This is actually a suggestion I like if I'm understanding him correctly.



If you truly think that blacks are held back in America, you don't have to wait for some massive social change in the country. You don't need to wait for laws to change. You don't have to wait for Hillary or Bernie to win an election. I'm black and therefore disadvantaged right? Then if you care about changing that, why not just give me your money? Send me money to my PayPal account so I can go to school. Buy me a new computer and some books. Prove how much you actually give a shit about black people and go make the change you want to see happen. Go drive to a predominantly black neighborhood and make an impact as an individual. You want me to have reparations? Then set money aside out of each and every paycheck you get and send me my reparations.

I think Young Thug is one of the most obnoxious rappers to ever exist and his music is garbage, however I 100% agree with what he says in this video:



"I don't respect niggas who say black lives matter and don't do nothing to help black lives."

I come from a family of two black business owners. Grandfather was a business owner, mother was a business owner, in a predominantly black city. My father is also a pastor who received donations from different companies/organizations in Michigan and we turned around and gave most of it away - we've given beds, instruments, computers, toys, clothing, food, you name it to people less fortunate in Detroit. We've even helped other black people start up their own small businesses with websites, business cards, giving them free software, etc. We've done more to enrich black lives than most of the people running around shouting "black lives matter". Honestly, unless you've done something at some point to actually help a black life, kindly shut up about how much you care about black lives because you're full of shit.

Sorry, I stopped reading at "no one's asking for free shit".

You hadn't even posted anything in this thread before, IDK what you mean by "your posting points".

No one's asking for free shit

Asking for reparations

Pick one.

My quick take on reparations is more pragmatic. (There's a longer version, but boy is that a lot to go into.) Even if it were moral to hold a child responsible for the sins of the father which it is not, even if you overlook the fact that it's possible to go back even further in human history and find still more legitimate grievances in a never-ending chain, there is no way to assess value on an individual level in terms of who owes or is owed what. Also, and this is important, the original kidnapping and selling into slavery should count for something, and that means a whole lot of currently impoverished African nations would have a bill to foot for this mess too.

My wife and I watch some court shows now and then; most specifically we're fans of Hot Bench. One of the things you run across watching those shows is that in a civil court, they need some reasonable means of assessing damages. If there's no way to see a direct chain of actions from one party to the other that results in damages, they award nothing. If there's no way to prove the damages within a reasonable estimate, they award nothing. They recognize there are things they can never determine and often there is no truly fair solution to complex problems.

The only fair solution to the mess left behind by slavery in the US and to the long dark century of institutionalized bigotry that followed it is the same solution Dr. King called for. His was a colorblind vision of inclusion, of simply working ever closer toward the goal of treating one another as equals. There will never be justice on Earth for the billions of people in the past who were wronged by someone else; those cases are closed for good or ill. There is only moving forward with kindness and respect for all.

Lummox JR wrote:

My quick take on reparations is more pragmatic. (There's a longer version, but boy is that a lot to go into.) Even if it were moral to hold a child responsible for the sins of the father which it is not, even if you overlook the fact that it's possible to go back even further in human history and find still more legitimate grievances in a never-ending chain, there is no way to assess value on an individual level in terms of who owes or is owed what. Also, and this is important, the original kidnapping and selling into slavery should count for something, and that means a whole lot of currently impoverished African nations would have a bill to foot for this mess too.

Precisely. Pretty sure every race at some point committed an atrocity. It's quite ridiculous to paint whites as the only people who've fucked something up. That's what a lot of the alt-right chick's concerns seemed to be about. The standards applied to whites and the standards applied to every other race are drastically different when it comes to things like this.

If you say "whites enslaved blacks", people shout "reparations".

If you say "blacks enslaved blacks", all you hear is crickets.

tfw a red pilled black tells the truth and gets called an uncle tom for it

Lastly and most importantly, you can't discount something that millions of people around the world experience just because you "don't like it".
Fuck your feelings if you want to discount someone elses reality simply because you don't feel like dealing with it.

From another perspective, most black people spend a great deal of their life trying to figure out how to get along with or integrate into white society while whites only have to deal with it "occasionally".

We deal with social stigmas, social ostracization and isolation daily (and largely for no reason other than white people seem scared of anything they can't relate to and don't want to understand)

But more importantly, every alt right talking point is rooted deeply in, and perpetuated by lies. Let's take black on black crime, they love to harp about this.

Yea. Black crime is high for our community, but white crime is worse. People will argue that's because the white populace is bigger, but the truth is there are way more white mass shootings and have been historically than there are black shootings. Period.

Poverty is linked to crime, so it doesn't matter the skin color. This is fact, the one way to decrease the crime rate in black communities is to give them the reparations they are deserved. So they can rebuild their infrastructure.

That won't happen because, to whites its not a big deal (whites who also own the largest land, and financial portions in the country)

The problem is obvious, but whites are indifferent. In other words they are only interested in giving reparations to people they can control so that they can't gain the upper hand or stability in the country.

Blacks make up the second largest populace, so of course they dont' want black people to have money, it creates competition.

Most whites get money from their parents, or grand parents or someone before them who got it, but they never stop to think where that person's money came from. Most wealth came from free work, slave work. Aka, it probably came from the backs of black people. This is also skirted over by most whites when they want to pull the "well what about this aspect of black people" card.

Yet no one points any of this out.

Mobs in chicago painted the streets bloody red for years before Elliot Ness. It was a huge deal back then. The mob operates with police in many places, so their crimes go under the radar.

It's only an issue for blacks because they are outside of the system by default.

Whites also believe it is their right to be ignorant and indifferent, and latch onto this fiercely, even if their ignorance or indifference puts other people at risk.

This is evident in the election of Trump.

In essence white society skirts all social responsibility for the actions they have taken to cause this situation and condition in the black community.

Slavery never died, they just gave it invisible chains, lied to the white man that blacks are no good and dangerous by default, gave the white man a "bubble" to live in where he gets the best of everything by default.

Sure he still has troubles, so he can't understand why blacks complain so much--he doesn't see the alternate way that blacks get treated by default--and he doesn't want to understand.

They just complain. They don't work hard enough.

bob walks into the office and has a job interview.
jamal dodges drug dealers, police who are brain washed to come down on him hard because of his name and appearance , the evils of the streets all to apply to the job -- only to never get called back because his name was Jamal to begin with.


But uh...sure. We just make all these things up and absolutely nothing we say is true.

EmpirezTeam said:

Still a double standard.

There is none in this case, as Black people have not enslaved their own. That was the point of me mentioning we are not the same as Africans, who did enslave their own.

The point of me mentioning the differences in American slavery compared to everywhere else has to do with the fact that it wasn't simply slavery, it was the breaking down of a people out of pure hatred. That's where the double standard comes from, and there isn't anything wrong with recognizing the differences in the two.

Avidanimefan wrote:

Whites weren't enslaved.
Irish being enslaved is a myth they were just poor. This is rhetoric passed around by the alt right.

No, this is literally history. The Vikings took slaves in raids all the time, and Ireland was one of their favorite stalking grounds. So was eastern Europe, which is why the word "slave" derives from Slav.

In the colonial era, basically all the major powers practiced slavery. It was often used--for a fixed term or for life--as a punishment on all sorts of people because it was an excuse for cheap labor. Indentured servitude also worked out to be more or less the same thing. It didn't morph into the racial slavery seen in America until much later, and probably a lot of that was out of simplicity: if you figure everyone brown must be a slave, it's easier to track them down if one runs away.

The context of this discussion is slavery in the US, though, and I think the colonial era is relevant to that since it gave rise to slavery as it existed in the US. A lot of people in the South also descended from people who came over as slaves or indentured servants. By the time the Constitution was signed I doubt there were any more white slaves in the US, but that wasn't the case in the couple of centuries leading up to that.

Secondly, Jewish , Japanese, basically every group of people besides blacks got reparations. And where are they now?

The reparations you're referring to are basically the aftermath of WWII. In the case of the Jews the wounds were incredibly fresh, and there were both living victims and living perpetrators with clearly defined damages. I assume the Japanese reparations you mean are where President Reagan made reparations to Japanese Americans who'd been detained in internment camps--where again, this was in living memory and damages could still be reasonably assessed.

These cases are completely different.

Slavery hasn't existed legally in the US for over 150 years. While there are people alive who were affected by Jim Crow, they weren't put out of their homes or slaughtered en masse on the scale that was done to European Jews. Quantifying damages there is very difficult, and assessing blame is also very difficult.

Lastly, and most importantly -- whites did get a huge stepping stone. They came over and killed everyone here and took their land.

That's the biggest stepping stone of all.

It's entirely valid to point out that colonization of the Americas violently displaced a lot of native peoples. It's also entirely valid to point out those people did the very same to each other as it suited them. Which is no surprise, because they're human after all and that's how the human race rolls.

But if you look at people as individuals, as you should, there may be some people of old money or at least a long line of middle class who could reasonably be said to have benefited from said stepping stone, but there are also many who were born poor enough for none of that to matter for much. And if you say a poor white person still benefits in countless ways from the conquests of their ancestors (assuming their ancestors didn't come in a later wave of immigration), it's just as reasonable to say a poor black person has many of those same benefits of being born into a highly literate, prosperous country. Maybe not all the same benefits, because I'm sure there's still lingering prejudice to deal with, but the stepping stone argument still falls flat on its face.

Black people have only been "free" for 51 years give or take. And even as we are "free" we suffer from systematic and institutional racism.

The word you're looking for is "systemic", not "systematic". It's a common mistake when people parrot these same talking points.

If you want to define true freedom as the end of the segregation era and the Civil Rights Act, by all means. But that era was what was systemically and institutionally racist. Discrimination by race is now illegal across the land, which means wherever it still exists is because of pockets of prejudice and bigotry that haven't died out yet. In other words, racism is no longer systemic nor institutional. (Unless you want to discuss racial preferences in hiring and college admissions.) It's simply an unfortunate by-product of the history that got us to this point, and hopefully it will continue to evaporate with time.

This is not a debate, this is well documented fact by both numbers, law makers of the actual US government (even republican ones to my surprise) and much more.

Once again this is not a debate.

"This is not a debate" is a nice tidy way of shutting down discussion, but it's intellectually vapid at best and crassly dishonest at worst. When you insist racism is still institutional and systemic, that's a factual assertion you can't back up. Show me a law on the books in the US today that deliberately puts down a minority race.

I mean sure, you could blame the drug war for the ridiculously high rate of incarceration in this country and you could give it plenty of blame for the fact that black men are disproportionately affected. But those laws aren't intentionally racist, and to the extent that they have a racist result--why not push harder to get them changed?

Black people historically have been hounded, abused shot at and killed for being economically successful.

This is not a debate. This is fact.

To say it's a fact you would actually have to present a fact. Can you name someone who was hounded for their economic success in this way? You did use the word "historically", and going back to the bad old days I don't doubt there are many cases of that happening. But since by your definition black Americans had no true freedom until 51 years ago, can you name someone hounded in this way since the Civil Rights Act became law, and especially since the 1980s or so when that was a generation old? Can you name enough such someones to show a pattern?

And again, you don't get to say there's no debate. Submitting facts is part of the debate process. The whole point is to sway someone to your side. I'm not saying you're wrong about this being a fact, at least when looking at older history, but I am saying you should back it up.

During the reconstruction period of the post civil war era, white supremacists didn't just attack black people for no reason, they attacked the doctors, the lawyers, the business owners.

But that again was in the era just after emancipation, during the worst of the worst times post-slavery when white people were forced to get used to the idea of free black people, and a lot of slack-jawed dinosaurs couldn't wrap their walnut-sized brains around that concept. What like that has happened since the era of Dr. King? What has happened in modern day? You can't point to hate crimes perpetrated by racists well over a hundred years ago and use that as a basis on which to say racism even close to that magnitude is alive and well today.

They burned down black wall street--which was generating millions of dollars a week (yes even back then) around the world with a booming economy -- all to financially opress black people.

96 years ago, dude. 96. That's 45 years before the cutoff you yourself said. Also, Black Wall Street was a by-product of segregation. The race riot that burned it down was wrong; but so were the segregation laws that ultimately created it.

Yeah, this was racism at some of its worst and it was incredibly bad. And likely as not it happened because a bunch of poorer whites with a history of racism saw black men doing better than they were and couldn't accept it. It's 2017 now and we can all agree that's terrible. I pity the people who lost their livelihoods, and I pity the idiots who let envy and hate eat them alive until they lost all decency.

Also BTW, that's a good case for reparations; or it would have been at the time. Find who was responsible for instigating the riot, and some of the perpetrators, and you make them pay back the people they wronged. (I don't know if that ever did happen, to any extent. But assuming it didn't, it's way late now to do so.)

This is fact. It's not up for debate.

You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Whites aren't being punished for the sins of their fathers, in fact they aren't being punished at all. They still participate in social and economical oppression today.

Red Lining, segregation by defacto (aka showing up to a home you told was available only to be told it's not suddenly) and many, many other methods.

That's literally illegal. If you can prove it in court you'll own the whole block. I don't doubt that it happens anyway, but I also highly doubt that it happens systemically; rather I think that there are a few bad apples who try to get away with it and largely succeed. But every now and then you hear of a case where this kind of thing makes it to a jury and the jury tears someone a new one over it. Real estate agencies do not want that kind of liability--and more to the point, the good ones understand that all money is green and don't really give a crap who buys a house or where as long as they make a commission.

There are powerful legal and financial disincentives against racism. Are they powerful enough? I think that's a fair point for discussion. I also think if you can gather enough anecdotal evidence of it happening in certain places, it makes a fair case for changing the incentives even more. Harping on reparations and old history instead takes the focus completely off of modern-day abuses, and that's deeply unfortunate because it's the modern-day problems we can actually address!

This affects black people in every facet of their life. A black person with a credit score on part with a white person has to spend 2-10% more interest on bank related loans as an example.

Also highly illegal. See above.

Banks really, really hate these kinds of lawsuits, and their loan officers dislike prison. I bet this happens way less than the real estate thing, to the point of non-existence. Can you actually name a case where this happened in modern day, under current or nearly current financial law? Banks choose their interest rates based on mathematical formulae and dispassionate credit scores for precisely this reason. There are actual criminal penalties if a loan officer denies credit to someone who looks identical on paper to someone who got the same loan.

There is so much evidence that racism is systematic and purposeful, you can't readily look at any of it and dismiss it without being called a sane person.

Again, "systemic". And how can anyone look at said evidence when you haven't presented any? You're repeating arguments you heard from someone else, and they heard from someone else in turn, and so on eight steps removed from both the present discussion and Kevin Bacon. But you haven't actually demonstrated any of them, even anecdotally, except for old history.

So far the most compelling thing you've brought up at all was the Tulsa race riot of 1921. (That was actually a new one on me, so I was glad to learn of it.) That was a horrible event; it was also in the now-distant past. It's incredibly strong evidence of a huge problem with systemic and institutional racism at the time, especially since the neighborhood that was called Black Wall Street was a product of segregation. But it says nothing about what race relations are like today.

Wanting to avert your eyes is called cognitive dissonance. If you have to round every point back to something that caters to your point of view, you are suffering from cognitive dissonance.

Black people deserve reparations and it's been generations in the coming.

This juxtaposition was brought to us by our friendly neighborhood Irony Fairy.

Governments flooding our communities with drugs while keeping the drugs out of theirs are the cause for black crime rates --yet whites skirt that fact when they want to mention black on black crime.

Governments don't flood communities with drugs. Some might have have officials who are complicit (under bribe or threat) in their production and export, although you'll find most of those in South America. But no government in the world purposely floods any community with drugs, and none have been successful in keeping drugs out of any given community.

Drugs and the drug war have both had a disproportionately terrible impact on inner cities, and inner cities are disproportionately peopled by minorities due to past segregation. Those are both terrible things. The drug issue is worse there because of economic hopelessness, and if you want to tie it all back to racism I'm cool with that; I think you'd be right. Except the finger should point at the racists of several generations back who championed segregation. What's going on now is a very sad stain on human dignity, like toxic sludge decades after a bad pollution event; it doesn't prove the pollution is ongoing. And a big money transfer from one group to another is not going to clean it up, because money doesn't fix those things; work does.

Police imprisoning blacks at a higher rate--despite the fact that whites do more drugs and more addictive drugs than whites.

Agreed that this is terrible! There may be racial bias inherent in some of it, and a lot may also stem from the aforementioned problem that the drug war has simply had a bigger impact in minority communities. Instead of assuming bad intent on anyone's part, or assuming this is a result of current racism rather than the bad outcomes of past racism, let's talk about ways to fix this. Let's talk about ways to fix the justice system, to bring down incarceration rates safely, to put an end to overcharging and calling every little thing a felony, and to ensure everyone accused of a crime has a fair trial.

If there is racism still ongoing at the heart of that, everyone with half a conscience is on board with cleaning it up. So let's tackle that bear.

Perpetuating a false narrative about how you are a threat if you are a black male by default (because that's how police always treat it)

"Always" is a thick stereotype. And you're using the word "narrative" wrong; that would imply that there are lots of people outright pushing the notion that black males are a threat by default, which except for a few racist holdouts largely isn't true. One could make a much better case that there's a narrative saying that cops treat black males as threats by default; especially since you just said exactly that.

I'm not saying you're completely wrong about that or that it's a false narrative in total. I'm sure there are cops who do make such assumptions. You could probably make a good case that many more cops are not overtly racist but do tend to be more inclined to see some people as suspects. And I think it could also be said there are many, many police officers (including those who are themselves from minority groups) who are cognizant of this potential bias and try to avoid it.

None of these are up for debate, and in this day and age if you're still propagating these myths with alt-facts, then you owe it to yourself to get actually educated.

Again you're trying to shut down debate rather than present a case. That's not a healthy way to discuss anything.

The truth is while there is alot wrong with the black community, we don't get credit for the things we actually do, and a good 70% of what is perceived to be wrong is created, manufactured and engineered by whites who can never "see" the problem or even accept responsibility for their part in it.

Well heck, I can pull numbers out of my butt and point fingers, too. Responsibility stems from choices; neither one of us bears responsibility for the actions of others, only what we do ourselves. We can both point at forces that have pushed things into the state where they are, and a lot of those forces are historical.

But actually, I kind of agree with you that a lot of the current problem is manufactured; not all by white people, but by those who benefit from a bad status quo. Their motives are power rather than racism. There's money, and votes, in telling people in a bad situation that their problems are mostly someone else's fault. Seems to me that happened in Germany once...

And of course the idiot black people who just don't experience it--come take a trip down south where they look at you funny as soon as you step into a store (no matter how you dress)

Yeah, the South has a bad history and it still has a lot of nasty little cesspools where the racism hasn't evaporated yet. Everywhere else we agree that's bad, and hope to hasten the day when that kind of thing doesn't happen anymore.

But dude, why are you disparaging black people who don't experience significant racism as "idiots"? Sounds to me like they're in a good situation, and good for them--good for their communities! Maybe it'd help to take a look at how it got that way for them, and what forces helped drive back the racism that once existed all around them to the point where they hardly see any.

Or go to the bank to make a deposit and get the third degree about where you work and where you got the money from.

Also illegal. And there are probably a lot of other banks that'd be happy to take that deposit instead, without being racist asshats about it. Also probably news media who'd love to report on it.

Or get stopped by the police because you "looked like a suspect".

Happens to white people too, but I don't doubt you have a point there and that there are some lingering problems that explain it. That ties in with the whole thing about the justice system. Again, that's a problem that's ongoing and somewhat quantifiable and is something we can look for ways to tackle.

At the end of the day, reparations would fix exactly zero of the problems you mentioned. If anything they'd cause a lot of new racial animosity to spring up, when all everyone reasonable wants is for racism to go the heck away. The problems of economic despair in inner cities, of drug and gang crime disproportionately impacting minorities, of incarceration rates being sky-high especially among minorities, are all things that we would still need to face. They are not reasons for reparations but for staring these problems in the face and fixing them.