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Jan. 24, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
07:18
Reparations for Slavery: The Worst Idea in American History
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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.
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.
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