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Reparations Redux
00:06:32
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| Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance. | |
| Last November's midterm elections seem to have given a big boost to one of the worst ideas in all of American history: reparations to blacks for slavery. | |
| Four Democrats who want to be president are already pushing for reparations: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, and Marianne Williamson. | |
| Last week... | |
| Nancy Pelosi backed a bill in Congress to study reparations. | |
| Everything about this idea is wrong. | |
| To begin with, who gets the cash? | |
| All black people? | |
| Well, there are more than two million immigrants from Africa, one million from Haiti, and about three million from the West Indies living in the United States. | |
| All of them showed up at least 100 years after slavery ended. | |
| And what about the descendants of blacks who owned slaves? | |
| In 1860, 3,000 blacks in New Orleans alone owned slaves. | |
| And this guy, Andrew Durnford, he was a Louisiana black who worked 80 slaves on his plantation of 1,600 acres. | |
| Are we going to sort through all these people to decide who gets what? | |
| And who pays? | |
| Uncle Sam? | |
| The U.S. government never owned a single slave. | |
| And slavery existed under the U.S. government for only... | |
| 89 years, but under the British crown for 157 years. | |
| Do the Brits have to pay too? | |
| If the U.S. government pays, it would have to tax an awful lot of people who had nothing to do with slavery. | |
| Even in the Old South, only one family in five owned a slave. | |
| More than 80 million immigrants have come since slavery was abolished, and they have had many millions of descendants. | |
| Why should they pay? | |
| If blacks deserve to be paid, what is the least crazy, least unfair way to do it? | |
| Well, you track down every white person who had an ancestor who owned a slave and every black person descended from a slave and make the whites pay the blacks. | |
| Well, good luck finding everybody. | |
| We can't even find illegal immigrants. | |
| But even if we could track everybody down, there is no legal theory of hereditary guilt. | |
| At least, not yet in this country. | |
| If my great-granddad raped and tortured and murdered your great-grandma, you might hold it against me, but I don't owe you a dime. | |
| And murder is worse than slavery. | |
| So if there is no way even to make the actual descendants of slave owners pay the actual descendants of slaves, why are we even talking about this? | |
| Well, there's another theory. | |
| The idea is that black slaves were so immensely productive that the country became rich only because of them. | |
| As Ta-Nehisi Coates, the current sage and guru of American race relations, explains, upon the backs of slaves, the economic basis of America and much of the Atlantic world was erected. | |
| In other words, blacks made the country so rich that even a Guatemalan who just hopped the fence owes them something. | |
| This is prize-winningly stupid. | |
| Ever since colonial times and up until the present, the poorest parts of the country are the ones with the most blacks, slave or free. | |
| Even Eugene Genovese, the famous Marxist historian of slavery, said slavery was terrible for economic development. | |
| You couldn't use modern agricultural machinery on plantations because slaves would break it. | |
| They broke ordinary shovels and hoes, so slave owners had to make extra-heavy, unbreakable tools. | |
| Slaves broke industrial equipment, so they couldn't be used in factories either. | |
| Slaves were famously unproductive. | |
| As one owner complained, it takes two slaves to help one do nothing. | |
| It was very hard to make a slave work any harder than he felt like working. | |
| A northerner who studied slavery wrote this in the September 1849 issue of De Beau's Review. | |
| Every attempt to force a slave beyond the limit that he fixes himself only tends to make him unprofitable, unmanageable, a vexation, and a curse. | |
| He added this. | |
| Overdriving a Negro, as well as a mule, is the poorest way to get work out of either of them. | |
| Northern men are always the hardest masters in the vain attempt they make to force the Negro to do even half. | |
| As much as a hireling in New England is compelled to do. | |
| Even in Uncle Tom's cabin, the evil slave driver, Simon Legree, is a northerner. | |
| Frederick Law Olmsted, who laid out Central Park in New York City, spent five years, from 1852 to 1857, studying the slave states. | |
| He estimated that slaves worked about one-third the hours of a hard hand on a farm in the North. | |
| And on top of that, they had to be food housed and clothed from cradle to grave. | |
| With all due respect, these people did not create the wealth of the West. | |
| I repeat, the idea that slaves produced the economic basis of much of the Atlantic world is embarrassingly stupid. | |
| If black people are so fantastically productive, why aren't Haiti and Africa rolling in dough? | |
| And there's a principle here. | |
| Times change. | |
| Like it or not, slavery was legal. | |
| Slaveholders weren't criminals, and their descendants aren't criminals. | |
| Until 1920, women couldn't vote. | |
| Do today's women deserve reparations? | |
| Up until just a few years ago, homosexuals couldn't get married. | |
| Do they deserve reparations? | |
| From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Muslims caught and enslaved at least a million whites. | |
|
Why Reparations Feel Good
00:00:57
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| Women were sold into harems and men were worked to death as galley slaves. | |
| White people aren't asking for handouts. | |
| So, why all the jabber about reparations? | |
| It'd be a great way to fleece white people. | |
| And just talking about it is a way to make goofy white people feel guilty. | |
| And it shifts the blame for black failure. | |
| Politicians who push reparations think they are hip and progressive. | |
| So... Just because reparations would be crazy doesn't mean they won't happen. | |
| A majority of blacks want to pay up. | |
| Now, it's true that 89% of whites don't want to pay up. | |
| But what do our opinions matter? | |
| Remember, 78% of whites don't like racial preferences for blacks in college admissions. | |
| But affirmative action is still crammed down our throats year after year after year. | |