Slavery and Reparations

Why slavery is not America’s original sin

Modern histories tend to rely heavily on the new ideological pieties of left-wing activists. First among these is the belief that we live in a totally corrupt and oppressive society – in fact, in the world’s most oppressive and corrupt society. Feeding this belief is the widely accepted claim – at least, within the modern Western world – that slavery is the United States’ ‘original sin’, and alleged to be uniquely evil as practised within the US.

One major American textbook, Traditions and Encounters, appears to describe the Western-dominated slave trade as the largest and most brutal in history, calling even the full sweep of Arab / Islamic slavery ‘smaller than the Atlantic slave trade of modern times’. Elsewhere, the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones argues bluntly: ‘America’s brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Enslaved people were… property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.’

As cities and states charge ahead with reparations efforts, questions are swirling about whether the programs are constitutional and how eligibility would be determined, with one observer saying the government trying to prove whether Black people are actually Black highlights “the insanity” of the programs.

California’s recent allocation of $12 million in its budget towards reparations could leave the Golden State vulnerable to a slew of legal challenges.

Leaders of the Church of England have been scrambling to assure the faithful that their proposed £1 billion fund for slavery reparations will not come from donations to parishes.

Last year the Church of England announced it was establishing a £100 million fund for slavery reparations but later acknowledged there were plans afoot for the far larger target of £1 billion.

It’s full steam ahead for Sankofa Square.

Toronto city councillors on Thursday voted 17-6 in favour of proceeding with a plan to rename and rebrand Yonge-Dundas Square.

No good radical-left public policy proposal can gain any traction with radical-left lawmakers without a radical-left academic study to back it up.

Harvard professors Linda J. Bilmes and Cornell William Brooks have published a study in the “Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences” titled “Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans.” That the radical-left professors say it is necessary to “normalize” reparations suggests that reparations are not “normal” and shouldn’t be attempted. This is especially true when you consider that the very word “normal” doesn’t exist in the usual academic lexicon.

Lib-appointee @SenatorWanda seeks apology for 'Canada's role in the slave trade.' No Parliament legalized slavery. @StatCan_Eng data show most Black Canadians arrived after 1971. https://t.co/RlMZHkFPfA #cdnpoli @MarciIen pic.twitter.com/fzZT1gtEP2

— Blacklock's Reporter (@mindingottawa) May 30, 2024

America’s first operational reparations scheme has been slapped with a lawsuit that calls $25,000 payouts to black Illinois residents ‘unconstitutional.’

The class-action lawsuit led by Judicial Watch, a conservative group, casts doubt on the future of the watershed reparations program in Evanston, a Chicago suburb.

The scheme was launched in 2021 and offers $25,000 payments to black residents who suffered from racist housing policies in the 20th Century.

H.R.7109 or The Equal Representation Act passed the House on a party line vote. Its objective is simple.

“To require a citizenship question on the decennial census, to require reporting on certain census statistics, and to modify apportionment of Representatives to be based on United States citizens instead of all persons.”

California lawmakers are moving to create a “genealogy office” that would help determine an individual’s eligibility for reparations.

The deep blue state has long flirted with ludicrous proposals to spend hundreds of billions of dollars they can dearly afford to those claiming to be the descendants of slaves.

A Democratic congresswoman is calling for black Americans to be exempt from paying taxes as a form of reparations — though she admitted that the plan may not work because many poorer black people “aren’t really paying taxes in the first place.”

Jasmine Crockett, a freshman representative from Texas, said she heard a celebrity — though she could not remember which one — propose making black people tax-exempt, and thought, “I don’t know that that’s … necessarily a bad idea,” she recounted in an interview with “The Black Lawyers Podcast” last week.

A Memphis pastor has started a petition against a bill that would prohibit the study of reparations for descendants of slaves in Tennessee, and in two days, it has more than 500 signatures.

State Sen. Brent Taylor, a Shelby County Republican, is sponsoring the Senate version of the bill, SB0429.

500 signatures doesn’t seem like a groundswell of grassroots support.

Good on Tennessee for the bill.

April 4 (Reuters) – Support is building among Africa and Caribbean nations for the creation of an international tribunal on atrocities dating to the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, with the United States backing a U.N. panel at the heart of the effort.

A tribunal, modelled on other ad-hoc courts such as the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War Two, was proposed last year. It has now gained traction within a broader slavery reparations movement, Reuters reporting based on interviews with a dozen people reveals.

A California Democrat wants to tax sales of gold, cotton, tobacco and other goods linked to slavery — and to divert the money to black residents, in the latest bid to turn reparations into reality.

The bill by Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer is one of more than a dozen bills backed by the California Legislative Black Caucus seeking reparations for black Californians, especially the descendants of slaves.

They stem from a July 2023 report from the state Reparations Task Force, where Jones-Sawyer served as a member, and underscores efforts to turn controversial policies into a legally-binding compensation scheme.

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has declared reparations are due now to compensate for the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a way to tackle “its legacy” in today’s society, including “systemic racism and white supremacy.”

In a statement to mark the U.N. International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery, the veteran Portuguese Socialist said past colonial powers “laid the foundations for a violent discrimination system based on white supremacy that still echoes today.