see the positive and practical outcome of participating in the election process!

Reperations is a federal issue OP, not local. A city council isnt who will close the wealth gap. Its already been a few one stop light towns to call some bullshit reparations that ain't really reparations for publicity stunt purposes.
 

KingTaharqa

Greatest Of All Time
BGOL Investor
Interesting! I read somewhere that reparations wasn't a local government issue. Great to see the positive and practical outcome of participating in the election process!

Nothing you posted disputes what I said, a bunch of mayors getting ready to lobby for the US government to pay reperations is a lil different from Hicksville, USA drawing up some bullshit POC resolution for their area that aint reparations for 30 million ADOS nationwide. What these Mayors are doing is good, what youve been doing the past year and a half on this board, bad. But Im glad youre finally catching up and maturing enough to discuss reparations tho. Thats a good thing, even if it took fuckin forever.
 

LordSinister

One Punch Mayne
Super Moderator
why is this stickied?
I'd actually like to see a positive discussion about this without all the bullshit. There was a token effort made today that set the right-wing bitch boys on twitter into a rage, that's enough for me. I love to hear them say nobody today was born into or owned slaves oblivious to the fact that slaves built the fucking white house Orange Julius Ceasar is living in. :smh:
 

NightMare Paint

Not A Horse
BGOL Investor
Nothing you posted disputes what I said, a bunch of mayors getting ready to lobby for the US government to pay reperations is a lil different from Hicksville, USA drawing up some bullshit POC resolution for their area that aint reparations for 30 million ADOS nationwide. What these Mayors are doing is good, what youve been doing the past year and a half on this board, bad. But Im glad youre finally catching up and maturing enough to discuss reparations tho. Thats a good thing, even if it took fuckin forever.
Don't hurt yourself moving those goalposts.
 

Database Error

You're right dawg
OG Investor
ASHEVILLE, N.C. – In an extraordinary move, the Asheville City Council has apologized for the North Carolina city's historic role in slavery, discrimination and denial of basic liberties to Black residents and voted to provide reparations to them and their descendants.


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The 7-0 vote came the night of July 14.

"Hundreds of years of Black blood spilled that basically fills the cup we drink from today," said Councilman Keith Young, one of two African American members of the body and the measure's chief proponent.

"It is simply not enough to remove statutes. Black people in this country are dealing with issues that are systemic in nature."

The unanimously passed resolution does not mandate direct payments. Instead, it will make investments in areas where Black residents face disparities.


REPARATIONS: How much would the US owe descendants of enslaved people?

"The resulting budgetary and programmatic priorities may include but not be limited to increasing minority home ownership and access to other affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities, strategies to grow equity and generational wealth, closing the gaps in health care, education, employment and pay, neighborhood safety and fairness within criminal justice," the resolution reads.

What is systemic racism? Here's what it means and how you can help dismantle it

Increasing generational wealth should be the focus, supporter says
The resolution calls on the city to create the Community Reparations Commission, inviting community groups and other local governments to join. It will be the commission's job to make concrete recommendations for programs and resources to be used.

Councilwoman Sheneika Smith, who is Black, said the council had gotten emails from those "asking, 'Why should we pay for what happened during slavery?'"

"(Slavery) is this institution that serves as the starting point for the building of the strong economic floor for white America, while attempting to keep Blacks subordinate forever to its progress," Smith said.


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Councilman Vijay Kapoor, who has often split with Young and Smith on police and budget issues, said he supported the measure for moral reasons. But he said skeptics could look to the "practical reason": data showing showing large disparities between African Americans and other Asheville residents.

"We don't want to be held back by these gaps," Kapoor said. "We want everyone to be successful."

The council allowed an hour of public comment on the measure. Many who were not able to speak before the vote waited for another hourlong comment period afterward, pushing the meeting late into the night. Most were in support.

Rob Thomas, community liaison for the Racial Justice Coalition, which led the push for reparations, thanked the council.



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"This is a really, really good gesture as far as the foundation of what we can build," Thomas said. "The potential of what can come out of this document is amazing."

Increasing generational wealth — something African Americans were deprived of through economic and regulatory discrimination — should be the focus, he said.

It was also important that the county's government join, Thomas said, to ensure issues weren't lost between the county and city.

The Buncombe County's Board of Commissioners is not clearly behind the reparations measure, though it has a 4-3 Democratic majority.



 

Day_Carver

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
1. No state or federal taxes ever; only taxes on goods bought
2. Free education and health care for forever
3. Wipe clean all non violent records
4. 1 mill per adult
5. At least 1 home worth 250k for each family/house hold

Im good......
 
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