"WHAT IF?" (USA Slavery Restitution)

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1) Probably not going to happen.

2) Better simply to open opportunities to everyone - make university scholarships and grants available for anyone who is bright and motivated to go that route; make job training available for people who are not scholars.

3) Probably not going to happen, but at this point, it would have to be some type of collective responsibility. The slave owners are dead, but the corporations (including state and other governments) that profited from it may still be around.



From a strange legal lens, the claims arising between the various Indian tribes and the US Government are still valid - the US recognized these tribes as nations and signed treaties, which are binding contracts. So restitution for stolen lands, stolen minerals, or massacres is still an issue.

Speaking of restitution. I was a skinny seven year old immigrant child attending a public school in the South The Bronx in New York City. After being beaten-up several times by my “fellow students” my mother, an unemployed woman who had been abandoned by her husband (my father), went to talk to the guidance counselor at my school to stop the harassment. She was instructed by the guidance counselor to teach me how to fight so that I could defend myself. Where is my restitution?

Fnord wrote:

If I absolutely have to answer the question originally stated, assuming that reparations were necessarily agreed to, I would say that the descendants of slave owners should pay the descendants of slaves.

However, even this is not a good solution when you really think about it. Maybe in some areas of the country, there are people whose relatives all owned slaves. But is someone whose paternal great-(great?)-grandparents were a slave-owner and a non-slave owner in the South and whose maternal relatives were in Eastern Europe till the late 1800s/early 1900s as "responsible" for slavery as someone whose entire family is descended from slave owners? What about people whose great-great-etc. grand parents had slaves, but set them free for moral reasons? Or would there be any difference between how much people paid based on how many slaves their ancestors owned, or how well they treated them? How, even in the most "fair" solution available, can we objectively determine how much someone owes the descendants of slaves based on the behavior of people who lived hundreds of years ago?

I also have a gripe about this similar to the one Coadunate mentioned. Yeah, African Americans were enslaved, segregated and overall mistreated in the past. But if I'd been born 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, I would've been dead. Or if I were particularly "lucky," I would've been stowed quietly away in an institution for my entire life. Same is true of many people with psychological or physical problems, and this has been going on for centuries longer than American slavery did. So what makes one group more entitled to reparations from the oppressing majority group than another?

Well, restitution poses a moderately interesting conundrum in entitlement property theory. Anything which one does not produce oneself is a just property holding via some chain of free and just transfer of property ultimately stemming from an original just appropriation/production. Consequently, if a property was not initially obtained in a just means (in this case, some degree of production through forced labor), then that means that any exchanges and transfers of property deriving from this initial unjust property holding inherit that injustice. That is, while the lack of property on the part of some may be interpreted as morally neutral because we cannot know a just transfer of property for the people who may have had the property otherwise, we can know that any degree to which wealth is had on the part of some at the past expense of others is unjust because the people they ultimately derive that part of their wealth from had no right to transfer it.

So... good luck working out the worth of unjust holdings on the part of whomever.

European ownership of the Americas is just as valid as their ownership of China, India, Africa.

You can never perfect title by murder.