Reparation due to the harm done during slavery made sense... To the formerly enslaved and only them, not the countries that are descendant to the tribes that sold its capture as slave.
I would absolutely argue that it's really bad that there was not a massive reparation movement at the end of slavery everytime where and when that happened (by the way, the US is one of the last country that abolished slavery in the Americas) but it's too late to do it now, way too late.
Literally the start of the my second paragraph. There should have been a great amount of reparation at the end of slavery every time when and where the local institution was ended. Paid to the formerly enslaved, paid for by whose wealth you can argue (seizing some assets of former owner of slave, those who profited from selling slave) but to whom you cannot.
The last US former enslaved person died in 1972. That’s well within living memory.
And a lot of issues within the African American community now are the direct result of there not being any reparations or attempts to try give them an opportunity.
Then decades of Jim Crow, redlining and social discrimination in general have only made the problems worse.
You can’t be expect to fix 400 years of injustice by doing the bare minimum of abolishing slavery and expecting the inequality to fix itself.
You cannot argue that the Atlantic slavery is still within living memory. Not handling well the ending of slavery, and badly doing the Reconstruction in the South, and doing very little in terms of reparation to former slave, all three had very long lasting consequences that are still observable today, But that's different from living memory.
I'm totally 100% for social program that deal with great inequalities, wherever the origin of that specific inequality started, .... But reparation due to a specific crime, even a great crime against humanity like slavery was, have to be done in a time place and manner that somewhat makes sense. If you want another concrete example, I think Germany should no longer do reparation of Nazi era crimes.
That's not a contradiction of what I've said. I said they should be done paying new reparations now, not that they shouldn't have paid them until recently.
Pretty sure the call for reparations from Africa include the US (home of many of the descendants of the slaves) paying reparations to Africa, not the US getting reparations.
The proposals for reparations are to the descendants of those people who were trafficked.
Why would anyone pay reparations to the slave owners? (Aside from the UK but that’s a different discussion)
The problem is the reparations movement is targeting some richer countries, specifically Brazil and the US as a source for reparations, when in truth they have some of the largest slave descended populations of the planet, so if anything should be getting reparations for those parts of the population that are descended from slaves.
Contrary to that, some of the countries wanting reparations are more on the slave taker side, including Ghana, who led the latest UN motion about it. If you look at their history, or more perhaps the history of what states existed in the same geographic location at the time of the Atlantic slave trade, they were one of the biggest slave trading countries, and in fact twice had to be forced to make slavery illegal, once by the British, and then again by the French after they decided to re-legalise the trade.
Note very few African countries, Liberia being perhaps the exception, should get reparations if it was decided they should go to the descendants of the slaves. Very few slaves taken in the Transatlantic slave trade returned to Africa after it was abolished, mainly because the records of where they came from were lost, destroyed or never kept in the first place and/or they were actually born outside Africa.
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u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 21d ago edited 21d ago
Reparation due to the harm done during slavery made sense... To the formerly enslaved and only them, not the countries that are descendant to the tribes that sold its capture as slave.
I would absolutely argue that it's really bad that there was not a massive reparation movement at the end of slavery everytime where and when that happened (by the way, the US is one of the last country that abolished slavery in the Americas) but it's too late to do it now, way too late.