Shot in the Dark

Tales

Every Democrat candidate favors paying reparations to Americans held in slavery.
Last American slave died in 1971, nearly two generations ago.
Too late to pay reparations to someone who was actually owed them.  Everyone else simply has an interesting family history to tell.
Joe Doakes

Not to mention the fact that there were not a few black slave owners – some owned quite a few.

So it’s entirely possible, given the number of generations that’ve descended since 1865, that we’d be paying “reparations” to the descendants of slave owners as well.

Because I’m going to tactfully suggest that the business of identifying which blacks are descended from slaveholders is going to be pretty dang dilatory, if you catch my drift.

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Mitch Berg

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19 responses to “Tales”

  1. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    We should pay reparations. It is only right.

    But wait… the French owe reparations to Haiti not only for enslaving its population but for making them pay for their freedom all the way up to 1947.

    And the British throughout the Caribbean, (don’t get me started on the horrors of Jamaica), owe billions, not only for the Africans enslaved there, but the Irish too.

    Then we need to invade Turkey and turn their cultural treasures (actually our) cultural treasures) over to the heirs of the four million Poles, Romanian, Bulgarian and Ukrainians, who the Turks and Crimean Tartars enslaved.

    Then lets take a tour of Islamic Africa and bill each and every holder of a Koran and then bill the non-Islamic Africans for their role.

    Maybe we could hit up the Somalians living here? Somalia was a hot-spot for the capture of interior Africans and shipment to Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

    And how about those Native Americans? I am sure the Chippewa owe the Lakota a bundle – but don’t worry, they can pay after they collect their reparations from Ojibwa casinos.

    By the end, everyone owes everyone, so can’t we just call it a wash and forget about it?

  2. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Let’s say reparations are paid, how will that be done? On what basis will the money be paid out.

    You think genealogists will scour the old census and estate records to determine who gets paid? Not on your life.

    Every dime of it will go to community activists and outreach organizations…

  3. gl whisler Avatar
    gl whisler

    Anybody checked to see if 23andMe and Ancestry support reparations?

  4. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    Not to mention billing Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya for the white slaves – which, in the late 1700, outnumbered African slaves in the United States.

  5. golfdoc50 Avatar
    golfdoc50

    Interesting news out of Evanston, IL: After 1/1/2020, when recreational pot goes on sale in the state, the city will use the tax collected to fill a “reparations” fund. Details are scarce but apparently one not need be able to prove descent from an actual slave in order to be eligible. Pass the popcorn.

  6. Pig Bodine Avatar
    Pig Bodine

    Rachel Dolezal, excuse me, Nkechi Amare Diallo will finally be able to get off welfare!

  7. Prince of Darkness_666 Avatar
    Prince of Darkness_666

    I pray this is brought up in a debate. Trump will destroy the argument and probably do it in a hilarious manner and officially end the election right then and there,

  8. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Even if reparations could be made only, and proportionally, to those whose ancestors had suffered harm due to slavery, you’ve got the issue that you’re inflicting another harm on the millions of Americans who, in full or in part, had nothing to do with it and did not benefit from it, which included about 90% of White Southerners during the Civil War. (and those were mostly hurt by their neighbors getting free labor)

    So under the best possible framing of the issue, what you’ve got is a huge group of innocents being victimized to benefit another group of people who are not clearly victims. Are we to seriously argue that creating a new victim group along racial lines is going to be the path to racial harmony? Seriously?

    I keep coming around to the notion that our best path forward is to acknowledge the wrongs of Democratic Party policies like slavery, Jim Crow, and the War on the Poor, repent of those sinful policies, and work together to give as many people as possible good opportunities. I am obviously something of a Pollyanna here.

  9. Swiftee Pinochet Avatar
    Swiftee Pinochet

    It’s high time the crimes committed against my Irish ancestors by the English in America were recognized, and that I & my family be compensated for suffering we have no memory of.

    Speaking on behalf of us all, we’d like that in hard currency, thankyewverymuch.

  10. Scott Hughes Avatar
    Scott Hughes

    I shared this on the subject from our friend John Hindereaker at PL a few days ago. I’m still suggesting that if reparations are to be paid they should be paid by the political party of those making the demands.

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/12/a-footnote-to-transatlantic-slavery-visualized.php

  11. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    You are looking at this all wrong.
    You cannot tax generic “white people” and give the money collected to descendants of slaves.
    Instead “reparations” will consist of the feds engaging in social engineering on a mammoth scale: hard quotas in employment and higher education, busing to integrate public schools, and perhaps subsidies to move poor blacks into affluent neighborhoods.

  12. jimf Avatar
    jimf

    If so, what about reparations to the 360,000 or so Northern soldiers and their families that died fighting in the Civil War? Where would it stop?

  13. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Unless you read actual scholarship about the Civil War (and chances are you haven’t), you will not understand the reason why the people of the Union so despised slavery. Most were bigots, not to say racists. They did not consider the black man the intellectual or political equal of the white man.
    But they knew that the institution of slavery killed family farmers. It is simply a fact that slave-powered agriculture has the economic advantage over family-run farms. Commentators at the time mentioned this prominently. Where there was slavery, traditional freehold farming disappeared.
    This explains why the addition of states as slave or free was so important to the common voter: a new free state meant economic opportunity for farmers, a new slave state meant that economic opportunity in that state was closed off to anyone without the capital to buy thousands of acres of land and run it with slave labor.
    Abe Lincoln was the son of a poor, freehold farmer in an area that was bordered by slave states. Lincoln’s motivation for entering politics was his anger at seeing vast ag lands incorporated into the United States as slave states.

  14. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    “Where there was slavery, traditional freehold farming disappeared”

    One of the reasons poor southern whites are the way they are – slavery dispossessed them, for generations at a time.

  15. Swiftee Pinochet Avatar
    Swiftee Pinochet

    Where there was slavery, traditional freehold farming disappeared.

    Have to take issue with you, MP. In fact, I do consider myself somewhat of an armature scholar of the antebellum South in general and the Civil War in particular, and am lucky enough to be drenched in it’s history right outside my doorstep.

    Freehold commercial farmers could not compete with slave worked plantations, it is true. But in South Carolina (for instance) yeomanry was nonetheless the principal vocation of our citizens. Most slave plantations grew commodity crops; cotton and tobacco, not food. Growing truck goods simply wasn’t profitable enough to put costly slave labor to.

    South Carolina and, to a lesser extent Georgia, were somewhat unique in that we had the right climate and ecology to grow rice (which resulted in the importation of specific slaves, the Gullah, from Sierra Leone btw). However since rice was not being grown commercially anywhere else in America at the time, competition wasn’t an issue.

    There were many reasons Northerners objected to slavery (morals among the least of them), but competition with free farmers was not one of the major gripes, although it may have been brought up from time to time.

  16. Swiftee Pinochet Avatar
    Swiftee Pinochet

    BTW, allow me to side track a bit to dispel a myth about the South.

    South Carolina was the first colony to have a majority Negro population; in time, many Southern states became majority Negro. Most American Negroes still live in Southern states, which is something leftist reprobates are loath to consider when mocking Dixie for our out-sized welfare dependency, low academic achievement and high unemployment.

    Teh stoopid hillbillies? Nah, think of Detroit (or North Minneapolis) spread state wide. Go ahead, lefty; cut that AFDC grant.

    The South did suffer from poor education among wipipul right into the mid 20th century, buts that was more a function of our status as agriculturally dependent than low IQ. Today, we are leaders in automotive, energy and aerospace engineering and manufacturing. Those industries moved here for our skilled labor force as much as for a union thug free workplace.

  17. Loren Avatar
    Loren

    And once again, I have to ask, what is my share?
    My mother’s mother (my grandmother) was conceived in Denmark prior to the family immigrating to America in the early 1900’s. My maternal grandfather was the son of Norwegian immigrants, who also came to America after the civil war. That side of the family bears no responsibility for American slavery.

    On my father’s side, most were of the North, some were in the border states, and I don’t even know for certain where they fell during the Civil War. I haven’t seen any old photos in either uniform.

    So do I only have to pay half? If those who would get the reparations are based upon their ancestry, shouldn’t my ancestry count for the liability?

  18. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    Much like the teachers’ union, if reparations ever get an official foothold, the beneficiaries will constantly be screaming for more and more. Yet they will never give an answer to the question “How much is enough?”

  19. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    unionS

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