zlacker

>>pessim+(OP)
This is what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation, not because their skin color or gender.

>>getmei+F5
Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity.

The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. There's no clearer illustration of our values than the fact that children who, through no fault of their own, have become the responsibility of the state are treated like unwanted trash. The idea that a society like that could figure out how to ethically treat prisoners or immigrants is laughable.

>>pessim+47
Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Please cut me some slack here, by the nature of the world we live in, I have not uttered these thoughts to another human being, and they might have obvious flaws. It's tough when you can't talk about ideas out of fear of the consequences.

I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead.

The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors.

I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?

>>slashd+Fd
The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved

Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?

There were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.

That's my justification for affirmative action (not reparations). Should it last forever? No but it hasn't been that many generations since the civil rights act

>>themit+le
> Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?

No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from. Were it not for slavery, again as abhorrent as it was, they'd be a lot worse off today.

> here were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.

Yes, that's a fact.

>>slashd+Pe
It is also easy to forget that the suppliers of slaves were African nations that practiced slavery themselves. They found the Europeans to be great customers for their slaves. So descendants of the Ashanti and others benefited from the selling of slaves. If we really want to look at reparations, we probably need some way to determine what percentage each person benefited from slavery and what percentage they suffered from it. Also there were slaves from Asia and other places that are probably just as deserving of payments if that happens. But all of this flies in face of the narrative that slavery was something whites did to blacks.

A better approach would be to try to provide opportunities that people can take advantage of. The US actually does a great job of this which is why we don't see mass exodus of people trying to go back to the African nations.

>>troupe+Yk
Easily forgotten? It's brought up in just about every discussion on the subject, including this one, already, by the person you were replying to agree with.

>>riboso+zr
I've never seen it as something that was thought about as part of any reparation ideas.

>>troupe+YG
Why would it be a part of the discussion?

>>themit+lo8
Well if you want to take money from the general population and give to people whose ancestors were harmed by slavery, you need some way to differentiate between ancestors who were harmed by and ancestors who benefited from slavery.

If that isn't part of the discussion, then people are just proposing a welfare system to give money to people based on the color of their skin.