Our favorite CONGRESSWOMAN SheJack is having a brief moment in the sun this week. She opened hearings on Making Everyone Pay for the fact that she was born in the good old USA, This is also known as Reparations, and it’s being billed as a means of paying people because they happen to be descendants of African slaves because white privilege or something, and it has the added benefit of cleansing the inherently racist souls of white people. Seriously, a religious leader who testified in front of SheJack’s committee wants a $51 million fund or his church. Not even kidding.
Episcopal Bishop Eugene Taylor Sutton told the committee that white people need reparations more than black people. They need it for their souls, he said. “ You need this to be able to look black persons in the eye and say ‘I acknowledge the mistake and I want to be part of the solution to repair that damage.'”
Basically our good bishop is saying that it’s time white people paid for the privilege of being white.
Which raises some interesting questions, namely who should get reparations, and who should actually be paying for them.
In the past, most notably, the Federal Government paid reparations to those Japanese-Americans who had been interned during World War II. The reparations were paid by the government to the people who were directly affected by the incarceration. And remember, it was the government that incarcerated them in the first place!
Note to the reparations crowd—we haven’t had slavery in this country in over 150 years. There is no one alive today who was a slave or who was a slave owner. Period. Regardless of this reality, people somehow believe that since there was slavery, the descendants of those slaves are somehow still slaves. People may be slaves to the notion that they are oppressed, but that’s not limited to descendants of African slaves, folks.
With that in mind, who is going to pay for this? Should people whose ancestors who arrived on these shores prior to 1863 pay for reparations? They would have had nothing to do with slavery? More narrowly, should only those whose ancestors settled in the southern states pay, regardless of whether or not their families owned other human beings?
Is it fair to ask the descendant of an Irish immigrant who came to Boston in 1845 to escape the Potato Famine, and who probably fought against the south in the Civil War to pay reparations?
Is it fair to ask the descendant of the Chinese immigrant who suffered terrible conditions while building the railroads and had to suffer the indignities of the Chinese Exclusionary Laws to pay reparations?
Is it fair to ask the descendants of the Spanish Conquistadors who settled in the southwest to pay reparations?
What happens if a white person has ancestors who arrived before 1863, never owned slaves, fought for the Union in the Civil War, and has another ancestor who was a slave holder? How much of the reparation bill should he be responsible for?
What the reparations crowd is trying to do is say that since slavery was allowed at the foundation of the country, the government is responsible for it. OK. But show me the people who were enslaved. They can’t. Because we haven’t had slavery in the country in at least 7 generations. So who would we pay the reparations to?
The obvious answer is that descendants of those enslaved would get the reparations. Right. Who is that? Let’s take some prominent individuals who claim descent from Africans.
Barack Obama would not be entitled to reparations, would he? His father was from Kenya. Not a slave. Now, his daughters might be able to claim them through their mother.
Would Dr. Ben Carson get more money than Halle Berry; she’s half white?
What about SheJack herself? Technically, she should claim reparations from the British government. Her ancestors were sent to Jamaica. And her reparations would be less than US reparations, because the Brits outlawed slavery in their empire in 1808—a full two generations earlier than the laggards in the US.
Kamala Harris might be completely out of luck. She’s half Jamaican, true, but there might have been some slave owners on her side….
Would socioeconomic factors come into play? Why should Cory Booker, the son of not one, but TWO IBM executives who went to Stanford get anything at all? Clearly, he didn’t suffer growing up.
And finally, what about the recent immigrant from Nigeria? Can he get reparations? Some of his relatives might have been captured by Arab slave traders and sent to the New World. Can he claim damage because of that?
This whole notion of reparations is the last gasp of the Democrats to keep their most important voting bloc intact. After 50 years of almost total Democrat voting, enough blacks woke up to the fact that Democrat policies have done as much, if not more, damage to their community, and have started to peel away. Burgess Owens, the former Oakland Raider, put it like this:
“This is not about black and white, rich and poor, blue collar, white collar. We’re fighting for the heart and soul of our nation. We have a very, very special country instilled with the Judeo-Christian values that allowed every single generation to become better than the last. That has not ended. That has not stopped — until now. We’re telling our kids a little bit something different. That they don’t have the opportunity that we had. I’m going to talk about some ideologies. When I talk about them, I’m not talking about people. People change. I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found out the misery that that party brought to my race. So when I talk about these ideologies, ideologies don’t change, people do.”
EvenQuillette’scolumnist Coleman Hughes (not a right winger!) said this "Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims. So the moment you give me reparations, you've made me into a victim without my consent."
Here we are—reparations are the Democrats last gasp effort to keep spiritually enslaving our black citizens, and continue to stoke a racist divide that they created.
If Democrats were really serious about reparations, they wouldn't have put Sheila Jackson Lee in charge of the efforts.
Sandra Peterson
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 19: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) speaks during a hearing on slavery reparations held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on June 19, 2019 in Washington, DC. The subcommittee debated the H.R. 40 bill, which proposes a commission be formed to study and develop reparation proposals for African-Americans. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)