Reparations for historic crimes

In case you’re not aware, there has been a growing movement in the USA that somewhat parallels the Treaty of Waitangi settlements here.

A small number of American academics, and now a growing number of Left-wing activists and minor politicians, are demanding that Blacks in America should be individually paid millions of dollars to compensate for the enslavement of their ancestors. It’s now reached the point where an official State government commission appointed in California has produced a recommendation to the State legislature of some $800 billion, or nearly three times the state’s annual budget.

This for a State that joined as a free state (meaning free of slaves) in 1850. How this would be figured out in detail is not explained, but perhaps the Democrats could return to their one-drop-of-blood rule? Or perhaps this blunter suggestion from a Democratic councilwoman:

Speaking before the Greater Metro Denver Ministerial Alliance, Cdebaca said: “Capitalism was built on stolen land, stolen labor and stolen resources. … You could be collecting those taxes from white-led businesses all over the city, and redistributing them to black- and brown-owned businesses.”

That sounds like a very familiar argument, even if it’s couched in terms of individuals rather than Iwi.

One of America’s leading Civil Rights leaders of the past sixty years, Robert Woodson, had something to say about that on Dr Phill’s daytime TV show – and note while watching him speak that he’s 87 years old, with no stutter!

Wow. Civil Rights leader leaves Dr. Phill & his audience speechless after rejecting the idea of “systemic racism” & reparations.
👏🏾 Beautifully said. pic.twitter.com/3DrdcuMOw6

— Melissa Tate (@TheRightMelissa) May 12, 2023

“When you go into slavery, it’s much more complex than all White people were the oppressors, and Black people were the victims. If you dissect it, you will find there were about 3,700 free Blacks who owned 12,000 slaves — Black slaves. The question is, do the descendants of those free Blacks who owned Black slaves, do they pay?
…
Blacks really benefited more the first 100 years after slavery than we have in the last 50 years. I was born in 1937 during the Depression. Everyone in my small, low-income Black community, 98% of the households, had a man and a woman raising children. Elderly people could walk safely in that community without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren. Never heard of gunfire during that time. Never heard of a child being shot to death in the crib, but there are 50 children today who have been shot and killed in our cities.

If you’re talking about remedies, we’ve got to look beyond saying that every solution has to have a winner and a loser – that Blacks can only benefit if Whites lose. We have to be defined [as] more than just victims of oppression. When Whites were at their worst, Blacks were at their best. When we were denied access to hotels, we built our own.

We have to communicate to our people the history of how they achieved in the face of oppression. But if we continue to sit back and say all of the challenges that we face in out-of-wedlock births, the violence, that somehow the control of that is in the hands of White America, and therefore, until White people change, there’s nothing that we can do – this sets up a terrible situation for this nation.
…
The big crisis facing this nation is not racial. It is the moral and spiritual freefall that is consuming our children. [We need to] be defined by what we want to become in the future”