Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor - Reparations for Slavery: The Worst Idea in American History
Aired: 2021-01-24
Duration: 07:18


=== Reparations Redux (06:32) ===

[00:00:04]  Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
[00:00:07]  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.
[00:00:19]  Four Democrats who want to be president are already pushing for reparations: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, and Marianne Williamson.
[00:00:30]  Last week...
[00:00:31]  Nancy Pelosi backed a bill in Congress to study reparations.
[00:00:36]  Everything about this idea is wrong.
[00:00:39]  To begin with, who gets the cash?
[00:00:41]  All black people?
[00:00:43]  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.
[00:00:52]  All of them showed up at least 100 years after slavery ended.
[00:00:56]  And what about the descendants of blacks who owned slaves?
[00:01:00]  In 1860, 3,000 blacks in New Orleans alone owned slaves.
[00:01:06]  And this guy, Andrew Durnford, he was a Louisiana black who worked 80 slaves on his plantation of 1,600 acres.
[00:01:16]  Are we going to sort through all these people to decide who gets what?
[00:01:20]  And who pays?
[00:01:22]  Uncle Sam?
[00:01:23]  The U.S. government never owned a single slave.
[00:01:26]  And slavery existed under the U.S. government for only...
[00:01:29]  89 years, but under the British crown for 157 years.
[00:01:35]  Do the Brits have to pay too?
[00:01:37]  If the U.S. government pays, it would have to tax an awful lot of people who had nothing to do with slavery.
[00:01:44]  Even in the Old South, only one family in five owned a slave.
[00:01:49]  More than 80 million immigrants have come since slavery was abolished, and they have had many millions of descendants.
[00:01:57]  Why should they pay?
[00:01:59]  If blacks deserve to be paid, what is the least crazy, least unfair way to do it?
[00:02:06]  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.
[00:02:16]  Well, good luck finding everybody.
[00:02:18]  We can't even find illegal immigrants.
[00:02:20]  But even if we could track everybody down, there is no legal theory of hereditary guilt.
[00:02:28]  At least, not yet in this country.
[00:02:30]  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.
[00:02:40]  And murder is worse than slavery.
[00:02:43]  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?
[00:02:53]  Well, there's another theory.
[00:02:56]  The idea is that black slaves were so immensely productive that the country became rich only because of them.
[00:03:04]  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.
[00:03:18]  In other words, blacks made the country so rich that even a Guatemalan who just hopped the fence owes them something.
[00:03:26]  This is prize-winningly stupid.
[00:03:30]  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.
[00:03:39]  Even Eugene Genovese, the famous Marxist historian of slavery, said slavery was terrible for economic development.
[00:03:48]  You couldn't use modern agricultural machinery on plantations because slaves would break it.
[00:03:54]  They broke ordinary shovels and hoes, so slave owners had to make extra-heavy, unbreakable tools.
[00:04:02]  Slaves broke industrial equipment, so they couldn't be used in factories either.
[00:04:07]  Slaves were famously unproductive.
[00:04:10]  As one owner complained, it takes two slaves to help one do nothing.
[00:04:16]  It was very hard to make a slave work any harder than he felt like working.
[00:04:21]  A northerner who studied slavery wrote this in the September 1849 issue of De Beau's Review.
[00:04:28]  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.
[00:04:39]  He added this.
[00:04:41]  Overdriving a Negro, as well as a mule, is the poorest way to get work out of either of them.
[00:04:48]  Northern men are always the hardest masters in the vain attempt they make to force the Negro to do even half.
[00:04:57]  As much as a hireling in New England is compelled to do.
[00:05:01]  Even in Uncle Tom's cabin, the evil slave driver, Simon Legree, is a northerner.
[00:05:08]  Frederick Law Olmsted, who laid out Central Park in New York City, spent five years, from 1852 to 1857, studying the slave states.
[00:05:17]  He estimated that slaves worked about one-third the hours of a hard hand on a farm in the North.
[00:05:24]  And on top of that, they had to be food housed and clothed from cradle to grave.
[00:05:30]  With all due respect, these people did not create the wealth of the West.
[00:05:36]  I repeat, the idea that slaves produced the economic basis of much of the Atlantic world is embarrassingly stupid.
[00:05:45]  If black people are so fantastically productive, why aren't Haiti and Africa rolling in dough?
[00:05:52]  And there's a principle here.
[00:05:54]  Times change.
[00:05:56]  Like it or not, slavery was legal.
[00:05:59]  Slaveholders weren't criminals, and their descendants aren't criminals.
[00:06:03]  Until 1920, women couldn't vote.
[00:06:05]  Do today's women deserve reparations?
[00:06:08]  Up until just a few years ago, homosexuals couldn't get married.
[00:06:12]  Do they deserve reparations?
[00:06:14]  From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Muslims caught and enslaved at least a million whites.

=== Why Reparations Feel Good (00:57) ===

[00:06:22]  Women were sold into harems and men were worked to death as galley slaves.
[00:06:26]  White people aren't asking for handouts.
[00:06:29]  So, why all the jabber about reparations?
[00:06:33]  It'd be a great way to fleece white people.
[00:06:36]  And just talking about it is a way to make goofy white people feel guilty.
[00:06:40]  And it shifts the blame for black failure.
[00:06:44]  Politicians who push reparations think they are hip and progressive.
[00:06:49]  So... Just because reparations would be crazy doesn't mean they won't happen.
[00:06:55]  A majority of blacks want to pay up.
[00:06:58]  Now, it's true that 89% of whites don't want to pay up.
[00:07:03]  But what do our opinions matter?
[00:07:06]  Remember, 78% of whites don't like racial preferences for blacks in college admissions.
[00:07:12]  But affirmative action is still crammed down our throats year after year after year.