Posted on 04/29/2015 10:37:29 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A photo published in The Baltimore Sun on Tuesday showed young black men gleefully, almost hysterically, dashing out of a looted Baltimore CVS store that would later be set ablaze.
One was clutching a box of Froot Loops and half-gallon of ice cream, and one had a couple 50-ounce bottles of Arm & Hammer Laundry Detergent, dermatologist tested, for sensitive skin.
The mob mentality that existed at that moment prompted them to grab items worth less than $20. It was a criminal act warped by the African-American experience in the U.S., where they and their ancestors have long been denied the staples of daily life as immediate as food and as abstract as opportunity to participate in the American dream. Their crime makes an undeniably convincing argument for the need to discuss slavery reparations.
The concentrations of black populations in urban centers are the result of generations of racist policies on housing, banking, education, employment and criminal justice. These cities absorbed people freed from a 250-year-old slave economy that required a civil war to end it. The truth is, the bigotry and commercial exploitation of African-Americans that enriched the nation’s earliest industrialists still exists and continues to funnel black communities into dead ends from which escape is difficult, to say the least.
Those young men with their ice cream and laundry detergent have the choice of seeing their neighborhood as valuable, nurturing communities, or as traps built by the power structure that has determined this is where they belong.
The police, who should be serving and protecting, too often rule by intimidation, meting out punishment beyond the charge of their office. This is not about police going into neighborhoods and straightening out black-on-black crime. It’s about men being afraid to go to jail for not paying child support, making eye contact with a police officer or selling loose cigarettes. These aren’t criminal behaviors, they are responses to living under intimidation.
Looting, violence, vandalism and crime are no solution. They are unjustifiable. They are wrong. They are deplorable. But should they be unexpected any less than infection follows an untreated wound? Two wrongs don't make a right, but until the wound is healed, how could we expect to prevent the infection? Reparations is a way to treat that wound.
The reality of life for the urban black American is heartbreakingly present in the instruction the mother has to give her son regarding police interactions, in the student who isn't even aware that her chances for success are less than those of her more affluent peers. But for so many other Americans, these lives are viewed over one electronic device or another and become reality for what amounts to a few moments in the world of media.
U.S. Rep. John Conyers has in every session of Congress since 1989 filed a bill that would begin a discussion on reparations, but it never passes. This discussion must take place. We must understand why black lives matter, and why in 2015 it's necessary for so many beautiful Americans to be walking through city streets to remind us of that.
What form reparations might take is unknown, but we know that all the policies imbued with racism mentioned above need repair. That might be the place to start.
President Obama said from the White House on Tuesday, "If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could; it's just that it would require everybody saying, 'This is important; this is significant.' And, that we don't just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don't just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped, but we're paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids."
Let’s remind Congress that “This is important; this is significant,” and remind ourselves of it, while we’re at it.
A quarter of a million dollars, tax-free and a one-way ticket back to Africa and you renounce your US citizenship upon arrival. Deal?
So long as Democrats, the party of slavery and the KKK, are the ones paying.
My position evolved. I am now in favor of reparations paid by those calling for them.
“A quarter of a million dollars, tax-free and a one-way ticket back to Africa and you renounce your US citizenship upon arrival. Deal? “
There was a thread the other day, and a freeper was explaining how in the late 1600’s after a black indentured servant had served his 7 years he was to be sent back to Africa (Liberia). Many of them, after 7 years, sold themselves as slaves to avoid having to go back.
OK, here’s my contribution: NO.
Sounds great. They can start with a CVS store in Baltimore, and we’ll move on from there.
“OK, here’s my contribution: NO.”
And I was hoping the slaves would pay us.
The left is constantly dreaming up new ways to take money from Republicans and give it to Democrats. This is most appalling in that the Democrats were the slavery supporters while Republicans had anti-slavery statements in their platform from the beginning.
Then, dejected, I realize it's just the usual collection of liberal cliches and logical mishmosh, totally devoid of the sardonic brilliance I imagined.
Coming from “the Cape Cod View?”
How about inviting some black folk to your vacation homes as a start?
Those who are calling for it aren’t calling for themselves to pay for it, but by others. Similar to “lets tax on the rich, but not me even though I’m rich”
As maids, nannies, cooks or gardeners?
700k dead before 1860. Just leave the plantation anx we call it even.
Make the KKK party pay for it. And while the dems are paying back the slaves they can chip in for the Yankees as well.
reparations time, yes!
how about paying me my raparations for when I was admitted to a leading major professional school...but the faculty decided to divert all available financial aid to persons of one particular skin pigmentation (not my own)
or when, prior to that, I was turned down by many other schools to make room for LESS QUALIFIED persons of that other racial group
Racism definitely exists in Amerika today, indeed it thrives...parricularly in leftist collectives like (most) universities
just saying.
I harbor no ill will. Just observing that if reparations for racial discrimination are to be the order of the day, that I am definitely in line for my share!
By the way, it may be worth noting that Rep. Conyers--who appears to think that "reparations" are a simply splendid idea--seems to have advanced fairly well in society, absent any such thing...
Let me see, we have a bunch of hoodlums looting—and that proves we should give them money? For unspecified crimes our distant ancestors are alleged to have done to their distant ancestors?
And the author learned common sense where?
Journalism school.
I owned no slaves, therefore I owe nothing.
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