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2015-08-25 Home Front: Culture Wars

WAPO: Instead of cash reparations, give every black American 5/3 of a vote

[WAPO] If you want to shut down a conversation about race, just say the word "reparations." Even black Americans are divided over the idea that money can compensate for the vestiges of an evil institution that ended 150 years ago; only 60 percent think the government should make cash payments to descendants of slaves. White Americans, on the other hand, have reached a consensus: In a YouGov poll taken shortly after the Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates's viral feature, "The Case for Reparations," 94 percent were opposed.

Yet a year of protests over disparate law enforcement practices, a decade of particularly sharp income inequality and centuries of imparity in America show that racial reconciliation is impossible without some kind of broad-based, systemic reparations. Recognizing the original sin is simply not enough; we must also make moral and material amends for our nation's treatment of African American citizens. But if a pecuniary answer can't fix the structural disadvantage -- and it can't -- what can?

Weighted voting.

Thanks to a compromise between Southern slaveholders who wanted enslaved blacks counted in the population, for the sake of boosting Southern congressional representation, and Northern whites who didn't, the framers enshrined the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. This agreement set the census value of a slave as 60 percent of the value of a free person. Even after the 13th Amendment neutralized the political (and moral) compromise by abolishing slavery, Jim Crow laws, which contravened the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equality, stopped blacks from voting. The just answer today is to invert that ratio. If black Americans were once counted as three-fifths of a person, let each African American voter now count as five-thirds.

Reparations in America have come to mean "free" money, so any serious discussion about them also mandates a discussion of how much -- an exercise doomed to failure. Other ways of imagining reparations (as the spilled blood of more than half a million Union soldiers during the Civil War; as affirmative action in universities and workplaces; as subsidized education) don't involve cash payments, but they also don't do enough to combat the structural disadvantages black Americans face -- disadvantages that have gone largely unaddressed by our legislative and executive branches.
Author's Website found here. He appears to have a rather singular focus.

Posted by Besoeker 2015-08-25 03:48|| || Front Page|| [11136 views ] Top

#1 Why is the word "reconstruction" keeps running through my mind?

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2015-08-25 05:01|| 2015-08-25 05:01|| Front Page Top

#2 And how will you decide who's black?

There's no scientific way so I've decided I'm black today.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2015-08-25 05:54|| 2015-08-25 05:54|| Front Page Top

Posted by 2015-08-25 07:17|| 2015-08-25 07:17|| Front Page Top

#4 Hokay. Any survivor of slavery pre-1865 gets a 5/3 vote. The rest? STFU

Posted by Frank G 2015-08-25 07:24|| 2015-08-25 07:24|| Front Page Top

#5 How many more do they want? I thought all the Dems voted at least twice, anyway.

Posted by Bobby 2015-08-25 07:26|| 2015-08-25 07:26|| Front Page Top

#6 Frank - Your scheme may produce a few more votes, but no federal jobs. Nice try however.

Posted by Besoeker 2015-08-25 07:28|| 2015-08-25 07:28|| Front Page Top

#7 The comments thus far are universally negative. Surprisingly, some Washngton Post readers can do math.

Posted by trailing wife 2015-08-25 08:43|| 2015-08-25 08:43|| Front Page Top

#8 Sorry, that should have been the comments at the link. PIMF!!

Posted by trailing wife 2015-08-25 08:46|| 2015-08-25 08:46|| Front Page Top

#9 "reparations" will follow at a later date.

Posted by Vast Right Wing Conspiracy 2015-08-25 08:59|| 2015-08-25 08:59|| Front Page Top

#10 Even black Americans are divided over the idea that money can compensate for the vestiges of an evil institution that ended 150 years ago

How about compensation to everyone else for all the disproportionate rape, murder, robbery, et al committed by one community against all today? If you can hold one group accountable for the acts of a few, why not others?

BTW, the northern states were 'free' without 'sin' at the beginning, including those that were to be added to the union from the Northwest Territory from which that peculiar institution had already been banned (well before the British or French started to seriously talk about ending the practice).

Posted by Procopius2k 2015-08-25 09:07|| 2015-08-25 09:07|| Front Page Top

#11 @Besoeker
A sort of EuGenic tax break system?

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2015-08-25 09:59|| 2015-08-25 09:59|| Front Page Top

#12 The three fifths clause was to avoid giving the slave states undue political leverage, not to denegrate blacks.

Posted by KBK 2015-08-25 10:04|| 2015-08-25 10:04|| Front Page Top

#13 Reparations? Hell no. This is ridiculous. How much has been paid already to people who were never slaves? Anyone who would be required to pay would become slaves of the government. Is the North going to be required to pay? I thought they emancipated the slaves when Lincoln issued his executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation. Is the South going to have to pay? They have already paid plenty. So I'd say STFU and get a job and quit bilking the rest of us of hard-earned boodle-
-this is basically stealing. Who comes up with this shit?

Posted by JohnQC 2015-08-25 10:32|| 2015-08-25 10:32|| Front Page Top

#14 I say let the white people who simply can't live with their guilt over the distant past contribute their votes to blacks. Say, provide a box on the ballot to effect that the next black voter gets my vote too. That way both groups get what they want, yet the overall vote is unaffected.

Posted by brujotejano 2015-08-25 10:39|| 2015-08-25 10:39|| Front Page Top

#15 But that would dilute the illegal vote.

Posted by Iblis 2015-08-25 10:45|| 2015-08-25 10:45|| Front Page Top

#16 We went to war for One Person One Vote.

Posted by OldSpook 2015-08-25 11:02|| 2015-08-25 11:02|| Front Page Top

#17 And will do it again.

Posted by OldSpook 2015-08-25 11:02|| 2015-08-25 11:02|| Front Page Top

#18 So will immigrants from Africa be considered 'black'. You know the ones who's ancestors originally enslaved them to begin with. Like Barack Obama.

Posted by CrazyFool 2015-08-25 11:48|| 2015-08-25 11:48|| Front Page Top

#19 CF, good point. Would Obama be entitled to reparations? He is not descended from slaves, yet he is African American.

Posted by Rambler in Virginia 2015-08-25 12:26|| 2015-08-25 12:26|| Front Page Top

#20 What about those of us with European ancestors who were kidnapped and sold into indentured servitude? Those folks weren't able to vote.

Come to think of it, VERY few of the early European colonists could vote for anything.

Just give me the cash.........

Posted by Mullah Richard 2015-08-25 13:44|| 2015-08-25 13:44|| Front Page Top

#21 "All citizens are equal. Some are just more equal than others."
(Where have I heard this before?)

Posted by ed in texas 2015-08-25 14:09|| 2015-08-25 14:09|| Front Page Top

#22 We've been paying reparations for decades...it's called Welfare

Posted by Warthog 2015-08-25 14:33|| 2015-08-25 14:33|| Front Page Top

#23 I think you've confused reparations with bribery.

Posted by Pappy 2015-08-25 14:51|| 2015-08-25 14:51|| Front Page Top

#24 As KBK stated. The three fifths clause was insisted on by the northern states.

Posted by Betty Hitler2611 2015-08-25 18:52|| 2015-08-25 18:52|| Front Page Top

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