Tucker Carlson: What the fight for slavery reparations tells us about today's Democratic Party

Let's say somebody committed some sort of horrible crime against you, a horrifying crime -- shot your dog, burned your house down, kidnapped one of your children. Let's say the person who did it escaped and then died before being punished. You'd be frustrated, of course.

But how would you feel if the police arrested someone else -- an innocent person -- for the crime, someone who just happened to look like the criminal, and then sent that person to prison? Would you be happy with that? Would you consider it justice?

If so, you probably agree with Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, that we need to reparations for slavery. Jackson Lee held hearings on the subject in Congress on Wednesday. She described a version of American history in which the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement and the war on poverty -- indeed, the last 150 years -- never happened.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas: The role of the federal government in supporting the institution of slavery and subsequent discrimination directed against blacks is an injustice that must be formally acknowledged and addressed. I just simply ask, "Why not?" And why not now? God bless us as we pursue the final justice for those who lived in slavery.

Of course, that very same federal government also lost more than 600,000 men fighting slavery. So it's slightly more complicated perhaps than Jackson Lee presented, but she wasn't interested in details.
Nobody in the room was; the hearing quickly became a circus. Anyone who questioned reparations was booed and heckled by the crowd.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas: It is important that we know our history, and we not punish people today for the sins of their predecessors in the Democratic Party.

Unidentified male: You lie.

Gohmert: I just stated all facts. And again, we have people who are denying history.

Even black witnesses drew boos when they dared question the concept of reparations.

Coleman Hughes, writer: So the moment you give me reparations, you've made me into a victim without my consent. Bill H.R. 40 is immoral and a political mistake. Thank you.

[Booing]

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn.: Thank you, Mr. Hughes. Chill, chill, chill, chill. He was presumptive, but he still has a right to speak.

"He was presumptive." What does that mean? Maybe it means he disagrees with the Democratic Party's orthodoxy.

Eugene Taylor Sutton, the Episcopal Bishop of the State of Maryland, told the committee that white people must support racial reparations, he suggested, to save their souls from damnation.

"When I'm talking for reparations, I'm talking about those left behind, but I'm actually talking to my white brothers and sisters," he said. "You need this more than we do. You need this for your soul. You need this to be able to look black persons in the eye and say, 'I acknowledge the mistake, and I want to be part of the solution to repair that damage.'"

Actual official racial discrimination of the kind embodied in Jim Crow ended half a century ago. But as it recedes with living memory, it becomes even more important to the Democratic Party.

Bishop Sutton was not the only person using rhetoric like this Wednesday on Capitol Hill. New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker made a guest appearance at the hearing. He claimed that the same country that has made him one of the most powerful figures in the land, is, in fact, incorrigibly racist.

"We as a nation have not yet truly acknowledged and grappled with racism and white supremacy that has tainted this country's founding," Booker said. "It continues to persist in those deep racial disparities and inequalities today."

So in the same country, that's the point at which the entire room would have burst out laughing when Senator Booker said that, precisely because of his title. Really, Senator Booker?

Cory Booker's parents were highly paid IBM executives. He grew up in a rich, all-white neighborhood, by the way. He attended Stanford. Then he had a Rhodes scholarship, went to Oxford, then he got a law degree from Yale. He is currently a senator from New Jersey. He will win re-election pretty easily in 2020 if he seeks it. And Jersey is one of the richest states in this country. It's also majority white.

So, if white supremacy were a huge problem in America, how did Cory Booker become a senator? And yet somehow he did. America has given Cory Booker amazing opportunities precisely because it's not the hateful place he pretends it is. Cory Booker is one of the most privileged people in the world. He is living proof.


But it doesn't matter. Actual official racial discrimination of the kind embodied in Jim Crow ended half a century ago. But as it recedes with living memory, it becomes even more important to the Democratic Party.

In a religious procession earlier this year, half a dozen Democratic presidential candidates prostrated themselves before professional race hustler, Al Sharpton and vowed to seek reparations if they were awarded the presidency. From Sens. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren to Beto O'Rourke and Julian Castro, they all kissed the ring of their moral leader, Al Sharpton -- hilarious.

But on one level, it's not funny. As we're often told, correctly, America is a diverse country now and becoming more so. A diverse society can only survive by finding shared values and shared goals and pursuing them collectively.

However, when a country collapses into a feud between racial or ethnic or religious factions, that country fails -- every time. Warring tribes -- that is where this is pushing us.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tuc...ations-tells-us-about-todays-democratic-party

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America did a lot of buying. They did very little of enslaving. That role goes to the Portuguese, Muslims, and Africans. If one want to blame anyone, blame them and ask them for reparations


Reparations is a horrible idea.

 

Reparations should be restricted to the families who's ancestors arrived in America prior to Lincoln freeing the slaves.Anyone who's ancestors arrived after that date obviously had nothing to do with slavery.

 

No reparations period. Nobody alive today Is a victim of slavery. If this happens then I want compensation for all of my roman slave ancestors.
They could just get a job and stop begging for money they are Not entitled to

 

Finding out who's ancestors were slaves and who's weren't wouldn't be extremely difficult if not impossible. Not to mention that the government sucks at everything

There will be massive abuses and corruption. And poverty pimps will get richer

 

Tucker Carlson: What the fight for slavery reparations tells us about today's Democratic Party

It tells us the dems can't resist an opportunity to redistribute wealth even when it is illogical.

 

Here, let us expand on the reality of your analogized example. Fair?

Now how would you feel if that -- innocent person -- who police arrested for the crime, did not do the "horrifying crime" but had just lived their entire life benefitting from what the actual criminal did when he killed or kidnapped per say your daughter and your dog.

For example, let's say the "innocent person" received your daughter, from the criminal? And received your dog, from the criminal? Then the "innocent person" spent many many, decades, benefitting from your daughter's work and play and pleasures and also benefitted from your dog's existence. Until the police finally arrested him, decades later, like you described where I quoted you.

Well sir, the benefits he received as a result of your daughter and your dog, that were stolen, would in fact represent/be symbolic of White Privilege in this case. Meaning he owes reparations. For not committing a crime, but for benefitting from that crime for 156 yrs and counting.

We owe Black people reparations. Period.

And not because of slavery era's slaves, but because slavery's legacy has caused Black citizens to be eternally cheated by our White Privilege here in the USA from 1619-2019.

 

Do we owe the families of soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War anything? I have seven direct descendants who joined various Pennsylvania militias. Three of them died, and two were scarred for life with terrible wounds.

What do they get?

 

Money. They didn't fight for free.

 

the dems are suffering from massive guilt because their forefathers were the owners, rapists, & murderers of slaves waaay back then... tell 'em to donate their net worth to the aclu and lessen their guilt... but, noooooooo, as usual they want everyone else to pay for their sins...

 

No, it's not fair

You are making a gross assumption regarding a specific race. I didn't come to this country until 1999. There are more poor white people than black people. But that because there are more white people. But why are more black people are poor as a percentage? For the same reason why 13% population commits 50% of all murders. Culture. There were more black family units during the era of racism and Jim crow than there are today. Single motherhood is more prevalent today than than it was in 1965. In 1965 single motherhood was at 25%. In 1991 it was at 68%. And in 2011 it was at 72%. Why is that? Culture. Who is to blame for this culture. Are blacks free of this responsibility? In part, I blame the rap culture. It has been a cancer to the black community. It glorifies crime and sexism. Referring to woman as female dogs and prostitutes. It's no wonder then that men who grow up listening to this music are more inclined to commit crime to obtain easy money, and ditching a girl after "hitting it".

The notion of white privilege is conceptually racist. You are grossly generalizing an entire race of people. Your comparison is a false one. Add the fact that more than 150 years passed and all parties involved are long dead. The person who bought slaves is "innocent". People who are alive today are. They did not received the daughter and the dog. That's why they are innocent. Nor do they profit from their slave lobor. So your example falls flat on its face.

Speak for yourself. Before 1999, I was in Russia. You are expecting innocent people who never profited from slavery, who never owned slaves, and who didn't even live in this country, to pay slavery reparations to those who were never enslaved.

You are being patronizing. To claim this is to acknowledge that white people are superior and to acknowledge that black people are nothing but victims.
In all circumstances, punishing innocent sons for the sins of their fathers is wrong. It is not justice.

But if you ARE dead set on reparations and must point a finger, let me help you.

America did a lot of buying. They did very little of enslaving. That role goes to the Portuguese, Muslims, and Africans. If one want to blame anyone, blame them and ask them for reparations

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"It's Time to Face the Whole Truth About the Atlantic Slave Trade

Incomplete depictions of the Atlantic slave trade are, in fact, quite common. My 2003 study of 49 state U.S. history standards revealed that not one of these guides to classroom content even mentioned the key role of Africans in supplying the Atlantic slave trade.3 In Africa itself, however, the slave trade is remembered quite differently. Nigerians, for example, explicitly teach about their own role in the trade:

Where did the supply of slaves come from? First, the Portuguese themselves kidnapped some Africans. But the bulk of the supply came from the Nigerians. These Nigerian middlemen moved to the interior where they captured other Nigerians who belonged to other communities. The middlemen also purchased many of the slaves from the people in the interior . . . . Many Nigerian middlemen began to depend totally on the slave trade and neglected every other business and occupation. The result was that when the trade was abolished [by England in 1807] these Nigerians began to protest. As years went by and the trade collapsed such Nigerians lost their sources of income and became impoverished. 4​

In Ghana, politician and educator Samuel Sulemana Fuseini has acknowledged that his Asante ancestors accumulated their great wealth by abducting, capturing, and kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves. Likewise, Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Awoonor has written: “I believe there is a great psychic shadow over Africa, and it has much to do with our guilt and denial of our role in the slave trade. We too are blameworthy in what was essentially one of the most heinous crimes in human history.”5

In 2000, at an observance attended by delegates from several European countries and the United States, officials from Benin publicized President Mathieu Kerekou’s apology for his country’s role in “selling fellow Africans by the millions to white slave traders.” “We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation,” said Luc Gnacadja, Benin’s minister of environment and housing. Cyrille Oguin, Benin’s ambassador to the United States, acknowledged, “We share in the responsibility for this terrible human tragedy.” 6

The historical record is incontrovertible—as documented in the PBS Africans in America series companion book:

The white man did not introduce slavery to Africa . . . . And by the fifteenth century, men with dark skin had become quite comfortable with the concept of man as property . . . . Long before the arrival of Europeans on West Africa’s coast, the two continents shared a common acceptance of slavery as an unavoidable and necessary—perhaps even desirable—fact of existence. The commerce between the two continents, as tragic as it would become, developed upon familiar territory. Slavery was not a twisted European manipulation, although Europe capitalized on a mutual understanding and greedily expanded the slave trade into what would become a horrific enterprise . . . . It was a thunder that had no sound. Tribe stalked tribe, and eventually more than 20 million Africans would be kidnapped in their own homeland. 10​

Historians estimate that ten million of these abducted Africans “never even made it to the slave ships. Most died on the march to the sea”—still chained, yoked, and shackled by their African captors—before they ever laid eyes on a white slave trader. 11 The survivors were either purchased by European slave dealers or “instantly beheaded” by the African traders “in sight of the [slave ship] captain” if they could not be sold.12 Of course, the even more horrific and inhuman middle passage—the voyage of a European (and later American) slave ship from Africa to the Western Hemisphere—still lay before those who had survived the forced trek to the coast.

No one is well served when “old myths of African barbarism” are replaced by “new myths of African innocence.”13 There are some encouraging signs. A recent middle school textbook, for example, tries to explain—

how Africans could have sold other Africans into slavery. The answer is that [African] slaveholders didn't think of themselves or their slaves as 'Africans.' Instead they thought of themselves as Edo or Songhai or members of another group. They thought of their slaves as foreigners or inferiors. In the same way, the Spanish, the French, and the English could massacre each other in bloody wars because they thought of themselves as Spanish, French, or English, rather than Europeans.14​

Similar candor can also be found in a current college textbook co-authored by three African-American historians. Europeans and eventually Americans—

did not capture and enslave people themselves. Instead they purchased slaves from African traders [who]…restricted the Europeans to a few points on the coast, while the kingdoms raided the interior to supply the Europeans with slaves. ... The European traders provided the aggressors with firearms, but they did not instigate the wars. Instead they used the wars to enrich themselves. Sometimes African armies enslaved the inhabitants of conquered towns and villages. At other times, raiding parties captured isolated families or kidnapped individuals. As warfare spread to the interior, captives had to march for hundreds of miles to the coast where European traders awaited them. The raiders tied the captives together with rope or secured them with wooden yokes around their necks. It was a shocking experience, and many captives died from hunger, exhaustion, and exposure during the journey. Others killed themselves rather than submit to their fate, and the captors killed those who resisted.15​

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/41431

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If you want to punish an entire race of people because long ago, people who looked like them bought slaves, what must those who looked like the ones who did most of the actual enslaving pay?

What must Africans pay. They did most of the enslaving. What should Muslims pay? It was through their conquest that slavery spread in Africa.

I'm a slav. Should Muslims pay repercussions to me because my forefathers were enslaved once? That's where the name Slav comes from.

Reparations is racist in practice, and in concept it make no sense

 

They buy indulgences from the left without paying a dime.

 

Well you should also hold those Africans responsible who sold their brethen into slavery... most of the slaves were sold to the Arabs, far more than those who went to the America's and ALL of them were sold by black Africans... why only hold the white man responsible.. they were merely end buyer... and not even the biggest end buyer

 

Because this is blind and shameful pandering. Cadance Owens called it out well.

""Every 4 years, the black community are offered handouts and fear. Reparations and white nationalism. This is the Democrat preview."



She was right

 

I am not making any racial assumption, grossly, as you yourself said you are White. That is the only element needed, for my philosophy to include you. It does not matter what year you came here.

If you are White and somewhere within, America, then you are in fact living within White Privilege created by slavery's legacy which continues to dictate our USA society to this day. That's why your family came here, because they saw how greatly White people control this society therefore your family wanted to live in that Utopia.

The fact (above) allows me to be, discombobulated, at how you & @scarlet witch tried to cloud this discussion by bringing up issues that have nothing to do with qualifying Reparations in terms of The U.S. Slave Trade exclusively.

Which means it does not matter how those slaves, got here, nope there's no need to even bring that up. Because all that matters here, is how White USA citizens have oppressed Black slaves and their descendents, every day since those very first Black slaves docked on our shores in April 1619.


[QUOTE] To claim this is to acknowledge that white people are superior [/QUOTE]

Just because a criminal victimizes an, organism, does not make that criminal superior to the organism it preyed upon. Perhaps, superior at being evil. But, that's about it.

This is 100% meaningless.

This reparations ordeal is about the USA, exclusively, and only what happened to Black humans once they landed on our shores from 1619-2019. The U.S. Slave Trade's legacy. Period

 

I am not African American -- I have no opinion.

I am proud of my great a grandparents. In 1919, they worked on building Soviet State. Former Nobles lost all the property they inherited from their serfowner ancestors.

 

@scarlet witch and @Fallen might hate me, for this, but I still love you both as my fellow Caucasoid sibling indeed:







pay special attention from 1:50 - 1:58 and especially 2:03 - 3:05

 

Here's their reparation... they don't have to live like millions of other Africans in Africa... it's this (appreciating a high quality life) or a ticket home.

 

Hey @scarlet witch

can you elaborate on the video, from 2:03 - 3:05, I would love to know your interpretation of his words verbatim if possible.

I just want to see if you and I understand his words in different ways, by excluding our actual opinion of his words from 2:03 - 3:05.

 

Tell you what I think of that. Anytime someone calls for a commission to study something it is because they don't really want to follow through but it makes for nice optics and an election is coming up. "I am for this but let's kick the can down the road for now."

 

load of crap

he says "we inherited moral assets" and also "inherited moral debt" I say wake up, the world is an unfair and unjust place and not only to people of colour. You need to take responsibility for your own life and your own history and do the best you can to move forward. This is what everyone else has to do...

He also blames American whites for slavery, this is simply not true. African tribes used to sell one another into slavery and the majority of slaves went to the middle east, where their balls were cut off instantly... where are their reparations... and why are these Africans not paying reparations... at least for rendering them infertile on arrival.

Based on this reparations ideology we'll be paying reparations back to the stone age, many people have been screwed over in history... not just black people.

 

...hmmm...

I must've missed that part. At what time in the vid, does he say this?

 

When you ask someone to pay reparations it is because you blame them for something/hold them responsible for something.... why else would you demand reparations...

I'm not blaming you but you have to pay for it...

makes no sense unless you blame them

 

And they should be paid by the DNC.

 

It will never get that far. This is electioneering, public posturing to get the Black vote, and will more likely backfire.

 

"Now how would you feel if that -- innocent person...had just lived their entire life benefitting from what the actual criminal did"

You are assuming that white people are benefiting from slavery in modern times, and thus have "white privilege".
This is a gross generalization of an entire race.

Tell impoverish white people how they are more privileged than the likes of Barack Obama and Cory Booker.

As a percent white people are generally richer. As a percentage, black people generally commit more murder.

Calling white people privileged is using the same logic as calling black people murders.
In both cases, you are attributing a particular behavior, experiences, or actions to a particular race, an immutable characteristic.

Generalizing an entire race of people is wrong and racist.