Perhaps you should be less obsessed with reparations for the past and more obsessed with eliminating slavery today. http://www.iabolish.com/slavery_today.htm The ironic fact is people of color in America have a better standard of living and freedom of opportunity than any African continent from which their ancestors were kidnapped. A politically incorrect fact to be sure, but a fact nevertheless. Reparations are due only to former slaves, not their descendents several generations removed. It's time for all people, of all colors, to take a lesson from Bill Cosby and take responsibility for their future, instead of obsessing on past wrongs commited long before their own lifetime. IM Message was edited by: Iron Mike

Oh my God! I'm feeling a bit woozy. Neo and I have found common ground! ;) IM

If the Carr Centre opposes reparations for slave descendants, then I don’t think that’s a bad thing. If you ask me, the exercise of clawing monetary funds for the suffering of the descendants of slaves says more about a peculiar current mindset than it does about slavery or suffering. My parents are from the Caribbean, and I born in UK. By all accounts, the idea that I’m ‘suffering’ under the weight of some psychological chains, due to slavery – is insulting. Worst still, the campaign is divisive – it pits one group against another in a desperate, legal scramble for money. The campaign is a sure fast way of increasing jealousy and animosity amongst different groups in America. Far from uniting and healing American divisions, the push for slavery reparations looks set to inflame already incensed whites that watched as Indian tribes received multi-million dollar payouts. Try, if you can to forget that those leading the campaign in the courts are multi-million dollar earning African-American lawyers, and take a little look at the absurd economics. How to calculate the amount owed to today’s black Americans has churned up some very creative mathematics. The African American Reparation Action Network calculate that every black American is owed about 40 acres, $50 dollars and a mule. But what ever they worked out, how can you claim back pay from wages of five generation ago?

It is dismaying that so many people treat the issue of repearations with such flippancy. I understand that reparations for the suffering and injustice of those none of whom were likely to be alive 40 years ago, invites ridicule from the insensitive. But there is a lot at issue here, including a matter of honor. That said, I agree with Courtney Hamilton. Why has this issue, hardly discussed by DuBois, Claude McKay, and other courageous progressives from the turn of the century to 1960, suddenly gaining traction in the post-Reagan era? I suspect that underlying this is an EXPLOITATION -- not a shakedown of cash, but an exploitation of matters of honor. If someone wanted to con money, I can think of lots of better ways to do it than pushing for the (practically thinking) pie-in-the-sky goal of slavery reparations. Indeed, it is the vast gap between the likelihood of producing any tangible political and social gains and the attention paid to it that strikes me. But much of what is supposedly progressive in the US has in fact the purpose, even strategically, of undermining progressivism. The system is adept at exploiting and manipulating political correctness, sometimes quite nakedly, to promote its agenda, and often through the "serving" channels of those who present themselves not as underminers of progressive thinking and action, but as choruses of ostensible progressives. Witness as a case in point the chorus of protestation from ostensible progressives, many quite skilled sophists, using logic that ANY epidemiologist has to know to get their degree to try to claim falsely that HIV is not a virus and is not pivotal to the spread of AIDS. This is undermining progressive action on the issue and is a form of denial no less than the deniers of the greenhouse effect or evolution. But here, the interest groups behind it, unlike with the Greenhouse effect, are buried. On slavery reparations we don't have an out and out lie. And the issue has a morally compelling aspect -- at least until you consider the timing problem. With the perpetrators and their direct heirs (not the heirs of the heirs in other words) as well as the victims and their direct heirs all dead, or in the case of heirs very old and not likely to see any tangible results in their lifetime, the issue has a peculiar aspect. Remember that with the Nazis -- whose payouts were in the form of pensions or compensation to Israel for resettling refugees rather than actual reparations per se, for the most part, and who in any case paid out, in today's dollars about what Iraqi civilians are rightly insulted by in "sympathy payments" of a few thousand dollars per death or per murder. In the case of the Nazis, the total "payments" of any kind if applied as a rate to African Americans would amount to a fairly paltry per capita sum, not the trillions being talked about. The other anomaly is that interest is supposed to compound, so the longer ago something was, the greater the payout -- hence the Celtic descendents of Rome's slave masters would be owed a relative fortune compared to victims of let's say the Rosewood massacre, for which I WOULD support reparations. In terms of purpose, the idea of reparations specifically for BLACK Americans but not for non-black latinos is, for those outside the circle of the politically correct, a poison pill designed to sabotage a black-brown alliance. The latter, with a smaller number of white progressives and others (like Moslem Americans, most of whom voted for W Bush in 2000), could have quite a lot of clout. The total share of the population of blacks, non-black latinos, people of other ethnicities who are Moslem, and native Americans could easily be a majority of the Democratic Party, and those numbers are growing. The politics of many states could come to be dominated by such a progressive alliance -- and any political effort that tends to torpedo such chances is to be observed with EXTREME skepticism, especially where the likelihood of delivering is so nonexistent.