Equitable Reparations
Wednesday, April 5, 2023
By Roy Underwood
I have been thinking about an equitable way to solve the long-standing reparations for our slavery problem. The United States (US) has given reparations to interred Japanese-Americans during the outset of WWII. American Indians were given reservations and some form of autonomy to stop fighting. The victims of the World Trade Center tragedy were given a form of guilt compensation because the US let it happen. Recently the US population at large was given monetary compensation to ease the financial burden of shutting down the economy which was not their fault.
Based on this set of precedents it seems fair to entertain some form of reparations to descendants of slaves. The sticking point has always been who pays and to whom and based on what? I have always added one more requirement – “after a payment will this be the end of it?” Unfortunately like many other similar requests for money the answer has always been – “no – we will ask for more later”.
To try to move this forward to solving the who pays I would like to suggest the following group pay all the reparations.
Diehard Democrats should pay.
The Democratic Party until they reversed their party from subjugating Black people to using Black people considered Black people racially inferior. They constructed and used Civil Rights as the beacon of hope but led the new faithful onto the adroitly constructed virtual plantation. For over a hundred years the Democratic Party was responsible for sponsoring and maintaining slavery.
The Democratic Party:
• Started the Civil War
• Opposed any new free states
• Opposed abolishing slavery
• Introduced Jim Crow laws
• Created the KKK
• Was the mob that lynched Black people
• Created a southern unequal two-part justice system
• Introduced and totally supported segregation
Therefore, I propose that the following happen:
• A reparations amount with a sliding scale based on direct lineage to an actual slave in the US be established.
• The same sliding scale be applied to “card carrying” members of the Democratic Party.
• The guilty are assessed and the victims rewarded.
There is massive precedent for this reparations method. The US does this all the time. It is called a class action settlement.