The US should consider reparations to African-American descendants of slavery

Is the UN right to get involved in this question? Does the issue that the slave trade began before the founding of the US have any bearing? How is the best way to acknowledge the slave trade?

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics...oup-suggests-us-work-on-racial-reconciliation

The United States should consider reparations to African-American descendants of slavery, a United Nations working group said Friday
Associated Press Jan. 29, 2016, at 4:35 p.m. + More

By JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States should consider reparations to African-American descendants of slavery, establish a national human rights commission and publicly acknowledge that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity, a United Nations working group said Friday.

The U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent released its preliminary recommendations after more than a week of meetings with black Americans and others from around the country, including Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, the District of Columbia and Jackson, Mississippi.

After finishing their fact-finding mission, the working group was "extremely concerned about the human rights situation of African-Americans," chair Mireille Fanon Mendes-France of France said in the report. "The colonial history, the legacy of enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the U.S. remains a serious challenge as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent."

For example, Mendes-France compared the recent deaths of unarmed black men like Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police to the lynchings of black men in the South from the post-Civil War days through the Civil Rights era. Those deaths, and others, have inspired protests around the country under the Black Lives Matter moniker.

"Contemporary police killings and the trauma it creates are reminiscent of the racial terror lynchings in the past," she told reporters. "Impunity for state violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency."

Some of the working group's members, none of whom are from the United States, said they were shocked by some of the things they found and were told.

For example, "it's very easy in the United States for African-Americans to be imprisoned, and that was very concerning," said Sabelo Gumedze of South Africa.

 

What about Mexico, Central American countries, Venezuela, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Equator, Caribbean countries (the HUB of the slave trade), Asia, Africa, and Europe?

Why just make the U.S. pay?

 

The United Nations should tell all nations to offer reparations to all who have been oppressed or are currently being oppressed inclusive of race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. The United States should not be singled out.

 

Bernie supports this

 

To get the ball rolling perhaps, no good pointing fingers. Take responsibility and hope the rest follow. Lead by example and all of that

 

Would you support the UN "telling" Russia to pay reparations for the 6-8 million Ukrainians they murdered in the Great famine !!! How about paying the Chechens for the the murders and genocide they caused in Chechnya ? How about paying reparations to the Circassians who lived in the Sochi area of Moskowstan and the 1-2 millions that Russia murdered and deported to Turkey and to Syria ?

 

For the same reason Willie Sutton had when asked why he robbed banks:

"Because that is where the money is."

 

Color me shocked !!!!!!

Not ��

 

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Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too

 

This must be coming straight from "Dreams of My Father", even if unwritten. I'll just try to make a couple points....

While most ALL people originally came to the "New Land", meaning all races, as indentured servant's often from a particular commercial source, like the "Virginia Company", many came simply to escape some form of real poverty, even slavery in other parts of the world.

It was the British Empire that secured the world from piracy and other problems, while trying to get elsewhere, and this was not always the US. The British, introduced law, government and modern commerce (for the times) around the world, certainly not what became the US or for some time after it did become the US.

I would suggest, descendants of all people, even the less common slaves of a few Colonies, that owed payment for the eventual life their descendants were and have been, much better off than if they had not got the what became the US. I'd suggest even today, life in Africa or other places on this planet are not much better off, than in any other period of time. Maybe the US today should bill those that have benefited, not reward more to those that haven't taken advantage.

 

Anyone who knows the history of the transatlantic slave trade knows the butt of the responsibility belongs to the British, Dutch and Portuguese...And the African countries that sold their brothers into slavery.

So how about this, one time offer, $10,000.00 and a trip back to Africa, renounce your US citizenship...Live long and prosper. 95% of them would be clamoring to come back to the US inside a year. That's if they weren't already dead. Could you imagine some of these Detroit gang bangers thinking they are so tough that they would rule in Africa. The images running through my head are quite amusing...would almost make a good movie.

 

Nobody alive had anything to do with slave trade, nobody alive is owed anything for slavery.

Since it will be tax dollars taken from people who had nothing to do with what happened 400 years ago, I say anyone who takes reparations will be forced to move to the country of their ancestors . And good riddance.

Reparations have been paid, and a lot of it wasted to help blacks shut the (*)(*)(*)(*) up and move on.

 

I don't agree with reparations. At this point even the children of the children of slaves are probably mostly deceased, and the same holds true for the slave owners and their kin. What I see this as is, people who weren't slave owners paying people who weren't slaves. Reparations are a symbolic gesture that doesn't actually accomplish anything. That's my objective analysis, although it doesn't mean I can't see the subjective reasons why someone might be for or against them.

 

Does it include a one way ticket to Liberia?

 

Moving beyond the foolishness that is "reparations" for a second, how is the UN going to force the United States or any full time member of the Security Council to do anything? They can wag their fingers at us all they want, it's not going to amount to much. They've never stood up to Russia when they've moved on targets outside their country, they've never been able to stop China from manipulating their currency. What are they going to do? The answer is nothing, because when push comes to shove the UN doesn't have any power that the United States doesn't allow it to exercise.

The simply fact is the west by and large is not going to risk angering their sheriff, and Russia, and China, are not going to try to enforce anything against the US. The United Nations is a left over from the Cold War at this point, that is still followed as much by a force of habit as anything else. Despite their lofty words and treaties, they have no power not given to them by the actual super powers of the world.

 

I think 'reparations' have been paid in spades (no pun intended)........

 

IMO the most telling arguments from the link:

Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too
By: David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, January 03, 2001


One

There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery

Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?


Two

There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively From Its Fruits

The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous "nation" in the world. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped.


Three

Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them

Only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves. This is true even for those who lived in the ante-bellum South where only one white in five was a slaveholder. Why should their descendants owe a debt? What about the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves? They gave their lives. What possible moral principle would ask them to pay (through their descendants) again?


Four

America Today Is A Multi-Ethnic Nation and Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery

The two great waves of American immigration occurred after 1880 and then after 1960. What rationale would require Vietnamese boat people, Russian refuseniks, Iranian refugees, and Armenian victims of the Turkish persecution, Jews, Mexicans Greeks, or Polish, Hungarian, Cambodian and Korean victims of Communism, to pay reparations to American blacks?


Five

The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury

The historical precedents generally invoked to justify the reparations claim are payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans and African- American victims of racial experiments in Tuskegee, or racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. But in each case, the recipients of reparations were the direct victims of the injustice or their immediate families. This would be the only case of reparations to people who were not immediately affected and whose sole qualification to receive reparations would be racial. As has already been pointed out, during the slavery era, many blacks were free men or slave-owners themselves, yet the reparations claimants make no distinction between the roles blacks actually played in the injustice itself. Randall Robinson's book on reparations, The Debt, which is the manifesto of the reparations movement is pointedly sub-titled "What America Owes To Blacks." If this is not racism, what is?


Six

The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination

No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended over 150 years ago. But there is plenty of evidence the hardships that occurred were hardships that individuals could and did overcome. The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? West Indian blacks in America are also descended from slaves but their average incomes are equivalent to the average incomes of whites ( and nearly 25% higher than the average incomes of American born blacks). How is it that slavery adversely affected one large group of descendants but not the other? How can government be expected to decide an issue that is so subjective - and yet so critical - to the case?


Seven

The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community.

The renewed sense of grievance -- which is what the claim for reparations will inevitably create -- is neither a constructive nor a helpful message for black leaders to be sending to their communities and to others. To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans may have done to their ancestors fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victim-hood. How are the millions of refugees from tyranny and genocide who are now living in America going to receive these claims, moreover, except as demands for special treatment, an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others -- many less privileged than themselves?


Eight

Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions) - all under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances. It is said that reparations are necessary to achieve a healing between African-Americans and other Americans. If trillion dollar restitutions and a wholesale rewriting of American law (in order to accommodate racial preferences) for African-Americans is not enough to achieve a "healing," what will?

 

Reparations

Never going to happen.

 

The real question is who should pay. Common folks did not own slaves and many died to free them. Tax money belongs to us regular people and no we should not pay.

 

I saw this coming.

This just shows the level of victimhood feelings of entitlement whipped up in the nonthinking by the Marxist brainwashers.

 

Reparations is a foolish and unfair idea that will never happen.

And the U.N. needs to be shut down. It is utterly worthless.

 

Fine, here's your reparations.

A free one-way boat ride to Africa for any clueless loon, White Black or whatever, who thinks anybody today had anything to do with slavery.

I love how these parasite leftist things are constantly attacking Whites in the name of race relations.

Trying to act like human slavery, the civil war, and (*)(*)(*)(*)ing Mike Brown are all the same thing.

You liberal want another civil war?

Better think twice about that.

 

Any reparations should be paid by the African descendants of those who sold them into slavery and profited from this trade......I'm sure that will go over well in Africa......LMAO at the silliness.

 

I think maybe the descendants of people who owned slaves and the descendants of politicians who voted to maintain slavery should be made to consider reparations. My antecedents and myself are clean.

 

Considering how much better off African-Americans are compared to their brothers and sisters in Africa, they should be paying us reparations.