We already have those...
White self-hatred.... it's impact on mixed race people and families?
- Thread starter INACTIVERedDwarf
- Start date
- Status
We already have those...
"Local authorities" get their funds from somewhere, as in, taxes/fees/etc. levied on regular ordinary people (regardless of income/status).
Unless they have one of them magical money trees my dad was always going on about.
"Local authorities" get their funds from somewhere, as in, taxes/fees/etc. levied on regular ordinary people (regardless of income/status).
Unless they have one of them magical money trees my dad was always going on about.
I know this. I get a bill every year.
Some things are worth funding, like universal healthcare and bin collections. Quality and funded higher education is one of those things, though the idea of over half the population going to university is nuts.
Maybe on an individual basis. But in a historical context, big deal. "Non-white" is just a construct of certain societies to keep track of whom it was OK to kill, enslave, steal from, oppress, degrade etc. Which was done on a massive scale.
OK, but we're still left to deal with problems caused by systems of white -- as "whites" chose to define it historically -- oppression. I understand guilt makes people feel bad and they don't want to deal with it. I don't understand people who use that to justify not addressing very real problems of unfairness and inequality.
You're using the wrong word again. Responsibility, NOT guilt. We are not guilty of the things you mention, but we are responsible for acknowledging they exist and trying to get rid of them.
I remember those days! But then a lot less people went to university
Blair set that up to keep the under 21 unemployment figures down. Encouraging youth to go to university to graduate get jobs serving in Starbucks or KFC is cruel
There is enormous personal value in the experience of going to university, but without the demand for graduates in jobs, the £k42, or there abouts debt burden just doesn’t stack. And now many positions that previously required a degree, now require a masters.
There was a joke a time, what’s wide and green and takes all day to drink? Your grant cheque.
Everyone should have a university experience. Mingling with new people far from home, different cultures, language and cuisine crammed into the shared kitchen, being challenged physically and mentally, but not for the promise of work that just isn’t there to cover the massive fees.
You can do all this at work lol
Quoted for truth.
But now the chickens are coming home to roost. I’d revel in being right about it if my own fortunes were not quite so intrinsically linked to the farce.
Again? That was my first post in the thread.
Who is we? You and me as individuals, or our nation and society? Guilt can mean something emotional, or something factual, like in a courtroom. If someone has done wrong, admitting factual guilt can be a step toward something constructive and reparative. This is just as true on the societal level. The way I see it, if governments or power structures that did wrong are still in place, they are guilty and should admit guilt.
But I'm not hung up on individuals feeling guilty. Some people never feel guilty for anything. As I said, my emphasis would be on fixing problems. But some people people approach the question emotionally, in a sort of "You want to make me feel bad, and I don't want to feel bad" way, and that negative emotion makes them resistant and dismissive of the whole thing. Though that was in my reply to ichab, I am not directing that at him or anyone else in the thread. It's something I've encountered more generally.
We - the collective Caucasian. Because we used to have guys that thought like this.
We think it's receding but is it? Other skin colours can be put in there now.
Or to put it another way (don't know if this has been mentioned b/c thread TL;DR)...
About 10 years ago, the Australian PM got up in Parliament and issued an apology, on behalf of the Government, for the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their parents, and for other cruel and unnecessary treatments. We didn't actually do those things (and I wasn't even born here!), but we, as people who benefit from those actions, have a responsibility to address them, and lift up the people that were knocked down. We didn't knock them down, but we must lift them up.
And here's the thing. Wherever Aboriginal people gathered, to listen to this proclamation, in halls and schools and open -air gatherings, there were shouts and cheers and tears of joy. Because there was recognition that the wrong thing had been done to them, and many just wanted that acknowledgement. It has helped them start to move forward with their lives, knowing that whatever faults there were, they weren't theirs.
We didn't knock them down, but we must lift them up.
We think it's receding but is it? Other skin colours can be put in there now.
Or to put it another way (don't know if this has been mentioned b/c thread TL;DR)...
About 10 years ago, the Australian PM got up in Parliament and issued an apology, on behalf of the Government, for the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their parents, and for other cruel and unnecessary treatments. We didn't actually do those things (and I wasn't even born here!), but we, as people who benefit from those actions, have a responsibility to address them, and lift up the people that were knocked down. We didn't knock them down, but we must lift them up.
And here's the thing. Wherever Aboriginal people gathered, to listen to this proclamation, in halls and schools and open -air gatherings, there were shouts and cheers and tears of joy. Because there was recognition that the wrong thing had been done to them, and many just wanted that acknowledgement. It has helped them start to move forward with their lives, knowing that whatever faults there were, they weren't theirs.
We didn't knock them down, but we must lift them up.
I never went to university but I got all that doing shit jobs in overseas countries while traveling around for a couple years. I am debt free.. but I also live in a country not as enamored with degrees for jobs as the US. I remember one of my US relatives getting her first non-waitressing job after completing her masters degree. She was basically a receptionist but she needed the master's degree for it. This was just astounding to me, in Aus you would have gotten that job purely on work experience, no degrees required.
However, a great many things are affordable and worth doing.
As a matter of both common sense and morality, the descendants of slaves are owed reparations. They will not be repaid.
Generally, I agree - certainly the US system where the debt is a real burden would discourage me from taking all but the most financially rewarding courses. But in the UK, the system is such that a) you don't go out of pocket up front to go to university, and b) you are given the most sweetheart loan terms you'll ever see in your life. Don't pay a penny until you cross the income threshold, you can never default on it, and it is written off if it goes unpaid long enough. What we have essentially created is a Graduation Tax, a tax on higher earning graduates' income for a period of time after graduation that is proportional to how much you "spent" and how much you end up earning. That's actually not that bad a system, albeit it is masquerading as something else. In theory, it should also mean university is accessible to the poor as well, although presenting it as "crippling debt" has ruined that.
The big problem it has created, however, is the reality that so many of those 'loans' will end up never being paid off, because as you say many graduates will never reach sufficient income to do so. This means the expense of sending the current generation to university has actually just been shifted to the Treasury of 30 years hence.
Last edited:
BINGO!!
As long as people are told that they are owed something, why would they aspire to anything more than that? Good intentions aside, it's no way to lift people up. Your mileage may vary.
But you're welcome to pay reparations in any way you like. It all starts with you.
If you take out a loan to purchase something and then die without making any repayment on it, can you bequeath it clearly and legally to your children with no obligation on their part?
If you think that the answer to that is or ought to be "Yes, of course," then your position on reparations is logically defensible.
Orherwise, you're wrong.
(Actually, you're just wrong...but in the event you believed nonsense like the above, at least your error concerning reparations for slavery would not be so ridiculous)
The culture that has given you the wealth you enjoy was not in fact founded upon the labor of free people. It was founded upon the labor of free people as well as the theft, by those people, of the life's labors of enslaved people for hundreds of years.
And that is probably the most circumspect and understated way to describe slavery.
This isn't a metaphoric or moral "debt owed" - it's an absolutely real and literal debt. You're the direct beneficiary of stolen wealth, and you're simply doubly fortunate in that your creditors have no means to enforce payment.
Last edited:
Nice try, but no.
You're a white guy, right? Will you pay me reparations for damages to my Native ancestors? No checks, but I do take PayPal.
This is all just a bunch of horseshit. Keep digging.
There's a pony in there somewhere.
Given what he just got done saying about reparations for slavery, what makes you think he would be opposed to reparations for Native Americans as well, though obviously on a federal scale and not in the one person directly repaying another manner you proposed to try and make the whole idea seem ludicrous?
Now, he might not feel the same about Native American reparations as he does about slavery reparations; I don't know, and I can't speak on his behalf. But the way you said it is as if you think that would be some kind of dealbreaker for him that would make him have to reconsider his whole argument, when the two positions on reparations seem perfectly compatible with each other.
How did you feel about the US government paying reparations to Japanese-Americans held in internment camps during WW2? That didn't start paying out until 1990, 45 years after the war ended.
And before you say that's different because they were actual survivors of the internment themselves, bear in mind that we're not actually that far removed from slavery: the last known surviving former slave who was old enough to remember details about being one died in 1971 —though others have claimed they were the last too. And the last former slave kidnapped for the Atlantic slave trade died in 1935. There are still living children of former slaves and slave-owners. And that doesn't even begin to get into continuations or evolutions of slavery-era practices and policy like indentured servitude, Jim Crow laws, segregation, prison labor built on unjust arrests and sentencing of black people, and human trafficking which constitute a de facto continuation of the subjugation of black people in another form. This is not ancient history, it's something that there are still living victims of and that still affects the livelihood and outlook of their direct descendents.
The same as the above apply to Native Americans, in terms of the tragedies being within living memory and the oppression continuing in other forms.
As a side note to the above, one of the things rarely remarked upon in the Trail of Tears story is that the Cherokee were prolific African slave traders and owners who forced their black slaves to endure the marches with them and die right alongside them. And that as recently as a few years ago the Cherokee Nation chose to expel from their ranks the descendents of African Freedmen who had been given citizenship in the tribes after slavery was abolished. I don't say this to diminish the share of responsibility faced by European descendents (or to take away from the suffering the Cherokee endured on the Trail of Tears), because in a perverse way the Cherokee were trying to prove they were "civilized" to the white power structure by enslaving Africans as they had.
I mention the above because trying to specifically divide it up into who owes whom what reparations is a futile gesture and one guaranteed to provoke defensiveness and resentment. Which is why you deal with it purely on a national level. We as a nation, young and old, rich and poor, of all colors and ethnic backgrounds, owe the people who have been most wronged in the establishment of this nation we all benefit from to varying degrees to pay back a small portion of those debts, and to pay forward to make life easier for their descendents who are still experiencing difficulties as a result of those injustices today.
It doesn't have to be a lump sum monetary payment, though that would be helpful too. It can be the afforementioned free college education, it can be giving first priority and economic assistance in the establishment of legalized marijuana dsipensaries to African-American small business owners to make up for traditionally biased drug laws and sentencing against black people, much like legalized gambling has benefited (some) Native Americans. It can be greater property acquisition and financing assistance (a lesser but more literal take on the promised but unfulfilled "40 acres and a mule") or tax breaks. There are any number of ways to make amends.
It's not about quantifying blame against specific individuals or groups, or making it a competition in the Olympics of Suffering, it's about all of us living in this society sharing a responsibility to correct institutional injustice that has benefited us all to varying degrees, even those who were and are simultaneously victims of said injustice (because they pay the taxes that will contribute to this too). It's about building a better society by giving a helping hand to those whose labor or lands were stolen from them without compensation in order to first build that society.
Last edited:
- Status
