![]() Welfare reparations made many of them into something really special. Once the state recognized Black Americans as part of the sovereign mass, they did not disappear into racial anonymity. Their existential angst began to set in, cushioning a pathological ethos that would seek to denigrate the dream that America was predicated on - not economic equality, but political equality.Ī haunting question threatened the psyches of many Black Americans after the civil rights era: What do I do with my life when the “deliverance quest” for which I was searching finally has been delivered by the republic of the United States? He sought moral parity and respect for all disenfranchised persons.Īnd still that was not enough for some Black Americans. He sought neither revenge nor power nor dominion over whites. King projected the image of a benevolent universe. Their fractured humanity was made into a universal moral homogenous image: All human beings are deserving of equal treatment before the law all are to be respected for their moral worth and shared humanity. He equalized the two juxtaposing faces of humanity - those of Blacks and whites - reduced the moral proximal distance between them and equalized them. He played a significant role in not just embarrassing those who had not treated Black suffering seriously, but also in refraining from morally damning those who were guilty of mistreating Blacks. did something restorative and healing to a nation’s conscience. But that changed with the civil rights movement and the passages of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts and 1965 Voting Rights Act. All their lives, their existence was forged in painfully oppressive conditions, and yet, few claimed to be real victims - largely, one could argue, because such talk had no moral traction in a world that did not take the moral suffering of Black people seriously. The demand for reparations is a response to a crisis of meaning in the lives of many Black Americans living in an age of post-oppression. Equity rests on the idea that equal rewards ought to proceed from unequal performance. It unquestioningly assumes that all persons are actually born or behave equally or acquire talents, skills, capabilities of equal proportion in intelligence, strength, discipline, perseverance, frugality, temperance, tenacity, exercise of cognitive capabilities, moral choices and myriad characteristics that determine outcomes. ![]() It rests on the idea that all persons - outside the sphere of political and legal equality - are truly equal. They are being taught to treat equity, the belief in equality of results, as an inalienable human right. Reparations rhetoric is a means of socializing Black Americans into believing that white Americans owe them something, anything other than respect for their individual rights. The 1960s welfare programs in America were supplemented by a series of formal affirmative action programs that were themselves, I believe, a form of reparations: attempts to include Blacks in corporate and university institutions where they had been traditionally barred from entering. As Stanford University economist Martin Anderson stated: “The most ambitious attempt to redistribute income ever undertaken in the United States had begun.” Millions of government checks, representing tens of billions of dollars, were printed, mailed and cashed. ![]() Reparations for Blacks has been achieved since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the establishment of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the initiatives launched by his “ War on Poverty.” These programs specifically targeted Black Americans and the recipients of tax dollars from the middle- and higher-income classes. ![]() 40, which has the support of President Biden and the endorsement of Vice President Harris, is an anachronistic document. The reparations legislation known as H.R.
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