This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states “the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries”.
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That’s 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I’ve paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn’t this just a country that isn’t doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying “oh there’s this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling”?
Shouldn’t payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don’t flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
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Nations that were the source of slaves remain on the whole impoverished and underdeveloped.
Nations that were slavers still remain on the whole wealthy and highly developed.
This is not a coincidence, and there is a reasonable case to be made for reparations on these grounds.
The UKs position today is arguably due more to the Industrial Revolution and that was the main factor in the decay of slavery, so you need to balance historic grievances with development i.e. “what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Is it possible that other factors led to the countries being wealthy or impoverished, and this allowed the wealthy to colonise or take the impoverished as slaves?
For example?
I recommend the book “Guns, germs, and steel” if you’re interested. I’m not sure it covers this specifically, but it does cover in depth the reasons for different areas of the world being more of less wealthy (it has nothing to do with the people and everything to do with the geographic area, climate, natural resources including flora and fauna, and proximity to other populations).It’s an interesting read, even if a bit heavy.Edit: it turns out the book is a bit contentious: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views/#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22
I read it 10+ years ago. As I recall, its main point had to do with differences between Old World and New World populations.
Since Africa falls into the Old World along with Europe, I don’t think the book actually supports any conclusions about this topic.
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The industrial revolution for one.
Yes, and even accounting for those, wealthy countries that took slaves still hold an enormous amount of responsibility for what they did
The original OP argument is that those captors or slaves don’t exist anymore. Even the countries barely exist. Is this a matter of descendants being responsible for their ancestors crimes?
I think there’s a strong feedback loop argument here but I’m not sure that’s the point you’re making.
Do descendants have the same responsibility as their ancestors who actually owned slaves? No. But do they bear some ongoing responsibility as a benefactor of a system that was built around their ancestors owning slaves? Yeah they do.
All of this is incredibly messy, but approaching it at a governmental level is definitely something I support, because slavery was sanctioned and even encouraged by the government we’re talking about, which has existed continuously
That’s the feedback loop argument, right?
Some countries collonised others: crime of ancestor
But those countries used slaves and stole resources, making those countries wealthier. That wealth allowed them to develop better technologies, making them even wealthier.
So the argument is that while the original crime is not the responsibility of those alive today, the proceeds of crime should not be kept - they should be returned. In this case the proceeds are wealth, so a monetary reparation is appropriate.
Is my train of thought right? Because it seems to make sense to me.
Pretty much my take.
OPs position is based on the idea that the reparations are punitive, which they are not.
No one alive in England today was engaged in slaving, but everyone is the beneficiary of the practice.
Disclaimer that I’m not English and don’t particularly have a dog in this fight, and my opinions are a little mixed. On the one hand, I agree on the morality there, a lot of people were damaged in the very long term by slavery. But on the other, even if you can say that it’s an act to attempt to return the wealth to the wronged people, that doesn’t mean the wealth has simply been sitting there for nearly 200 years, waiting for return. That money has to come out of some budget, somewhere.
So where are they going to pull 18 trillion to give reparations from? Certainly, cuts will need to be made somewhere to make it happen, and often, those cuts are usually made along the lines of political agendas rather than things that are objectively bloated.
This is true. Also, remember that some African kingdoms were the sellers of slaves. Modern countries there are not direct analogs, and they don’t really have any money, but they deserve some of the blame.
Watch a video tour of the tourist sites of London. Or look what is in the imperial museum. Or the Victoria and Albert museum. The looted wealth of of their genocidal empire is still celebrated as a national treasure. India still has not recovered from British occupation, which only officially ended 75 years ago. And that’s like 20% of the entire current human population.
My comment is not about the validity of reparations. It was a direct reply to the one above it, which seemed to imply that reparations are because of the actions of past people, when in my view it’s about the proceeds of the crimes rather than the crimes themselves.
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I think they can and should be separated.
If they are not, then you are saying that you are making people responsible for a crime that was committed well before they were born.
By separating the crime from the proceeds, you can justify why reparations should be paid, without the defense of the crime being committed by someone else.
Guns?
Yes, definitely. But why they had guns is also another question. I recommend the book “Gun, germs, and steel” as a great look into how and why different populations formed as they did.Edit: it turns out the book is a bit contentious: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views/#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22
Exactly. If anything, this amount of money is way too small.
Occasionally we read a news story about someone who escaped a maniac that kept them locked up for years, forcing them to work and do depraved things for little or no pay. We rightfully think this is terrible and the criminal is inhuman.
Slavery was millions of people in that situation for their entire lives. Whole economies were based on this genocide. We put Nazis to death for genocide. We put other leader on trial for similar crimes. Paying this tiny fine is the least the British (and other European governments) can do. The amount they really owe would bankrupt them.
What amount of money would you exchange for measurably worse lives (education, health, jobs) for you, your family, and everyone who looks like you for generations?
there is a reasonable case to be made for reparations on these grounds.
What’s the reasonable case
That the wealth they still enjoy was largely stolen. Especially when you add colonialism.
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This is so false, slavery was wide practice in Africa already, the “slaving countrys” just bought them for the most part…
Yeah it existed as a practice. The big slave markets and infrastructure was not there until the North American slave trade opened up.
Simply not correct at all. Look up the trans Saharan slave trade. It was absolutely enormous business before the Portuguese sailed down the West Coast of Africa.
Lol why is that comment you’re replying to so upvoted, people just like what they want to hear.
Uhh okay. You’re talking about dozens or hundred people or so at a time, thousands of people per year, mostly prisoners of war, traded domestically, deported over a period of 1,700 years.
And it still not half as many slaves as were deported across the Atlantic in only 350 years. Millions of slaves died on the voyage. They built vast trading routes and employed slavers as a business model, building customized ships to transport 600 slaves at a time.
Apples and oranges.
You have a profound misunderstanding of the trans Saharan slave trade. Over centuries it resulted in millions of West African slaves being transported into and through the Arab world. This may not even have been the most significant source of slaves out of Africa during the pre-European colonial period. It is highly likely that more slaves came from Central and East Africa via Zanzibar. Millions upon millions of slaves being extracted from Africa before the Portuguese arrived. I’m not saying that what Europe did was even remotely reasonable. Just understand that we didn’t invent slavery, we didn’t start up slavery in Africa out of nowhere. It doesn’t excuse us. But we’re not uniquely evil either.
I don’t see the misunderstanding.
And? Thats not exactly question…
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Between 1500 and 1865, more than 80% of enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas by European slave traders.
I’ve never seen an exact number ascribed to it, any chance you have a source?
Very nice, thanks!
Uh… Yes Traders. They bought them in Africa and shipped them to America.
What are you trying to say?
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What do you think an enormous demand for slaves, as the colonial nations building plantations and mines in the americas, does to a the supply of slaves? Supply and demand, friend. It’s not as if all the enslaved people exported to the Americas were already in circulation when the europeans came knocking
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I can’t think of a single ethical framework that considers having someone else do your dirty work as permissible. If you have zero agency, sure. If you have nearly all the agency, like the colonial powers, no. The colonial powers threatened to topple governments that restricted slave trade, like the Kongo.
I’ve never said that it was a good or acceptable thing, im just very very opposed to the idea of reparations for such things.
This argument is based on the idea that buying ill-gotten water is equivalent to buying people
What’s your point?
“I’m going to take these slaves and exploit them because if I don’t someone else will”
I’m not sure if you are an ignorant apologist or outright racist but it feels important to comment on this given the number of uovotes this post is receiving. From an article from Slate I will link below:
"But, as historian Marcus Rediker writes, the “ancient and widely accepted institution” of enslavement in Africa was exacerbated by the European presence. Yes, European slave traders entered “preexisting circuits of exchange” when they arrived in the 16th century. But European demand changed the shape of this market, strengthening enslavers and ensuring that more and more people would be carried away. “[European] slave-ship captains wanted to deal with ruling groups and strong leaders, people who could command labor resources and deliver the ‘goods,’ ” Rediker writes, and European money and technology further empowered those who were already dominant, encouraging them to enslave greater numbers. Both the social structures and infrastructure that enabled African systems of enslavement were strengthened by the transatlantic slave trade.
AdvertisementBottom line: Why should this matter? This is a classic “two wrongs make a right” ethical proposition. Even if Africans (or Arabs, or Jews) colluded in the slave trade, should white Americans be entitled to do whatever they pleased with the people who were unlucky enough to fall victim?"
Nope, they deliberately made it so that the populations of African countries can easily be enslaved.
Here’s a way to think of it:
If I steal all of your money and invest it to grow over time then I’ll end up with even more money while you don’t benefit from the growth that should have been yours. Now we have children and pass on our wealth. You pass on less because it was stolen, and I pass on more because of what I stole. This multiplies over the generations and a disparity is maintained. My offspring will have better educations and better opportunities because of the wealth they had access to, and yours will have fewer opportunities because you don’t have the money to spend on them.
The goal of reparations is to attempt to correct some of this disparity. It tries to provide opportunities for people who don’t have it but would have if something in the past weren’t stolen.
For an example that’s easy to see: In the US, black people are less likely to know how to swim. This has nothing to do with them being black, but what opportunities they had access to. This is for many reasons. One part of it is that most places had community pools, but they had restrictions for people of color. When this was outlawed, they instead just closed the pools or added memberships that required payment.
People also built up wealth over time through property, but black people were prevented from getting loans to buy property except in redlined places. This prevented them from building up generational wealth like white people were allowed to do. (This is ignoring the whole slavery thing…) It causes ripples through time where their children have less opportunities, which then causes their children to have fewer, and so on.
The problem I have with this viewpoint is this.
Where does it start and where does it end?
World history is full of atrocities, crimes, war etc.
Additionally, many of the things which we now consider atrocity or crime might not even have been one in the past.
Fabricating such artificial claims is the same as Putin is doing by using the history book for creating claims on Ucraine.
This has always been an issue I get stuck on. If we hold current people liable for the crimes of their ancestors, how far back do we go?
The trans-atlantic slave trade was abhorrent, but slavery didn’t begin or end with it.
Do Egyptians owe Jews reperations due to how they were treated? Should the Italians compensate half of Europe and North Africa for what the Romans did? Should Arab nations pay the UK and Ireland for the people kidnapped by the Barbary Pirates?
The Ottomans were still keeping slaves until the early 1900s, long after the western European powers had ended the practice, why aren’t we seeing calls for reperations from Turkey to Slavic nations?
we go as for back as needed to achieve a somewhat just society.
Let’s take your example of the Jews in Egypt (other than the fact that the source for Jewish slavery in Egypt is just religious texts without any archeological evidence ever found): is there some great opportunity divide between an Egyptian and an Israeli? no, so we obviously don’t need to worry about that.
or for the Ottoman-Slavic question: do Slavic peoples have less opportunity than those of modern day Turkey? no, so we don’t need to worry about that.
and yes, Italians (and many other parts of Europe) do send different types of aid to Africa for these reasons
Do Black people in the USA have massive opportunity differences in comparison to the WASP population? yes, they do, thus it is right to conduct these reparations. You may not be the only people to have committed slavery, but you sure still wear it proudly, and you are still a deeply systemically racist nation.
TLDR: it’s not about revenge, but righting wrongs.
You seem to be operating under the assumption I’m American, I’m not.
none of these targets Americans, you can make the exact same arguments for England and their colonial holdings (the thing OP was referring to), to Russia and the rest of the Soviet, or Russia and the rest of Russia, etc…
Even currently in some rich Middle East countries, there are technically slave workers - construction & household to name 2.
Exactly, maybe we should worry more about ending it now than what happened two centuries ago.
We can do more than one thing at once.
this is why the slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy
“if we punish people for murder, what about self defense?”
or
“if we arrest people for selling meth, it’ll end up making the state arrest people who drink coffee”
you can legislate for a specific instance and not have it spiral out of control into insanity.
Maybe some people would try to seek reparations for ridiculous stuff. It’s exactly the purview of the law, politics and diplomacy to navigate that.
This isn’t a slippery slope fallacy. Nobody’s saying “if we let the gays marry the next thing that will happen is people will want to marry animals!”
What people are saying is, okay if this is being done in the interest of fairness, who else needs considered, and is it practical to consider them? Are we ever actually going to be able to achieve something close to fair?
In the US a great example in this discussion is native Americans. Do they get more or less for having their entire society destroyed, land confiscated, being driven on death marches to far away land, repeated treaty violations, decimated by smallpox, and many of the other tournaments?
I have native American, German, and Scottish ancestors that never owned a slave. I don’t have “African”, Irish, or “Asian” ancestors.
Do I get a check, do I get excluded, or do I pay for the sins of someone else’s forefathers? And then because… despite all the struggles my ancestors endured themselves, I lived in a country that’s trying to reconcile past sins of slavery they had nothing to do with directly (and hopefully were opposed to)?
Fact of the matter is, native americans suffered horribly, they just don’t exist in any kind of numbers to make a stink about it, and many of them bred into the white population.
We’re never going to get to “even” and we seriously need to consider if more unfair government wealth distribution is the solution to previous unfair government wealth distribution.
Hell I’m a full on Democrat and I strongly believe this will only make race relations worse. Like by a factor of 100 if they did that here. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and there’s no way sufficient time money and resources will be spent to actually make anything resembling fair happen here or in the US; you can’t do that when you’re trying to score political points.
Governments should be trying to help people from where they are now, not trying to reverse history and retroactively remedy history spread across hundreds of years.
Well considering the last slave (coerced labor) was freed in the 1940s, it’s still extremely recent. These are people’s grandparents and great-grandparents. The velocity of money is very real.
Honestly, it should never stop. There should be wealth, inheritance, and estate taxes that even out advantages and disadvantages over time. Poor people shouldn’t be paying for it because of their race, rich people should because of their advantages.
This is just communism. Distribute wealth until everyone is equal. You don’t even need to bring race into the equation to achieve the same results as being proposed here.
This is not communism.
Communism wouldn’t even have a need for money, so distributing wealth wouldn’t exist.
This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.
This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.
The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.
Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.
For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.
This is how I tend to view it too. We should be raising all poor people up and target wealth equality for everyone, regardless how they got there. I suppose reparations to POC would be a step in that direction but it by nature excludes people who might need help now. Idk, it’s a hard subject for me to form a solid opinion on too but I think social safety nets need to be prioritized for all.
sure, but now you are a godless commie who hates America.
Meh, fuck the people who think that. They don’t contribute to a healthy, functioning society
That’s what it always boils down to, which is why I am now actually a communist.
I don’t know who implied paying it would be based on race. It should be based on class. Rich people are rich because they had advantages and exploited people. They should be taxed and the money should be used to raise up people who weren’t as advantaged or exploitative.
That’s not reparations for slavery, then. That’s just redistribution.
The entire concept of reparations for slavery is that non-black people will be forced to pay black people money, either as a one time lump-sum payment, or an open-ended pseudo-UBI. Some suggestions include mandated documentation of ancestral slabery, but the most popular ones don’t. The vehicle for this payment would be either increased taxes, or redirection of taxes.
If you’re not talking about race-based redistribution of wealth, you’re not talking about ‘reparations,’ which is what this thread is about.
There were families that made Bezos-class money at the height of slavery, and those families’ descendants are still rich today.
At the very least, these families shouldn’t be anonymously rich, they should be infamously rich, notoriously so. Even if a truth-and-reconciliation process is ‘too much’, let us at least have the truth out, and loud.
That’s not a reparations issue, it’s an unfuck the cities that were fucked by Robert Moses and his buddies as well as funding public schools better, making hospitals public instead of privately owned, and changing the punitive justice system to a proper rehabilitation justice system.
Otherwise you’ll just see short term happiness and provide arguments for “we’re equal now, we paid reparations! What else do you want?”
I’d say both are required, and also reparations should never end. The rich should be taxed for their advantages and exploitation and money should be used to help raise poor people up. The problem can never be fixed. There will always be advantaged and disadvantaged people and exploiters and exploited people. Implying it should be a one time payment for a one time thing I think is missing what is trying to be solved.
I don’t know. Plenty if other groups arrived much later in western countries, often with little or nothing to their names and feeling persecution, and have done much much better.
I’ll give you that the specter of discrimination still haunted western institutions until quite recently. But blacks were not the only group that faced discrimination.
I am not black or white. I can offer a perspective of an immigrant who isn’t white. Looking at how blacks were targeted for arrests and the disproportionate amount of arrests while being brought up in economically challenging environments, it is very hard to “move up”.
I immigrated to a western country with qualifications and with a good sum in my bank account and still it was challenging. I cannot imagine how generational oppression will do to a persons psyche and their worldview.
I used black people as an example, not to say they’re the only group, because it’s obvious to see. Literally everyone has been exploited by the rich.
This is also why affirmative hiring and admission isn’t “racist against white people” as people see it as. It’s actually leveling the playing field.
Before implementing things like affirmative action or reparations, do any of us have any idea in mind for when reparations will be done making things “fair”? Or is the intent to have it go on forever? I’ve never heard this argument before and I’ve never heard of anyone having a set date for the end of affirmative action and the like, so it sounds like a slippery slope to future discrimination. This is probably what at least some of the “racist against white people” (and asian people) crowd are complaining about. I know I would be miffed if I lost an academic or career position to an objectively lower quality candidate due to something like government mandated diversity, regardless of how much I support civil rights. Obviously, ideally, everyone should have equal access to these opportunities and no one should be unable to get the education they want but that isn’t the kind of world we live in (at least in the USA).
Also, why can’t there be other ways to level the playing field in terms of environment, such as funding better schooling or housing for disparaged individuals, regardless of race? Despite black people having to fight an uphill battle in life, these things that uplift across the board without racial or ethnic discrimination would naturally end up helping them out more than others before leveling out as equality is achieved. The only problem, as always, is the bureaucracy involved.
A program that white people are excluded from isn’t racist?
The argument goes, as a British citizen, you have and continue to benefit from policies that your government made a long time ago. Reparations are not a tax on you, but an expense the government should have paid at the time of the work, but instead it did things like kidnap people from their homes, transport them to where labor was necessary, and force them into work. Now, the people who are the descendents of the kidnapped folks are requesting that the bills their great great grandparents were never paid. To extend that, after slavery ended, many of those who had been enslaved were left disenfranchised, and impoverished to the point that there is almost no possibility of building generational wealth.
As for if this will open the floodgates or not, who knows. An argument could be made in both directions, it’s not as though governments paying one time sums to places is rare, and reparations for wars used to be pretty run of the mill.
I like this answer a lot. Objective, doesn’t answer what it doesn’t know for certain and gives context.
The “floodgates” component of the question is the “slippery slope” logical fallacy.
Consider the present claim in isolation, not its relevance to other claims.
It is not a fallacy to consider it might encourage other claims. If I am in a classroom and I accept to give someone candy publicly, do you think everyone nearby will not be MORE tempted to ask too, compared to whether if I said no?
In both cases, asking costs almost nothing compared to the potential gains.
it might encourage other claims
… which would be considered on their respective merits.
Imagine you’re running a very long relay race. Just after the race starts, members of the other team jump out of the bushes, beat up your runner and tie them up. This happens for several laps until someone decides that this is probably bad so they stop beating and restraining you. But the race doesn’t stop and the positions aren’t reset, but the other team is like 20 laps ahead and allowed to finish. Is that fair?
Reparations would theoretically allow your team to catch up but former slaves and their descendants have never been allowed that. What’s more, in the UK, former slave owners were paid for the inconvenience of no longer owning slaves (edit: up until 2015!!!) while the former slaves got to continue living as second-class citizens for a while.
Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn’t work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth, advanced infrastructure and old laws that specifically aim to disadvantage black people (whether they were abolished or still on the books the effects are still felt). Imagine your great-granddad was able to build up a fortune, how likely would it be that your family would still be rich? Imagine your great-granddad lost every cent, how likely would it be that your family would be still poor? Sure, it’s possible that situations drastically over time but that’s the exception and not the rule. There are reasons why things are the way they are.
I believe that reparations should not be any lump sum of money but in the form of education, investment opportunities, resources and infrastructure. That way all persons living in former slave countries can benefit and pass those benefits down to their descendants.
Edit: I believe that up to last year Barbados went after Richard Drax for reparations due to his family’s direct involvement in slavery in that country. I don’t know how successful that was, but I support it.
Your analogy and argument is very well organized so I wonder how you think universal basic income could mitigate the negative impacts of generational wealth/poverty? In my mind, it is part of a solution to many social issues but I’m still learning. I know there are arguments that capitalism will just buffer against any implementation but I’m still forming my opinions.
Thanks, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time since it was a big discussion topic in my circle for a while.
I haven’t given the same level of thought to universal basic income, but I guess it would be a start. What people really need is a way to not only survive but to build wealth and pass that wealth on to their descendants. Like I said in my previous comment, education, investment opportunities, infrastructure upgrades, etc. will go a long way towards that goal. In my mind, a universal income could be a part of that but not the whole solution. And yes capitalism will find a way to ruin it but we can always hope.
Another part in my mind would be estate taxes. If generational wealth wasn’t as impactful on our lives then UBI could serve a bigger purpose. If the playing field were more level for everyone, then hate or fear couldn’t errode it as easily. It’s not something we can see in a lifetime, but I hope that I can see us aiming at a useful target while I am still around.
I think UBI could help with the problem. It won’t be solved without other things though. If we pay for UBI by increase estate and inheritance taxes, that could go a long way. Basically make it so generational wealth slowly decreases over time. Obviously it’ll never be zero, because education, social connections, and things are also generational wealth, but it’d be an improvement to the way things are.
Basically, it’s not fair that someone is rich because their parents were rich and someone is poor because their parents were poor. The rich person should be less rich and the poor person should be less poor (on average).
Hell, this is the best and most comprehensive argument for the generational debt we as the global north and winners of colonialism owe the global south I’ve ever read.
I’ll definitely use this analogy whenever this issue comes up in my peer group.
Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn’t work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth
In addition to that, slavery was never ‘abolished’. Just go take a quick look into the mining or cocoa industry.
So, can the Slavic countries claim payments of reparations from the formerly known ottoman empire? Perhaps Jewish people from Asia? Surely the Christians from the Arabs, and the Arabs from the Christians? Not to mention Vietnam from China, or entire Europe from the decendants of the Roman empire.
Or are all of those instances somehow different?
History is full of misery and trying to pay to make amends for somebody else’s actions, today, feels ridiculous. Just as OP, I don’t get it.
I can’t wait for my cheques from Scandinavian countries for the Viking invasions, Italy for the Roman occupation, France for the Normandy conquerers, etc!
Also your caveman ancestor punched my caveman ancestor so I’m expecting a payment from you too
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You’re in a community called ‘no stupid questions’ and your response to a question is ‘what a stupid question’? Good work
Slaveholders got to build wealth off the free labor of slaves. When they died, that wealth didn’t disappear. It was passed down to the next generation. The descendants of slave holders are better off financially than the descendants of slaves because of that accumulated wealth. The descendants of slave holders should pay back the wealth they now own to the people it was stolen from.
But tax-based reparations will mostly be paid out from normal proletariat with little to no capital ownership.
Which is just because not only those that profited from slavery paid taxes on those profits which improved the lives of all those who lived under the same state, they also individually used those profits in philanthropic projects (schools, hospitals, poor houses) that have benefited the public as well. On top of all these, just the injection of wealth that stemmed from slavery and other exploitative practices into the economies of these countries that practiced them had a positive effect on the growth of those economies the benefits of which (lower unemployment, higher incomes etc.) being reaped by the general public.
All of these have a compounding effect that positively affects the lives of the people living in that place (wherever that is) in the current times so even though they don’t own slaves now or their ancestors have never been part of the slave trade it is fair that they should be a part of paying reparations.
Party A is enslaved by party B. Party B dies and leaves his wealth to party C, who dies and leaves his wealth to … party F. Party A dies and leaves his lack of wealth to … party K. Party F uses the empire built off of his wealth to sell things to party K and some random other party L. Is party L responsible for compensating party K for party B’s exploitation of party A?
Aka tax the rich, were all slaves on a spectrum
Lmao as if I am seeing any of that wealth.
There was substantial indentured labour and serfdom in England too. Surely simple redistributive tax based on wealth is fairer?
Anyway how do you determine whos ancestors had slaves, or weren’t involved, or were slaves? You want to start tracing bloodlines?! Should the English pay the Irish?
You’re welcome to look at my bank statements. If you can find £569,000 that I can pay someone without going bankrupt then I’d be most surprised.
Group A was wronged by entity B. Group A goes to court to seek restitution from entity B. Courts rule that entity B did in fact cause damages to group A and must be held liable.
That’s all reparations are. Entity B is your government. It’s the same legal entity as it was 190 years ago, regardless of the composition of the population it represents. If a group was wronged by their government, this is their only means to legal restitution. Unfortunately since the primary form of income for some governments is taxation, it means people complain about paying for things when that’s not exactly what’s happening.
The alternative is to say that if a government “runs out the clock” and is able to avoid responsibility until the population turns over, then they can no longer be held liable for anything they did prior to that point. That’s not a very good position, in my opinion.
If entity A is the UK and entity B is those hunted and sold to slavery by entity C, why does A have to pay C for stealing labour from B? Compensate B for stolen work and damages.
Because of supply and demand. The transatlantic slave trade created demand for slaves much higher than what existed before that point. That creates an environment where being a slaver is rewarded, and therefore not being a slaver was punished. If, for example, a republican billionaire says “I’ll give 10000$ to anyone who kills a democrat” they can’t just claim they’re innocent when democrat death rates go through the roof.
That creates an environment where being a slaver is rewarded, and therefore not being a slaver was punished.
Idk about this line of reasoning. One thing being rewarded doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of the thing is punished. An olympic race has a winner and the winner is rewarded with a medal, but the losers aren’t typically punished, they simply “aren’t rewarded.” It isn’t like you get put in the boo box for coming in 4th, and I wasn’t there but I doubt they put anyone in the boo box (or any “punishment”) for being “a doctor not a slaver.” (Dammit Jim. Couldn’t resist.) At best some slaver dad got mad his kid wanted to be a composer instead of take up the family slaving business, but what else is new?
They have a warped view of supply and demand.
That’s true in general, but we’re talking geopolitics here. States that participated in the slave trade would conquer their neighbors and sell them as slaves. That’s the punishment I was talking about.
Yes, a lucrative market for a hideous crime was created, and the guys who hunted other groups in order to get paid in that market wronged the enslaved too. (I’m not sure it was all like this all over Africa too, but e.g. in the Congo, it seemed to be the case)
PS: and about the 10000£ bounty analogy: if there is proof that some dude killed because of an illegal bounty, they certainly are not going to be compensated for being “tricked” into killing, wtf?
Yes, but the thing is: The states that actually sold slaves basically don’t exist anymore thanks to colonialism, and even those that still do lost any wealth they had to colonialism. Can’t really accumulate generational wealth when you’re busy farming rubbers or whatever for your colonial overlords.
Yea, colonialism is yet another compensation for yet another historic crime (invasion, to start with) But, I think all this is going to be peanuts compared to compensation for global warming, this one is going to break every bank and nobody can agree on anything…it’s like these debates times 1000.
I have no idea why you made that idiotic comment about Republicans considering the involvement if Democrats in slavery.
I understand what Britain did was wrong and requires corrective measures, but personally I just think financial reparation is not a very bright idea. For
- How do you ensure the money actually goes to victims in foreign countries
- If its given to their govts, what assurances UK has it’ll be used to improvement of victim’s life
- It can very well be used to fill the pockets of rich politician
- Even if ignoring all three, UK gets money in hand of ech victim personally, still doesn’t help the fundamental problem of marginalised community, money will run out so far in their hands, they’ll have no real impact.
I my opinion a 100 fully paid scholarships to university specifically for victims is a way better way to help them then just handing cash.
Now explain how you came up with 100 as a good number of scholarships before defining the word “victim” to not apply to anyone currently alive.
(Pssst, he “came up with it” by “forgetting the % sign.” Read it again.)
Lol someone downvoted but you’re right, he obviously forgot the % sign. That comment is downvoted too even though it’s entirely reasonable. Fucking commies on here.
The guy literally said he meant 1000. Either he misspelled twice, or… you’re wrong.
One I meant to say 1000 and two I meant to give a random number not a speicifc number. I’m not qualified enough to do that kind of assessment. But handing cash to solve one particular injustice rarely solves problems across the world.
Also defining victim would be a bigger Challange as well. I’m not saying I have all the solution, I’m just saying giving scholarships of value of whatever amt smarter people have agreed is what UK should pay for their past, is objectivly better than handing out cash.
It’s not intended to be punitive. The idea is that slavery generated a massive amount of wealth for slave owning economies that left us richer and the descendants of slaves poorer. Think of it as being the child of a crime boss. You haven’t committed any crimes but the hosue you live in and the school that gave you the education to get ahead were paid for with dirty money. The idea is fair, but just not likely to ever happen. I think the point is more so to make people recognize the problem so that more is done to catch up the people on the wrong end of the generational wealth spectrum
This.
OP is correct in the statement that any person alive has not been alive to either own slaves or be slaves. But that’s not the point of reparations.
The point is that you have and continue to benefit from the times when slaves were legally permitted. It might not seem like it, and maybe someone along the line blew a bunch of that money on booze and gambling… But someone you are related to, and by proxy you are benefiting from the proceeds of slavery.
By extension, all of those proceeds from the work that slaves performed was robbed from them by their masters. Making most of the slaves insanely poor while the former masters were able to keep the money those slaves earned for them. So they started from nothing. Sure, they were “free” to some variation of free (not sure all the racism made it feel like much of a change)… Fact is, they started at zero, at a time when most established families were sitting pretty.
After all this time… There’s interest.
I don’t know where they got these numbers and I haven’t looked into it all that closely, but it doesn’t seem too unreasonable given all of that.
That kids or later generations are liable for past crimes or wrong doings (by todays standards!!!) is not fair and it is no justice.
In German it is called Sippenhaftung and was even used by the Nazis.
I think you missed my point. This is not about punishing white people, it’s about getting the victims caught up.
by your logic, if someone stole something, have it to his brother and then got caught, having the brother give back the stolen goods is something Nazis would have done.
But this isn’t Sippenhaftung, also known as gilt by association in English, this is a societal thing, you, even if your great great gandpappy didn’t himself own slaves, the society is still at fault and needs to right the wrongs done to a whole ethnic group
by your logic, if someone stole something, have it to his brother and then got caught, having the brother give back the stolen goods is something Nazis would have done.
According to Sippenhaftung the Nazis would probably have shot the thieve, his brother, their parents, other family members and burned down their houses.
In case of societies you mean collective liability then?
The society in question (which exactly?) of today is not the same compared to the society of the past. How can it be at fault?
look, YOU are the person framing this as some form of individually targeted thing.
as for the idea that the society is different, how can it be at fault? because the foundations of the society we have now are built on these injustices, to go back to the earlier example, “look, you can’t take the stolen stuff back from the thief, he’s a different person 10 years later”
Britain paid reparations to the slaveowners and their descendants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837
The last check went out in 2015. So yes, people alive today benefited from this. directly.
If they want to make it fair, they should pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved people and/or take back the money they gave to slaveowners.Wait, Britain was compensating the descents of slave owners for the loss of their slaves less than ten years ago? Wtf?
Yup. From the article:
Payments of the bonds to the descendants of creditors was only finalised in 2015 when the British Government decided to modernise the gilt portfolio by redeeming all remaining undated gilts.
Since 2018, numerous Freedom of Information Act requests have been sent to the British government and Bank of England for the names of those who were paid with the bonds, of which all were denied.
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Because those people will spend it poorly. And that’s not entirely their fault. They don’t know any better.
I wouldn’t say poorly, if your kids need a few new things for school, is that money really spent poorly? Most people know better, but they can’t spend it on anything else, than the things they need at the moment. You can’t save/invest money if you are starving.
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It is so weird to me you can somewhat accurately describe the issues that still exist today related to slavery and then just “but I don’t think we should give em the money because they probably wouldn’t spend it responsibly”. What a wild assumption. Why don’t we let the descendents of slaves have the money and figure out what to do with it instead of taking the attitude of “we know how to spend it better than they do so we should keep it and just fix things ourselves”? Do you really think that they wouldn’t have the desire to invest it in things like education and lifting up their communities?
Hopefully what they meant is giving relatively disadvantaged people some cash doesn’t really help. In other words, nothing to do with race specifically.
There’s a decent body of research indicating cash transfers actually are as effective as in-kind charity (often found to be even more efficient). With more recently neuance being added hinting at when one or the other is better at achieving long-term benefits. This is the basis behind charities like Give Directly. If you’re interested in some background:
Randomized trial of cash compared to food welfare in Mexico: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.6.2.195
OECD counties comparing cash transfers to expanded childcare and education: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/money-or-kindergarten-distributive-effects-of-cash-versus-in-kind-family-transfers-for-young-children_5k92vxbgpmnt-en#page5
India based comparison, noting the effectiveness and perception of the in-kind charity impacts long term results (e.g. social stigma of receiving food charity): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919214000499
Any assumption that direct cash payments will be misspent as a reason to prefer in-kind welfare isn’t justified IMO. Benefits are fungible. Any money saved on food / childcare / whatever will be respent either efficiently (or not) in similar proportions to the direct money welfare… But administrative costs and externalities with in-kind transfers tend to make them less efficient on average.
I don’t really agree with that either. Organized collective spending would be better but giving people some cash does generally help. For every one person that would use it irresponsibly there are 100 people that would just pay bills and buy essentials, and that is helpful.
I don’t really agree with that either.
That’s just a normal disagreement, though. Right?
giving people some cash does generally help.
Maybe. I wouldn’t personally argue it doesn’t help at all, but I also don’t feel like it’s that likely to be the most effective use of resources. I don’t have any issue with that approach in principle, just to be clear. I’m 100% in favor of whatever approach does the most good.
Idk what you mean by normal disagreement, but I have no intention of being hostile about this if that is what you mean?
This is kinda my overall point: worrying too much about the money being used “correctly” or “efficiently” above all else is a misdirection to keep the debate stagnated, and keep the issue of actually making reparations indefinitely in the future. The conversation of how the money can/will/should be spent isn’t a conversation that the countries that got rich off of slavery should be having, it is a discussion that the descendants of slaves should be having. Trying to make the decisions for them is just more of the same fucked up “we should be in charge of them for their own good” mentality.
Idk what you mean by normal disagreement, but I have no intention of being hostile about this if that is what you mean?
Ah, that’s not what I meant. Sorry for not being clear. I was referring to where you originally said:
It is so weird to me you can somewhat accurately describe the issues that still exist today related to slavery and then just “but I don’t think we should give em the money because they probably wouldn’t spend it responsibly”.
If the parent post was talking about “those people” as in a specific race, then the problem would be that person was being racist. So calling out a post for racist statements or overtones is different from just a normal disagreement about the best way to accomplish something. See what I mean?
quick edit:
worrying too much about the money being used “correctly” or “efficiently” above all else is a misdirection to keep the debate stagnated
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” — I agree. I think we should try to identify the best way to use resources to help most effectively, but certainly not to the extent we’re just paralyzed and don’t do anything.
Hmm… An argument could possibly be made that that was some sort of racism, but it probably would be subconscious, unintentional, “supporting the system” kindof racism. In my experience, trying to call that out as racism directly just gets people all worked up arguing about what defines racism, and it is better to just try and make direct arguments about the topic at hand than open that can of worms every time.
Obviously this isn’t a very consistent rule, just a general thing I’ve noticed. Many times calling something out as racism is necessary for the conversation to be productive.
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Thats an overgeneralization. Some white peoples were enslaved while not all black peoples were slaves. The question is more complex than presented.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and let you know that white people were indentured servants. While the conditions were just as bad as the slaves, indentured servitude was for a finite amount of time, while slavery was for life. This allowed the white people a chance to rebuild wealth and their children did not have to experience their parents’ conditions. Slaves never had that chance.
It depends on country. There were countries where indentured servitude was for entire life, except for cases when a landlord freed a serf or a serf bought own freedom. Landlords could buy, sell and judge serfs. Example: Russian Empire, where serfs had no rights.
I thought we were talking about the Transatlantic slave trade in the Americas?
Somehow it turned into blacks vs whites, which is not ok for me.
There were multi-generation serfs and indentured labour in the British isles. There were also slaves taken from the isles, though a very long time before then.
Let’s say that 5 generations ago, your great-great-great grandfather had a farm. It was highly productive and had a great location.
Let’s say that my great-great-great grandfather went to the local government and paid bribes and maybe did some light killing and stole that farm. No matter who your g-g-g grandfather talked to, they all pointed to the new deed and told him to suck eggs. Your g-g-g grandfather fell into despair and poverty. His children grew up poor but also worked hard and climbed up the wealth ladder a little. So too did their children, and so on, until your generation. Let’s say you’re lower middle class or so. No generational wealth to speak of but not in poverty.
Meanwhile my family has developed that farmland, partitioned it and sold or leased pieces of it for business and industry. We have phenomenal generational wealth all built on that initial theft of land.
But hey, you never had land stolen directly from you, and I never directly stole the land. Everyone in the area knows exactly what happened. Everyone in the area knows that my generational wealth is built on theft. Nowadays everyone talks openly about it, including me.
Now, from the outside looking in, I say that the absolutely morally right thing to do is restore the ownership of the land to the descendants of the person who owned it. But from the inside, the living descendants of the thief say hey, WE didn’t steal the land. We just benefit every day from the original theft. Why should we do anything to make amends for that theft, which we don’t dispute but don’t want to be accountable for either.
Okay, and how about the millions of other people whose ancestors never did or had any of that? Of the families that benefitted, some of them are still rich and powerful, those are the ones that should be looked at, not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.
Reparations are just getting the proletariat to cover the bourgeoisie’s bills, as usual. If you really want to make things right, you should trace capital ownership to those currently actually profiting from slavery.
I do genealogy and so I know that my g-g-g-grandfather had to give up farm labouring during the first decades of the British Empire and move to the Bermondsey slums, where he worked as a tanner. If you know anything about historical tanning, you know that this sucked. He was screwed over by the infiux of cheap food from the Empire and our family is part of the underclass to this day.
The thing is, we still live in a rich country because of that. My parents and grandparents and their parents did. We’ve still had access to education and free healthcare and all that shit. We still had access to all that cheap shit that we robbed the rest of the world for.
So yeah, we owe those people’s descendents like it or not. Plus, considering that yes, we were repaying the descendants of slaveowners until just a few years ago, and paying off our Marshall Plan debts etc until very recently, I’m not too fussed if the government of my country pays its debts.
I mean, if you agree that descendants of people who benefitted from enslaving others owe the descendants of those enslaved people compensation of some sort, then I think we agree. The remaining questions are how to identify members of each group and how to accomplish the transfers. That’s law and policy. Not simple, but achievable.
not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.
The corresponding Joe Blow from the group that got screwed over is going to be comparatively much worse off. Right? Or you can look at it from the other angle: if normal Joe Blow had ancestors who benefited from seriously screwing over people but made bad decisions, squandered their wealth and advantages so Joe Blow is just a Joe Blow then how much worse off would Joe Blow be? Possibly quite a bit.
But anyway, looking at it from the perspective of ancestors, who screwed over who, who’s responsible for what is overcomplicating things. Are there people who are suffering from unfair disadvantages, are their people who are enjoying unfair advantages at the expense of others? If you’re a decent person, that status quo shouldn’t be acceptable: it’s something that needs to be fixed. Maybe through reparations, maybe through affirmative action, maybe through some other approach. We should determine what the most effective use of resources is and do it.
This is a good analogy for the reparation argument, nice work.
Only partially. Those two gggf’s had their spat; I’m the descendent of neither, yet it’s me who has to pay the bill.
This is a decent analogy, but ignores the practicality of the situation.
How exactly do you get the UK electorate to support this, there really isn’t any benefit to them, it’s just like throwing money into a bonfire. Besides it’s not like the UK economy is currently doing that well, and given that, it’s unrealistic for anyone to support the government just taking more money away intentionally. You’re basically begging for a far-right populist to come in just because they say this is a terrible idea, which is in and of itself the primary reason why it’s a terrible idea.
So, American here. My family immigrated from Germany, Poland, England, and Italy (the nationalities of my four grandparents). My family never owned slaves, never owned farmland, never profited from any of that. Why should my tax dollars go towards paying reparations for something my family had no part in?
That’s the part that I struggle with. Should the families who directly profited off of slavery pay reparations? Perhaps. Should the families and individuals who had nothing to do with slavery? Absolutely not.
Why should my tax dollars go towards paying reparations for something my family had no part in?
Nobody is suggesting that your taxes should increase to exactly match the amount you’d have to personally pay. It’s the responsibility of the government to do it, and while the government does ultimately use your tax dollars it’s not like you’ll personally feel the effect.
Except you would feel the effects. The government would end up with less money for services so worse roads, hospitals, schools etc and probably higher taxes
Good news - your government will spend as little as it can possibly get away with on those things whether you pay slavery reparations or not!
This always seems such a strange argument to me, as if governments are just screaming to spend money on roads, hospitals etc. They spend it on pet projects and tax cuts for their voterbase.
Of course they are, roads, hospitals, railways etc are vote buying. Doesn’t mean they are doing it out of a sense of civic duty because they are generally scum. But if you think that 14 trillion in reparations (450k per tax payer!) Isn’t going to have a massive impact on future spending then I have a bridge for sale!
It depends on the period of time they’re paid over, doesn’t it? Generational debts like these are repaid over, well, generations. It’s not going to be something we notice, and the UK aren’t the only country involved.
Plus, if that’s what you think, I don’t think you can have seen the state of the UK’s roads, hospitals and railways.
I use them daily so imagine how much worse they would be with generational debt.
It would be used as an excuse to privatise every thing left :( I really can’t understand how it wouldn’t affect the average person. You can’t just hand wave away the impact of a very large amount increased debt. Ironically the people that would have had the least amount ‘benefit’ from the slave trade would be the ones that feel the most impact from any reparations. Social programs would be the first ones hit
Well, if we’re talking about ideal spending of tax dollars, this isn’t acceptable either. Any way we split it, the government will not spend our money the way we see fit, so it’s still a valid argument to me.
The hospitals, schools, libraries, roads and services were built with the aid of the disputed money in the first place.
This is a fact of life for all people around the world. I promise you’ll go circles paying retribution if you look for these links of “who stole what”.
We (the UK) have to be honest about how it is we come to be a member of a G7 country. It didn’t come about in the last 20 years, it came about because we were the leading world power between the Napoleonic Wars and the start of the 2nd world war. During that time slavery was legal, then made illegal but at the same time we colonised other countries, keeping their populations in conditions not much better than slavery.
When you include the Industrial Revolution and what some people say was our own ‘internal’ psuedo-slavery of the working classes, the UK became massively wealthy and it’s a foundation and status that we still have today.
This wealth via exploitation and slavery had the effect of not only making us a rich nation but the countries we raided and colonised, very very poor. That’s a foundation and status they still have today.
I don’t know what the answer is, but we can’t pretend it’s a simple as ‘this happened a long time ago and therefore doesn’t count’.
Some countries ended slavery by buying off the slave-owners — paying them for the property that they were being deprived of.
It’s kinda weird that they didn’t pay the enslaved people, who had been deprived of their own work and work-product and life and freedom.
As an American whose ancestors came from Europe around the same time that slavery was abolished here, I can be sure that none of my ancestors benefited directly from slavery; but also that they joined a society that had profited immensely from slavery. The whole reparations concept is complicated.
but also that they joined a society that had profited immensely from slavery.
The same is true for the descendants of slaves. They benefit from the same society that their enslaved ancestors participated in creating. They receive the same benefits of that society that you and your non-slave-owning ancestors receive, so for you, that issue is a wash.
Further, I would say that the descendants of Union soldiers who fought and died during the Civil War are owed at least similar reparations. When the deacendants of slavers get done paying the descendants of slaves, the descendants of slaves can turn around and pay the descendants of abolitionists for their sacrifices.
What of the descendants of the daughter of a former slaver and the son of a freed slave? Wouldn’t they, as descendants of slavers, owe as much in reparations as they are owed as descendants of slaves?
I mean if they didn’t buy the slaves to set them free, there’d have been a massive war, killing a bunch of the slaves and others, and likely costing more money. Imagine the American civil war but worldwide.
It was a necessary evil.
There’s a couple of things to consider when thinking about this.
Firstly, dividing the total by the number of tax payers and concluding that everyone should pay £569 is misleading. Wealthy people pay far more tax than most people (still not enough IMHO!) and as such the per-person cost is wildly different for everyone too.
Secondly, consider your position - your chances of success, and the possible range of success, depends hugely on your parents’ circumstances and those of other close people in your life.
So we have this clear chain of success breeding success - wealthy people can afford to give their children the kind of start in life that us poor spuds can only dream of.
A huge number of wealthy families used slavery to amass and increase their wealth massively. These families are still wealthy, still benefitting from the leg-up they were given on the backs of slaves.
These families are the ones who, ultimately through tax, would end up contributing the most. Us plebs would be paying relatively little.
Even if your family didn’t own slaves, or exploit them directly, they’ll almost certainly have benefited from their existence. I live in a mill town north of Manchester - the very reason for this town’s existence is cotton, ultimately picked by slaves abroad. The money came from businesses and trade that relied on slavery.
Wealthy people pay far more tax than most people
Not sure how things work in the UK, but I don’t think this is true in the US.
By raw amount usually yes, by proportion of earnings/income usually no
If Warren Buffett is right, even in absolute terms, the wealthy don’t pay as much as their secretaries.
They are definately not fair. But fair is not an economic or political quantifyable term. Slavery wasn’t fair either.
What is just or not changes with times and societies. If there is political capital to be made by making reparations then they make sense. If the public disagrees they can and will vote out those responsible. For better or for worse that’s our system.
But I personally do not feel there’s such a thing as Sins of the Fathers. I have nothing to do with the slavers of 300 years ago, the whole concept of owning a human being is repugnant to me. And I genuinly feel that should be enough.
I tend to agree about the Sins of the Fathers, but at the same time, if you don’t inherit their sins why do you inherit their stolen boons?
But, ultimately, the time to address these evils was a century ago.
Hell, at this point it’s impossible to separate “sinner” and victim in many cases. What do you do for the descendants of both slave and slave owner?
Instead, in the now, as a society we should indeed strive to lift up the impoverished. All of the impoverished.
