The average white person doesn’t hate black people, but for even the most glaring issues facing you, there is nuance.
The only way for actual change to happen is for laws to be jammed down our throats that eliminate racist policies. I can’t imagine a world where a capitalist country successfully chooses to make the lives of others better, because that wrongly is linked to making your life worse.
Hell, I’ll take it one step further, capitalism promotes racism. You need to exploit something to generate wealth. Marginalized groups are easier to exploit, and easily identified groups (race being one of them) make it easier.
Counterpoint: capitalism should promote racial tolerance because the only color that should matter to a capitalist is green, and the money of minorities spends just the same as that of white people.
Capitalism isn’t intended to be a fair game, it’s designed to consolidate power for those that start with the most and to harvest it from those aspiring to join them through their labor. Exploitation is a core feature, and social inequality that allows additional exploitation is a boon to it.
The South during slavery was capitalism operating at its full potential—not only did the capitalists own the means of production (the tools and the land) they also owned the labor, so they could capture 100% of the value generated by it.
Post-reconstruction, freed slaves were not only no longer free labor, they were labor competition. In a rational economy, the most capable black workers would now out-earn less capable white ones. In the early years, at least outside of the South, this is exactly what happened—some black people, some of them former slaves did indeed get rich.
Instead of embracing these new capitalists, the system reacted by restricting opportunities for black workers to create an underclass that was only competing with itself. This also gave poor white workers an intrinsic, elevated status separate from wealth, but a precarious one, with the threat of the underclass always looming. This dynamic allowed capitalism to suppress wages for both groups. Post Civil Rights, capitalism needed a new boogeyman and so immigrants were targeted for that role, with sexual and gender minorities also being thrown into the crosshairs in recent years.
That same playbook is now being used with the rollout of AI—a bogeyman that threatens all human workers and which will have the same stifling effect on upward mobility.
Any system can be manipulated. Rules can be broken or rewritten. There is nothing inherent to any economic system that automatically makes it "fair". No amount of economic change will eliminate the assholes who break the rules, corrupt the regulations, and are motivated by something that isn't economically based.
Bigotry is not an economic motivation. We can't solve bigotry with economics. But as you highlighted, we can destroy economics with bigotry.
In case you missed it by the way, after the Reconstruction/Robber Barron era, the Labor movement established the very upward mobility you're looking for. The hard won Fair Labor Act of 1938 has been systematically gutted over the last 50 years with bullshit like "right to work" State laws. That and the repeal of laws against stock buy backs have been the largest contributers to the extreme concentration of wealth over the last few decades.
The rich don't get that much richer off of exploiting only 15% of the workforce. But the rich can sure distract people with bullshit about how much better off their neighbors are.
2006-2009 saw the housing market collapse, continuation of the middle east wars, Deporter-in-Chief Obama, and otherwise sits comfortably in the continuity to the politics/antipolitics of 2026. In fact, several of the same influential people are still in prominent positions of power (Mitch McConnell comes to mind).
I think the author would very much enjoy the Baudrillard brand analysis (Simulation & Simulacra, The Spirit of Terrorism, etc) of the American culture and political economy (especially in this post 9/11 world the piece focuses on), and the questions it asks. What does the "American" label mean, and what does it mean to be proud of it? What is "The American Dream"? Are they coherent concepts, or just simulacra to drive the thought of the people along expected paths?
Oh I love this! Maybe I should've included my age, I'm 30, so 2006-2009, I wasn't directly affected by those things. My parents, I'm sure were but I had no clue.
As for the book recommendation, Thank you! My personal pride in being American is rooted in my cultural experience as a black American. I was often made to feel shame for my background, when in reality there is a lot of beauty in the resilience of my people. Also, to answer your question, I think its a mixture of both.
Right on, I definitely think you would find those works fascinating (Simulacra & Simulation can be... dense... but there's plenty of effective analysis out there on it). Baudrillard hypothesized that all significant meaning in American culture (and western Europe) has been lost in a déluge of information, signs, symbols, and they've been captured by Capital (the process, the money, and the capitalists) and in so have captured Thought. People use their purchases to express themselves, and these things have been detached from any actual history or meaning (imagine, if you were a communist and wanted to show it, it's likely you'd buy a shirt from a capitalist to do so, ergo Capital subsumes critique into itself).
In this post modern analysis, there is no "American Dream", it's a slogan that exists to hide that there is no American Dream.
I don't necessarily get fully behind his conclusions, but his analysis of culture and our relation to it (9/11 was an "absolute event" in that the images on our TVs weren't meaningless, that day, and forever after the lines between "real" and "fake" are blurred because the media perpetuates both sides) is immediately what came to mind reading your piece.
I honor the dignity and resilience of Black Americans. Slave owners believed that the freed slaves would enact terrible vengeance after centuries of murder, rape, and torture.
But the Black Americans showed Grace. In the subsequent 150 years after Abolition, we can see that Grace was not deserved. We should have burned out the Confederacy root & branch.
Also check out Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures are good and you can find some videos on YouTube that discuss some of the core concepts.
I actually thought, based on the title and some of the ideas in your post, that he was going to get name checked!
As a Canadian obviously I’m not super in tune with “The American Dream” but from what has seeped in through pop culture about it I was under the impression it meant buying a house. A house in the suburbs and a car.
I thought it was a fairly rigid definition restricted to a housing? What sorts of answers were you getting?
I'm guessing (it's not a guess) that you also believe Obama was the most racially divisive president.
Talking about reparations is just the quickest way to get white supremacists to self-identify.
icymi, the racial divide exists only because of all the racists. If they all vanished overnight, by the next morning there would be no racial divide.
Within a year reparations would be made and race would never again be an issue.
The reason many white people feel it’s divisive is because they are scared, not because they’re white supremacists. If their ancestry didn’t participate in or didn’t benefit directly from slavery, and they’re already struggling financially, and they support continued rectification of institutional and social racism, then they feel scared when the desire for reparations is communicated as being afforded by white people broadly. It is compounded by a subconscious or conscious resentment that tens of millions of people would get a wealth boost while they continue struggling. Most people with concerns would get on board and not feel the fear or resentment if the conservation didn’t feel like a trap to be outcast as a racist. If reparations are only to come from slaveowning families and probably families of political/police enforcers of racism, and that was the starting position, and if the discussion didn’t feel so absolute/closed to non-black folks, it wouldn’t be difficult to get most Dems/leftists and substantial independents on board. Unfortunately, the messaging about reparations on social media rarely allays these fears because the most vocal proponents don’t seem to understand them and they’re the ones reaching non-black folks, which leads to further misunderstanding and polarization on the issue.
People who aren't racist &/or white supremacists aren't scared of reparations and see them as unifying, not divisive.
What the people you describe are afraid of is losing privilege, ironically the thing that caused reparations to be necessary in the first place.
I am neither a racist nor a white supremacist. I am a tax payer who was not alive during slavery, or manifest destiny. I don't want my money going to reparations for something I had nothing to do with. Simple as.
Do you believe that reparations are owed due to Jim Crow, redlining, denial of access to the GI bill, massacres of communities, medical experiments such as the Tuskegee experiments? Things that happened to folks who are still alive?
How does a poor white person lose privilege by being charged money they can’t afford to boost a poor black person out of the same poverty they’re in?
That’s how they’re seeing it, and that seems less like a privilege being lost and more like black poor people being treated as born superior to poor white people - they may be equally poor, but because the black person’s ancestors were slaves and the white person’s ancestors merely itinerants or miners or factory workers, the poor black person gets to take the poor white person’s small amount of money for themselves.
This is the framing it will be viewed through, by the struggling white poor.
And honestly, any privileges they have as white people will remain even after reparations (though they tend not to focus on them, what with their greater concerns of financial insecurity and what with privilege’s inbuilt self-blinding effect), so reparations are of course going to be seen as merely about wealth transfer rather than addressing privilege.
Reparations should be paid by the wealth that benefited from enslaving people, not by the colour of one’s skin - and that needs to be communicated more widely too.
Neither am I. And yes, I do, but large swaths of white, Latino, Asians, and Africans are not going to understand or agree to being left out no matter how justified. Reparations are not going to end any of the still lingering repercussions slavery, and a massive racial discrimination plan put forth by the government isn't going to end racism. It will just make it far worse.
These are all the same arguments white supremacists have been making against the idea of reparations. The truth is reparations won't end racism - and no one's suggesting they will - because racists want to be racist & white supremacists don't want any non-white people to have the same level of wealth and privilege as they do.
Reparations aren’t happening. People would accept UBI before they accept just black people or descendant of American slaves getting wake-up pay. The idea makes more than white supremacists annoyed. Like it really feels like one of those pre Trump era ideas from the Democratic Party.
This might come as a shock to you but the average MAGA voter makes less money than the average Biden voter. The fact that you think all non-blacks are rich makes me wonder if you have ever even set foot here.
Honestly, yeah. My family came to the US after WW2, and changed their Polish name to avoid housing and employment discrimination.
Any reparations scenario would either impact my family, which had nothing to do with “white” (a moving target in Americas 250 years) American treatment of black Americans, or would involve racking and stacking the races, which I shouldn’t have to explain why that would be bad.
To top it all off, even if you somehow could magically pull off fair reparations, the immediate MAGA response would be “you got yours, you’re never getting anything again, and we want to stop hearing you complain about it.”
Reparations are a terrible idea if you spend even 30 seconds thinking about the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
So let me get this straight: your family got here after WW2 and you want to restrict the repair of families that have been shafted for 2 or 3 hundred years before without understanding the context of why those families lobby for governmental correction. Seems about white. To add if Black Americans did get "fair repairations" there wouldnt be anything to complain about.
If you're going to be American learn all the history not just the sh*t that makes you feel good
The fact that the Americans who were here before I got here fucked up, doesn’t mean that I should have to pay for it because I happen to have a similar complexion to them.
And, again, everyone commenting at me seems to be ignoring the fact that “white” and “black” are American constructs. How much should Italians, Poles and Jews pay for Anglo bullshit? Would a recent Nigerian migrant be entitled to reparations despite not having come to America due to trans-Atlantic slave trade? How do we disburse the reparations proportionately according to the fecundity of different families of ancestral slaves?
The very questions demanded of attempting truly equitable and fair reparations raise incredibly uncomfortable questions of “how much blood” people have, and we’ve seen how that plays out.
Yet quantative easing, and decades of middle east wars are super easy sells for you as a taxpayer without any blowback whatsoever. Tell me again about 'your money' and reparations.
Wow! Since you’re a mind reader, you must already have already known I would respond this way!
You’re running on a big assumption, that I agree with quantitative easing and big middle eastern wars. Also, what a huge whataboutism. Is your argument that because America has done two other misguided, economically stupid policies, we should do a third?
I’m curious if you felt this way when the US government gave $1.6B in reparations starting in 1990 for Japanese citizens who were wrongfully forced to relocate and or incarcerated. This happened during prior to your family’s arrival to the US.
Well, I was a toddler at that time, so I didn’t feel any particular way about it.
There is a meaningful difference between 1) a government making reparations for government actions against a very clearly enumerated population in living memory, and 2) asking people to pay for the sins of their fathers to the descendants of those harmed.
Should the descendants of Union soldiers be required to pay reparations? How would you distinguish? What happens for people who, several generations after slavery, are intermarried between a confederate descendant and the descendant of a slave?
I don’t know how this is so hard for people to get: it’s not that I don’t think slavery was bad, or that I don’t think immediately following the civil war former slaves ought to have received reparations (but ultimately did not due to the strain of maintaining the Union). It’s that because we are 3-4 generations divorced from emancipation, that there is no way to fairly and equitably tax the culpable and repair the injured. Any attempt to pave it over by way of “white” and “black” ignores non-trivial ethical problems, and fails to acknowledge the intersectionality of non-Anglo post-civil war migrants.
NecessaryRhubarb | 4 hours ago
The average white person doesn’t hate black people, but for even the most glaring issues facing you, there is nuance.
The only way for actual change to happen is for laws to be jammed down our throats that eliminate racist policies. I can’t imagine a world where a capitalist country successfully chooses to make the lives of others better, because that wrongly is linked to making your life worse.
Hell, I’ll take it one step further, capitalism promotes racism. You need to exploit something to generate wealth. Marginalized groups are easier to exploit, and easily identified groups (race being one of them) make it easier.
Zen28213 | an hour ago
Racism won’t end as long as it’s viewed as something blacks have to deal and not like an issue white have to solve.
allothernamestaken | 3 hours ago
Counterpoint: capitalism should promote racial tolerance because the only color that should matter to a capitalist is green, and the money of minorities spends just the same as that of white people.
username_redacted | 2 hours ago
Capitalism isn’t intended to be a fair game, it’s designed to consolidate power for those that start with the most and to harvest it from those aspiring to join them through their labor. Exploitation is a core feature, and social inequality that allows additional exploitation is a boon to it.
The South during slavery was capitalism operating at its full potential—not only did the capitalists own the means of production (the tools and the land) they also owned the labor, so they could capture 100% of the value generated by it.
Post-reconstruction, freed slaves were not only no longer free labor, they were labor competition. In a rational economy, the most capable black workers would now out-earn less capable white ones. In the early years, at least outside of the South, this is exactly what happened—some black people, some of them former slaves did indeed get rich.
Instead of embracing these new capitalists, the system reacted by restricting opportunities for black workers to create an underclass that was only competing with itself. This also gave poor white workers an intrinsic, elevated status separate from wealth, but a precarious one, with the threat of the underclass always looming. This dynamic allowed capitalism to suppress wages for both groups. Post Civil Rights, capitalism needed a new boogeyman and so immigrants were targeted for that role, with sexual and gender minorities also being thrown into the crosshairs in recent years.
That same playbook is now being used with the rollout of AI—a bogeyman that threatens all human workers and which will have the same stifling effect on upward mobility.
LeoSolaris | 4 minutes ago
Any system can be manipulated. Rules can be broken or rewritten. There is nothing inherent to any economic system that automatically makes it "fair". No amount of economic change will eliminate the assholes who break the rules, corrupt the regulations, and are motivated by something that isn't economically based.
Bigotry is not an economic motivation. We can't solve bigotry with economics. But as you highlighted, we can destroy economics with bigotry.
In case you missed it by the way, after the Reconstruction/Robber Barron era, the Labor movement established the very upward mobility you're looking for. The hard won Fair Labor Act of 1938 has been systematically gutted over the last 50 years with bullshit like "right to work" State laws. That and the repeal of laws against stock buy backs have been the largest contributers to the extreme concentration of wealth over the last few decades.
The rich don't get that much richer off of exploiting only 15% of the workforce. But the rich can sure distract people with bullshit about how much better off their neighbors are.
PsyX99 | 2 hours ago
"Capitalisms" do both because it does not care about racism it cares about making more profit.
BrutalN00dle | 6 hours ago
2006-2009 saw the housing market collapse, continuation of the middle east wars, Deporter-in-Chief Obama, and otherwise sits comfortably in the continuity to the politics/antipolitics of 2026. In fact, several of the same influential people are still in prominent positions of power (Mitch McConnell comes to mind).
I think the author would very much enjoy the Baudrillard brand analysis (Simulation & Simulacra, The Spirit of Terrorism, etc) of the American culture and political economy (especially in this post 9/11 world the piece focuses on), and the questions it asks. What does the "American" label mean, and what does it mean to be proud of it? What is "The American Dream"? Are they coherent concepts, or just simulacra to drive the thought of the people along expected paths?
[OP] idkbutheresathought | 6 hours ago
Oh I love this! Maybe I should've included my age, I'm 30, so 2006-2009, I wasn't directly affected by those things. My parents, I'm sure were but I had no clue.
As for the book recommendation, Thank you! My personal pride in being American is rooted in my cultural experience as a black American. I was often made to feel shame for my background, when in reality there is a lot of beauty in the resilience of my people. Also, to answer your question, I think its a mixture of both.
BrutalN00dle | 6 hours ago
Right on, I definitely think you would find those works fascinating (Simulacra & Simulation can be... dense... but there's plenty of effective analysis out there on it). Baudrillard hypothesized that all significant meaning in American culture (and western Europe) has been lost in a déluge of information, signs, symbols, and they've been captured by Capital (the process, the money, and the capitalists) and in so have captured Thought. People use their purchases to express themselves, and these things have been detached from any actual history or meaning (imagine, if you were a communist and wanted to show it, it's likely you'd buy a shirt from a capitalist to do so, ergo Capital subsumes critique into itself).
In this post modern analysis, there is no "American Dream", it's a slogan that exists to hide that there is no American Dream.
I don't necessarily get fully behind his conclusions, but his analysis of culture and our relation to it (9/11 was an "absolute event" in that the images on our TVs weren't meaningless, that day, and forever after the lines between "real" and "fake" are blurred because the media perpetuates both sides) is immediately what came to mind reading your piece.
blue-jaypeg | 2 hours ago
I honor the dignity and resilience of Black Americans. Slave owners believed that the freed slaves would enact terrible vengeance after centuries of murder, rape, and torture.
But the Black Americans showed Grace. In the subsequent 150 years after Abolition, we can see that Grace was not deserved. We should have burned out the Confederacy root & branch.
twoinvenice | an hour ago
Also check out Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures are good and you can find some videos on YouTube that discuss some of the core concepts.
I actually thought, based on the title and some of the ideas in your post, that he was going to get name checked!
ShaneBarnstormer | 6 hours ago
Recently I took to asking people that very question, what is the American dream to you? The answers made me profoundly sad.
emptycagenowcorroded | 5 hours ago
As a Canadian obviously I’m not super in tune with “The American Dream” but from what has seeped in through pop culture about it I was under the impression it meant buying a house. A house in the suburbs and a car.
I thought it was a fairly rigid definition restricted to a housing? What sorts of answers were you getting?
BayouGal | 3 hours ago
American dream is like any other. Open your eyes and it’s gone.
Mr_Fuzzo | 6 hours ago
What types of answers have you received? What are the backgrounds of the humans you ask?
kafka_lite | 6 hours ago
There is no faster way to get people to vote MAGA than to talk of reparations, and no greater way to stoke racial divide.
Spookyrabbit | 4 hours ago
I'm guessing (it's not a guess) that you also believe Obama was the most racially divisive president.
Talking about reparations is just the quickest way to get white supremacists to self-identify.
icymi, the racial divide exists only because of all the racists. If they all vanished overnight, by the next morning there would be no racial divide.
Within a year reparations would be made and race would never again be an issue.
x_raveheart_x | 3 hours ago
The reason many white people feel it’s divisive is because they are scared, not because they’re white supremacists. If their ancestry didn’t participate in or didn’t benefit directly from slavery, and they’re already struggling financially, and they support continued rectification of institutional and social racism, then they feel scared when the desire for reparations is communicated as being afforded by white people broadly. It is compounded by a subconscious or conscious resentment that tens of millions of people would get a wealth boost while they continue struggling. Most people with concerns would get on board and not feel the fear or resentment if the conservation didn’t feel like a trap to be outcast as a racist. If reparations are only to come from slaveowning families and probably families of political/police enforcers of racism, and that was the starting position, and if the discussion didn’t feel so absolute/closed to non-black folks, it wouldn’t be difficult to get most Dems/leftists and substantial independents on board. Unfortunately, the messaging about reparations on social media rarely allays these fears because the most vocal proponents don’t seem to understand them and they’re the ones reaching non-black folks, which leads to further misunderstanding and polarization on the issue.
Spookyrabbit | 3 hours ago
People who aren't racist &/or white supremacists aren't scared of reparations and see them as unifying, not divisive.
What the people you describe are afraid of is losing privilege, ironically the thing that caused reparations to be necessary in the first place.
Galactica_Actual | 3 hours ago
I am neither a racist nor a white supremacist. I am a tax payer who was not alive during slavery, or manifest destiny. I don't want my money going to reparations for something I had nothing to do with. Simple as.
ladyebugg | 3 hours ago
Do you believe that reparations are owed due to Jim Crow, redlining, denial of access to the GI bill, massacres of communities, medical experiments such as the Tuskegee experiments? Things that happened to folks who are still alive?
Galactica_Actual | 2 hours ago
Perhaps, but not by me.
AwTomorrow | 3 hours ago
How does a poor white person lose privilege by being charged money they can’t afford to boost a poor black person out of the same poverty they’re in?
That’s how they’re seeing it, and that seems less like a privilege being lost and more like black poor people being treated as born superior to poor white people - they may be equally poor, but because the black person’s ancestors were slaves and the white person’s ancestors merely itinerants or miners or factory workers, the poor black person gets to take the poor white person’s small amount of money for themselves.
This is the framing it will be viewed through, by the struggling white poor.
And honestly, any privileges they have as white people will remain even after reparations (though they tend not to focus on them, what with their greater concerns of financial insecurity and what with privilege’s inbuilt self-blinding effect), so reparations are of course going to be seen as merely about wealth transfer rather than addressing privilege.
Reparations should be paid by the wealth that benefited from enslaving people, not by the colour of one’s skin - and that needs to be communicated more widely too.
JimKPolk | 4 hours ago
Good god you’re naive
Spookyrabbit | 3 hours ago
I do so love triggering white supremacists.
Thanks for playing ;)
kafka_lite | 4 hours ago
No Trump is far more racially divisive. What is it you are accusing Obama of doing?
Why would we do reparations if racism had ended?
Spookyrabbit | 3 hours ago
I'm not accusing Obama of anything. Do you even know what reparations would be for?
kafka_lite | 3 hours ago
Neither am I. And yes, I do, but large swaths of white, Latino, Asians, and Africans are not going to understand or agree to being left out no matter how justified. Reparations are not going to end any of the still lingering repercussions slavery, and a massive racial discrimination plan put forth by the government isn't going to end racism. It will just make it far worse.
Spookyrabbit | 3 hours ago
These are all the same arguments white supremacists have been making against the idea of reparations. The truth is reparations won't end racism - and no one's suggesting they will - because racists want to be racist & white supremacists don't want any non-white people to have the same level of wealth and privilege as they do.
badnuub | 3 hours ago
Reparations aren’t happening. People would accept UBI before they accept just black people or descendant of American slaves getting wake-up pay. The idea makes more than white supremacists annoyed. Like it really feels like one of those pre Trump era ideas from the Democratic Party.
kafka_lite | 3 hours ago
This might come as a shock to you but the average MAGA voter makes less money than the average Biden voter. The fact that you think all non-blacks are rich makes me wonder if you have ever even set foot here.
Invisiblechimp | 2 hours ago
>This might come as a shock to you but the average MAGA voter makes less money than the average Biden voter.
This myth won't die.
55% of those making less than 50k voted Biden. 57% of those voting between 50-100k voted Biden. 54% making over 100k voted Trump.
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2020
kafka_lite | 2 hours ago
Interesting. There seems to be mixed data on the subject.
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/data-snapshot-biden-voters-outlive
Are you ever going to explain why Obama is a white supremacist?
kafka_lite | 3 hours ago
BTW
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/obama-reveals-why-he-didnt-seek-reparations-for-black-americans
Obama has the same opinion I do on the subject. Is he a white supremacist also?
Netherese_Nomad | 4 hours ago
Honestly, yeah. My family came to the US after WW2, and changed their Polish name to avoid housing and employment discrimination.
Any reparations scenario would either impact my family, which had nothing to do with “white” (a moving target in Americas 250 years) American treatment of black Americans, or would involve racking and stacking the races, which I shouldn’t have to explain why that would be bad.
To top it all off, even if you somehow could magically pull off fair reparations, the immediate MAGA response would be “you got yours, you’re never getting anything again, and we want to stop hearing you complain about it.”
Reparations are a terrible idea if you spend even 30 seconds thinking about the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
doc_lec | 4 hours ago
So let me get this straight: your family got here after WW2 and you want to restrict the repair of families that have been shafted for 2 or 3 hundred years before without understanding the context of why those families lobby for governmental correction. Seems about white. To add if Black Americans did get "fair repairations" there wouldnt be anything to complain about.
If you're going to be American learn all the history not just the sh*t that makes you feel good
Netherese_Nomad | 3 hours ago
The fact that the Americans who were here before I got here fucked up, doesn’t mean that I should have to pay for it because I happen to have a similar complexion to them.
And, again, everyone commenting at me seems to be ignoring the fact that “white” and “black” are American constructs. How much should Italians, Poles and Jews pay for Anglo bullshit? Would a recent Nigerian migrant be entitled to reparations despite not having come to America due to trans-Atlantic slave trade? How do we disburse the reparations proportionately according to the fecundity of different families of ancestral slaves?
The very questions demanded of attempting truly equitable and fair reparations raise incredibly uncomfortable questions of “how much blood” people have, and we’ve seen how that plays out.
Indigo_Sunset | an hour ago
Yet quantative easing, and decades of middle east wars are super easy sells for you as a taxpayer without any blowback whatsoever. Tell me again about 'your money' and reparations.
Netherese_Nomad | an hour ago
Wow! Since you’re a mind reader, you must already have already known I would respond this way!
You’re running on a big assumption, that I agree with quantitative easing and big middle eastern wars. Also, what a huge whataboutism. Is your argument that because America has done two other misguided, economically stupid policies, we should do a third?
Indigo_Sunset | an hour ago
Lol, be more defensive
ladyebugg | 3 hours ago
I’m curious if you felt this way when the US government gave $1.6B in reparations starting in 1990 for Japanese citizens who were wrongfully forced to relocate and or incarcerated. This happened during prior to your family’s arrival to the US.
Netherese_Nomad | 2 hours ago
Well, I was a toddler at that time, so I didn’t feel any particular way about it.
There is a meaningful difference between 1) a government making reparations for government actions against a very clearly enumerated population in living memory, and 2) asking people to pay for the sins of their fathers to the descendants of those harmed.
Should the descendants of Union soldiers be required to pay reparations? How would you distinguish? What happens for people who, several generations after slavery, are intermarried between a confederate descendant and the descendant of a slave?
I don’t know how this is so hard for people to get: it’s not that I don’t think slavery was bad, or that I don’t think immediately following the civil war former slaves ought to have received reparations (but ultimately did not due to the strain of maintaining the Union). It’s that because we are 3-4 generations divorced from emancipation, that there is no way to fairly and equitably tax the culpable and repair the injured. Any attempt to pave it over by way of “white” and “black” ignores non-trivial ethical problems, and fails to acknowledge the intersectionality of non-Anglo post-civil war migrants.
PeeDidy | 4 hours ago
You seem to be very ignorant of American history. Reparations wouldn't do shit to negatively impact your family, you sound brainwashed.
While it's not something I care about, if reparations are what "makes" you vote maga, you were just a piece of shit to start with.
Netherese_Nomad | 3 hours ago
I wouldn’t vote MAGA, but I absolutely will vote against any Dem in the primary who is in favor of reparations.