Originally Posted by BROKE LESNAR (Post 353204)

Absolutely not. Slavery extended far beyond that of the plight of African-Americans. At one point in World History, and still to this day, Africans were auctioning off Africans into slavery. Child sex slavery is still commonplace. Reparations are entitlements. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Didn't read the article bc the topic itself disgusts me.

Originally Posted by Sharp Nine (Post 353265)

Originally Posted by article

Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

Originally Posted by article

The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.”

Originally Posted by article

The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods.

Originally Posted by article

Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. “It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.

Originally Posted by article

why wont you read me??? :(

Originally Posted by BROKE LESNAR (Post 353263)

Are you willfully being an idiot or what? Sins of my ancestors? You think slavery in and of itself is a term, no, a STEREOTYPE, of black people SPECIFICALLY? And reparations for racism? Are you SERIOUS? So what, Jews of today should get reparations for THEIR "ancestors" being MASSACRED by the Nazis? Or better yet, for anti-Semitism? Or what about Gays? Should the LGBT community get reparations for bigotry? What other leftist ultra-sensitive liberal claptrap would you like? Would you like me to give you money for reparations? How about a gift card to Kohl's? Maybe a Google Play card? Raise taxes, increase entitlement spending?

What a joke.

Originally Posted by BROKE LESNAR (Post 353268)

Should Jews of today receive reparations for the Holocaust and anti-semitism? Yes or no?

Originally Posted by article

In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.

“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”

Originally Posted by article

Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.

Originally Posted by article

These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

Originally Posted by BROKE LESNAR (Post 353273)

Should Texas, California, New Mexico, etc. pay reparations to Mexico?

Should legal Immigrants pay reparations for illegal immigrants?

Should any gay or lesbian couple denied marriage in a church be paid reparations?

Should I be paid reparations by the Democratic and Republican party for what it has done to my US Constitution?

I mean it's entitlements. It's always entitlements.

Originally Posted by Zenland (Post 353283)

This escalated quickly.

Originally Posted by TYSON (Post 353305)

Weakest people in our country?

Originally Posted by oats (Post 353308)

Socioeconomically meaning the poorest people, yes. Regardless of skin color, these are the people that are most affected by the predatory practices I was referring to, and the least capable of advocating for themselves due to said poverty.

Originally Posted by uh-oh (Post 353397)

i read some of the article

can someone link that article/thesis whatever the dude mentioned by patrick sharkey

i refuse to believe that only 4 percent of white people live in poverty, that is pure nonsense, and malarkey.

but yea my problem with these discussions is i have no group to side with. im white but im of that miraculously hard to find 4 percent who lives in poverty.

i cant relate to either side enough to care about the subject

Originally Posted by Innovator (Post 353254)

welfare and food stamps are enough reparation.