Turns out I’m one of only 4% of white people in the US who support reparations to African-Americans.
The reason why reparations are so unpopular among everybody but me and a few other people is not that I’m morally superior and everybody else is a vicious racist. I’m not and they aren’t. The real problem is that the issue is being presented to people in a very heavy-handed, flat-footed and frankly stupid way.
Trying to guilt-trip people with rants about white supremacy, “Whiteness”, white privilege, original sin, the “white racial spoils system” that benefits even the poor whites (see the linked article, for instance, it’s all there, I just copy-paste) achieves nothing. People are alienated by the rants and turn away. And what’s especially curious is that the least racist will be antagonized by these rants the most. The only way out of the alienation is to do what I do and reject the ranters as idiot clowns who are not to be taken seriously. But hey, I’m from a different culture, it’s easy for me to do.
It is so obvious that this is not the way to achieve a political goal that I believe the ranters don’t actually want reparations to become reality. They want to feel important and aggrieved and they easily sacrifice those who actually need reparations. It’s the same strategy as the one that is making climate change so repellent to so many people as a political issue. More often than not, it seems that the activists are passionately dedicated to the goal of not being successful and not attracting anybody to their cause.
As I keep saying, a huge part of what people see as political activism is actually extreme psychological dysfunction.
In Alice Dreger’s book that I reviewed recently, there is an amazing detailed description of how activists work when they really want results. Dreger’s organization of people who fight for the rights of the intersex achieved phenomenal success. It’s insanely hard work but it brought actual results. And the #1 rule was: don’t rant, don’t accuse, don’t yell, don’t guilt-trip. Listen, flatter, cajole, thank, show that you are grateful for any interest towards your cause, recognize your opponent’s humanity, accept that the opponent is basically a good human being who wants what’s best. And remember, in the case of the intersex, the opponents were doctors who’d been cutting off the genitals of these very intersex, mutilating them for life. Try accepting the essential goodness of somebody who left you sans a clitoris and you’ll understand what kind of personal maturity and intellectual growth the activists had to bring to their cause.
Clarissa's Blog 
Almost nobody supports reparations because it means:
1)giving up their things,
2) having a different image of history which offends the just world fallacy
3)it also offends against the idea that at birth everyone is an individual who has a clean slate that isn’t over determined by their ancestors’ condition.
4)America is not over the Civil War; let alone the civil right movement.
Even the nicest most empathetic reparations supporter who radiates “people in the present are good” is going to offend because of these underpinnings.
It’s mostly money; but even so, most whites (70%) do not support an apology for slavery (from your link).
Honestly, I’m not sure what you think will be accomplished by reparations and what you expect to happen.
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An official apology would be a good start. If the Kind of Spain can apologize to Jews for the expulsion of 1492 ordered by people from two royal families before his, it definitely can be done here.
The country is extremely fractured around the race issue. There is a collective trauma here of massive proportions that is festering and emitting foul odors and substances that poison everything. Collectivities have methods of psychological hygiene, just like individuals. Sometimes, they instinctively know when to use these methods (like the Pope who keeps apologizing for the Inquisition that he personally obviously didn’t conduct). Sometimes, though, this self-defense mechanism fails, like with Russians who are devouring themselves, dying off in crazy numbers just to avoid recognizing the enormous collective trauma.
Ultimately, like individuals but on a more massive scale, groups either decide to get healthy and discuss the trauma or they decide to allow the trauma to eat them up. I don’t want this country to keep cannibalizing itself because of the fear of naming the source of the pain.
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There is a collective trauma here of massive proportions that is festering and emitting foul odors and substances that poison everything. Collectivities have methods of psychological hygiene, just like individuals.
But if you ask majority white populations, they either 1)deny anything has happened or 2)don’t connect it to themselves. “I don’t have a problem, why do they have a problem?” Unless they can say, “This happened and this is how it’s hurting me” nothing will change. All complaints of damage boil down to “I lost relative status” not “this collective trauma has warped my humanity by warping my empathy, imagination and ability to see other people as human.”
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I understand that most people are idiots and lack insight but there is an expiration date on the whole project and it’s either now or never. I’m hearing that this country will not be majority white by 2050. And that means Hispanics. And Hispanics will not be sympathetic to reparations no matter what.
This has to be done now.
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When does the bell for historical reckoning toll?
Does it toll when the last person who personally knew the last slave passes from the earth?
There’s an excellent chance this has already happened or will soon happen. (I don’t buy claims of extreme longevity; the oldest unambiguously documented person to live was Jeanne Calment and she lived to be 122 years old.)
I don’t think this has to do with some 2050 census,whether Hispanics are still considered not white by then or not.
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There is some very limited hope of getting the idea across to non-Hispanic Americans. Getting it to appeal to Hispanics is something I wouldn’t even try. It’s a total waste of time.
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Why?
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Actually, there will be NO single majority (greater than 50%) demographic group in America by 2050, but non-ethnic whites will still have the largest plurality by far at 47%.
Hispanics will be a distant second at 29%, followed by blacks at 13%, and Asians at 9%. Nobody thinks that these different groups are going to act as a single bloc.
(Data from Pew Research Center)
I don’t believe that cash-handout reparations (and that’s how just about everybody defines “reparations” — somehow programs like affirmative action and public housing don’t count) will ever fly in this country.
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The main thing I don’t get is, I didn’t cause any harm to anybody, I wasn’t around during slavery or Jim Crow. Why should I pay? If I haven’t done anything, how is it fair for me to be paying?
(And I won’t be getting into whose ancestors did anything wrong or not because it’s like what you always say about Israel. It doesn’t make sense to debate now what was done by whom hundreds of years before).
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Yes, you are right it’s extremely unfair and sucks dick that we are all paying for the damage inflicted on us before we were even born. I wasn’t alive during the Holodomor, I didn’t do anything to deserve being impacted by it but I am. My whole life I’ve been really messed up about food and it’s causing me very bad health consequences.
I could pretend that nothing is happening and accept a dramatically shortened life span.
I could develop my masochistic streak and chase one stupid diet after another.
Or I could get over the entirely reasonable sense of annoyance, accept that historic past has an impact, and pay large sums of money to an analyst to solve the problem once and for all. And yes, how horribly unfair that I have to shoulder the expense and the aggravation when I didn’t do anything to cause this. But if I repeat “It’s unfair, unfair, unfair” for the next ten years, that won’t solve anything. It’s easier to just do something about it already.
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But will it solve your problems if Russia finally takes this idea of being the legal descendant of the Soviet Union seriously, and pays you reparations for the consequences of Holodomor? Pays for your analyst, for example?
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It will solve the problems of the Russians. Gosh, forget reparations, if they can at least accept that Holodomor happened, that would already be a huge step for them. Not for me, mind you, for them. They are the ones who need this.
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OK, so you are proposing reparations to the African Americans as a measure primarily aimed at whites cleaning their own karma, so to speak?
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Of course! And African Americans will maybe be so kind and graciously accept the apology to help out. It’s exactly like those letters of apology that people in AA send out as one of the 12 steps. The recipients obviously derive a lot less value from the letters than the authors. I personally find the letters annoying. But they seem to help the alcoholics, so what are you going to do?
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We are none of us culpable for slavery or even Jim Crow. All true. We ARE responsible for the enduring legacies of inequality those inflicted. We ARE needing to take some due care to right the wrongs that have persisted even if we are not the cause. We have done this for indigenous people and Japanese Americans and need to do so for Black people. We defaulted on promises, stole, pillaged, and short changed on the ‘hand up’ we said would help but never made manifest. It IS recent. Office of Economic Opportunity was making huge changes for the good toward economic self sufficiency when resentment of that help was ripped away legislatively. We, Americans, defaulted again. And that’s within our lifetimes. How we make reparations is very open to debate, but that we should do this really is not. We don’t have to be guilty – we do have to be mindful that harm was done, and we allowed that harm to persist. That’s all we need to know to do the right thing.
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Then perhaps it is better to talk about “making amends”, rather than “reparations”?..
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Ah, another 4-percenter, welcome! 🙂 It’s true, no guilt is needed. Just a recognition that today is a consequence of yesterday and of the day before. Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room instead of trying to pretend it isn’t there.
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Well, it’s nice to know that I’ve been demoted from a “1-percenter” to a “4-percenter”! My karma is a clean as a hound’s tooth, no cleaning necessary.
But since I’m part Native American, do I get a handout, too?
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I was responding to churchlady320. Sorry, the app is acting up on me.
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—Ah, another 4-percenter, welcome!
thank you, but my position is more nuanced. My primary response is “What the Hell? I am a recent immigrant to North America, I am hundred percent sure my ancestors did not own any slaves, black or otherwise; should I participate in any reparations simply because I am white???” So I will oppose any law requiring anybody to make any reparations, or any reparations coming from the taxpayers’ money.
On the other hand, I am well aware that, compared to most African-Americans that are currently living, I had it easy. Soviet Union was a weird and harsh place in many ways, but growing up in an educated family and not worrying about food and shelter, or of being shot in the street, provided me a significant advantage. Thus, in some sense it is my moral obligation to help those who had it harder. Which I am doing offering more attention to certain students. More help in the process. But in the end they are all graded according to the same standards. And this, in fact, is a manifestation of respect and of not treating them as beneath me.
The desire to make amends has to come from within, it cannot be legislated.
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Obviously, I can’t legislate, so trying to get people to think about the issue is all I can do.
I’m an immigrant, and I thin nobody who is not an immigrant could have possibly had it harder than me. But that’s not the point. I simply don’t want to live in a place where this festering wound keeps existing and poisoning everything. People in this country are deeply messed up about race. It will be better for everybody, me included, if they stop being so scared and uptight about the issue and just start dealing with it.
The main person I want to help here is me. This will benefit me, and if it will take some money to achieve that, good. Money exists to be spent.
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If people would stop ranting about it, maybe there’d be a change in the feelings of “what the hell did I do to you?” That tend to come out of such exchanges.
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I don’t understand how Reparations are supposed to work.
Who gets money from where? Or is it something else?
Why not reparations for Native Americans, too?
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There have been reparations for indigenous people. They have worked very erratically, so we need to do better.
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In psychoanalysis, correctly identifying a problem and its root is already the solution to the problem. If the majority of people agrees that there is a massive, shared historical trauma here and names its causes, that will be our solution. Money is simply symbolic of the amount of psychological energy we are willing to expend collectively on solving the shared problem.
So the most crucial step is to get people out of the favorite mantra of all alcoholics, “I’m just choosing to drink, I can quit any time.”
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Neither does anybody else, including “experts” on race like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who recently wrote, “Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy. It is the indispensable tool against white supremacy.” (Italics mine.)
His long article lists many ways that blacks have been systematically abused in the country, along with many ways that the government and some big businesses have tried to make amends (efforts that Coates dismisses as about “class” and not “race”).
But he doesn’t give any definition of the term “reparations” at all, or explain how giving whatever constitutes “reparations” to (some? all?) blacks would be a useful tool against anything.
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The answer has already been given right here in this thread. But the resistance is so high that I could plaster it on in letters ten feet high and people will still insist that nobody has an answer.
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WHERE? If you mean one-time cash handouts of a relatively meager amount, that isn’t going to end anything, or even improve an impoverished person’s lot for more than a very brief period. If I’m a poor black person in the ghetto and the government hands me $500 and a verbal apology, then somehow all of a sudden I’m no longer a disadvantaged poor person, and somehow I won’t feel oppressed anymore?
If in your individual case, a $500 cash handout and an apology from whoever might possibly represent the old Soviet system would do wonders for you psychologically, that’s fine for YOU and you alone — it won’t work on a nationwide scale, for blacks, or Native Americans, or any other similar group.
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Wow, that’s one of the most clear and honestly stunning cases of resistance I have ever encountered. This could go into a textbook.
Man, I don’t pay my analyst nearly enough if that’s what I put him through, poor fellow. 🙂
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Everything I post is in the public domain. Feel free to use my words to benefit humanity however you see fit! 🙂
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Ok, let’s assume that by “answer” you mean the idea that the whites need to make amends primarily for the sake of their own karma (with which I agree in principle, but…)
First of all, I am not sure any reparations will be appreciated if the recipient of the reparations will be aware of the above. This should not be used as an argument in favor of not making any amends (if the amends are done for the sake of the one making amends), but this will have to be considered when analyzing why “reparations” did not work, post factum.
Second, I very strongly doubt that it is constitutional in the US to impose race based taxes (to finance any centralized reparations/amends program) on the whites. Besides, making amends only works on the one making amends if the desire to make amends comes from within, and is not imposed from the outside, however democratically this imposing decision might be made.
Third (and this is my own quirk), I oppose any mechanisms directly or indirectly endorsing the principle of collective responsibility where “the collective” is defined based on some criteria outside of the collective’s member’s sphere of control, such as race. Thus, technically dealing with those problems from class, rather than race, perspective, seems the only meaningful way to deal with them. (By “technically dealing” I mean the reforms that would need to be implemented, like decoupling of education funding from the property taxes; implementing class-based reforms does not negate the need to acknowledge that originally the injustice was racially-based.)
Based on the above arguments, I’d limit any publicly funded efforts to educating everybody about the injustices endured by this or that group. And then letting everyone decide on their own what would they like to do to create a more just society.
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Well, what about bringing back affirmative action, good public schools, free college, rent control, aid to families with dependent children (i.e. more food stamps and related things), Head Start, and having single payer health insurance … these things would not just benefit African Americans but they would solve a lot of problems and shockingly, many of these things existed within my lifetime yet no longer do.
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And world peace! 🙂
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Yes, but if you take actions that benefit everybody, then you aren’t specifically and ONLY addressing the issue of black oppression and slavery — so none of those actions count.
( Don’t take my word for it. Ask Ta-Nehisi Coates.)
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P.S. I don’t mean to say I think Dreidel is the downvoter.
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Are you referring to your initial comment downvote, or to Clarissa’s lighthearted “world peace” one? I suspect that those comments got downvoted because neither specifically endorsed reparations.
I never downvote any commenter for his/her personal views — only for name-calling, temper tantrums, and excessively vulgar language.
I probably get more downvotes than just about any other commenter on this website. WHO CARES? If I agreed with everything posted here, I wouldn’t have any reason to comment.
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I almost never see the votes anyway because I’m always on my app.
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Yes, I know, and then the comments thread isn’t in chronological order, but I hadn’t meant to be uncivil and thought I might seem so, so thought I should clarify.
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Well, we could make it so that every African-American got an endowment. And Native American.
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Look, a downvoter, surely a rancorous soul. Anyway, for things that would benefit African Americans greatly, major financial support for children of incarcerated parents, and bring back/expand family visits for prisoners.
I haven’t figured out a practical and effective way to come up with reparations that will only go to African-Americans and that will not only not be a drop in the bucket but will also be workable. However I think a lot of these things that incidentally benefit some other people as well will still be a big help. Notice that white people have been willing to give up a lot (like a better food stamp program, which many of them use) just because that will also hurt black people, so if we get to a point where we’re just a bit less vindictive it will already be a big deal.
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Oh look, more downvoting, it is interesting.
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I’m getting very curious about all this down voting that seems to be going on.
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\ Z: Oh look, more downvoting, it is interesting.
\ Clarissa: I’m getting very curious about all this down voting that seems to be going on.
All my later comments get 2-3 downvotes. For instance, when I said “Great news: The Palestinian Authority is finally starting to fight the phenomenon of teenage terrorists”, I got 2 downvotes. May be. people are bored when I write about Israel, but I live here. The same reason why Clarissa writes about Illinois. Or, may be, they support terrorists, who knows.
Z are lucky to get only one. 🙂
(I was not the downvoter, Z.)
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Hey, my posts on Illinois get no interest at all. I’d prefer the posts arousing hatred to nothing at all. At least, people care you exist.
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@el
The downvotes are less important than the vulgar comments — “this vile person [with no] self-awareness.. still as clueless as fucking day one” — “boy you stupid” — “keep fucking that chicken” — “why doesn’t [a native born citizen like you] take advice from [a foreign immigrant like me] to leave your native land and move to [a more savage nation] you’d feel more comfortable” — etc. etc. that a certain frequent commenter on this website periodically flings like poo down from a simian hill at a Southern California County zoo at any commenter, be they from Israel or Arizona or the Panama Canal Zone, who fails to hate Israel sufficiently for the heinous evil of defending its children and grandmothers from being murdered while going about their business in their own land in their kindergartens, in public buses, and along the streets.
Civilized people like you and me have to tolerate this animalistic hateful verbiage on a website that allows free speech. But we’re free to mock it for the anti-Semitic drivel, and for the hysterically juvenile loss of adult anger management skills that it represents.
When you get insults and downvotes from certain individuals on this website, you should wear them as badges of honor.
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