Zone1 The REAL REPARATIONS story that is rarely told, for obvious reasons.

[westwall]

I do love irony

Fake injun is fake.

 

[Foxfyre]

,,,,

How was that reparations?

It meant that the government did what was reasonably possible/feasible for the freed slaves which was make it possible for them to help themselves. And by the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century according to Thomas Sowell PhD and Walter Williams PhD et al, the black demographic was advancing economically more than any other demographic. All that came to a screeching halt with the "Great Society" initiatives when the government ripped apart black families and designated victim status to all black people. Recommended reading by Walter E. Williams PhD:

Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press Publication) Paperback – April 1, 2011​

Thomas Sowell: "Sowell presents an argument about why a plan for reparations is not only illogical but also impossible to implement, with so many US citizens’ ancestors arriving long after the Civil War. He also explains that slavery was common throughout the known world for thousands of years and that abolition movements didn’t begin anywhere in the world until the late 18th century. He reminds us that the United States was not the only country guilty of participating in slavery and yet is the only country debating reparations." Thomas Sowell On The Origins Of Economic Disparities

And also per Sowell: ". . .
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.

If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about."

Thomas Sowell on the Legacy of Slavery Vs. the Legacy of Liberalism

In a November 15, 2014 article in the New York Times (“When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4“) op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that (emphasis added): … the presumption on the part of so many well-meaning white Americans [is] that racism is a historical artifact. They don’t appreciate the...

www.aei.org

The best thing we can do for all Americans, most especially black Americans, is to do away with the modern progressive mentality that divides and separates people into groups and demands they stay there. The underlying factors and the truth of the matter will rarely be seen in U.S. media that buys into that progressive agenda and participates in erroneous group think.

 

[Coyote]

It meant that the government did what was reasonably possible/feasible for the freed slaves which was make it possible for them to help themselves. And by the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century according to Thomas Sowell PhD and Walter Williams PhD et al, the black demographic was advancing economically more than any other demographic. All that came to a screeching halt with the "Great Society" initiatives when the government ripped apart black families and designated victim status to all black people. Recommended reading by Walter E. Williams PhD:

Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press Publication) Paperback – April 1, 2011​

Thomas Sowell: "Sowell presents an argument about why a plan for reparations is not only illogical but also impossible to implement, with so many US citizens’ ancestors arriving long after the Civil War. He also explains that slavery was common throughout the known world for thousands of years and that abolition movements didn’t begin anywhere in the world until the late 18th century. He reminds us that the United States was not the only country guilty of participating in slavery and yet is the only country debating reparations." Thomas Sowell On The Origins Of Economic Disparities

And also per Sowell: ". . .
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.

If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about."

Thomas Sowell on the Legacy of Slavery Vs. the Legacy of Liberalism

In a November 15, 2014 article in the New York Times (“When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4“) op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that (emphasis added): … the presumption on the part of so many well-meaning white Americans [is] that racism is a historical artifact. They don’t appreciate the...

www.aei.org

The best thing we can do for all Americans, most especially black Americans, is to do away with the modern progressive mentality that divides and separates people into groups and demands they stay there.

Thanks for a well thought out answer (it’s refreshing here). I haven’t read Walter Williams so I can’t speak to it, but I don’t think it is entirely correct because it ignores other factors.

First, the idea that tbe OP represents reparations: “the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”

The homestead act was open to everyone equally, which makes it hard to see it as reparations such as were given to the Japanese Americans who were interned or that Germany gave victims of the Holocaust, which included the returning of stolen properties.

What makes the idea of reparations having been given a very mixed bag is how short lived it was:

The government opened up opportunities to freemen that were denied before, and made promises that had they been kept would have constituted reparations. But they weren’t kept and worse they were revoked:

The Short-Lived Promise of '40 Acres and a Mule' | HISTORY

As the Civil War was ending, recently freed Black people were promised land to start independent lives—but Lincoln's assassination led to that plan's demise.

www.history.com

After meeting with the 20 ministers, Sherman signed Field Order 15 on January 16, 1865. The order would reserve 400,000 acres of Confederate land for members of the formerly enslaved population. When the land near the Southeast coast was evenly redistributed, each family would have 40 acres of tillable ground.

“Union generals were attempting to divide these slave plantations into small farm settlements and make them available to the newly freed slaves,” says Valerie Grim, director of Undergraduate Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies and professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

No mention of mules appeared in the order, but some of the formerly enslaved population were granted Army mules, resulting in this reparations program being widely known as “40 acres and a mule.”

The freedmen set out to begin working their new land immediately, with a group of 1,000 settling on Georgia’s Skidaway Island. In subsequent months as many as 40,000 freedmen settled on the redistributed land.

“They were able to parcel it out to some of the former slaves, but for the most part, this dream was never realized,” Grim says.

The order was rescinded after Lincoln’s assassination on in April of 1865, and the 400,000 acres was returned to the Confederate landowners. It lasted only 4 months.

At that point most were forced to become share croppers and tenant farmers, a system not a whole lot better than their former one and one which provided a subsistence level of living and no land of their own which means little they could then pass on.

The period immediately following the Civil War saw the advent of Black Codes, which affected mostly the rural areas but the 1880’s brought Jim Crowe which basically ended a short period of incredible and unprecedented political representation for Blacks.

IMO…the idea of reparations cannot be done for slavery, too complicated, too much time has passed, but it certainly can be done for Jim Crowe.

The other points, that of decline Black income and advent “socio-regression“ due to liberal policies is also problematic.

Black income, best measured by looking at the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, doesn’t exactly reflect the advent of Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Sowell is deceptive in his claims, in part because the appearance of rapid and large economic gains was due, in large part, to the fact they started with nothing, and he ignores the slowdown in decreasing the gap well before liberal policies.

The other thing I would disagree with is Sowell’s statements on public housing in the first half of the 19th century.

The first attempt at public housing began in 193O’s, as part of the New Deal, and they were segregated.

Public Housing History

HOW DID WE GET HERE? A QUICK REVIEW OF PUBLIC HOUSING HISTORY: A New Deal Program with Segregationist Beginnings This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Housing Act of 1949, which significantly increased the number of public housing agencies (PHAs) and led to more widespread construction of...

nlihc.org

In his book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein explains the intensely segregationist beginnings of public housing. The federal government helped local governments carry out their housing segregation policies or did little to stop them. The Public Works Administration (PWA), created under the New Deal to address the country’s housing and infrastructure needs, constructed Techwood Homes in Atlanta, GA, in 1935 as the first federal public housing project. The project evicted hundreds of black families to create a 604-unit, whites-only neighborhood. That same year the Supreme Court ruled the federal government lacked authority to seize property through eminent domain – but local PHAs did have this authority, allowing them to act without proper oversight regarding the placement of public housing.

The federal government’s practice of creating segregated public housing persisted throughout the second half of the 1900s. In 1954, shortly after the federal government expanded the public housing program under the Housing Act of 1949, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision invalidating “separate but equal” public education. Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) General Counsel Berchmans Fitzpatrick stated the decision did not apply to housing. And one year later the Eisenhower administration ended the policy that black and white communities should receive equal quality housing.

The reality of “seperate but equal” is that it was anything but and far more resources were allocated to the White projects than the Black projects, and though the changed, the segregation persisted (much like redlining in real estate) through the 70’s.

When areas become run down, it isn’t due to a “drop in standards” in who they rent to so much as other things leading to an overall deterioration.


part of the effort to clean out the horrible slums little different than that chronicaled by Jacob Rhys at the end of the 19th century. It didn’t really become widespread until the 50’s and 60’s

Exploring 160 Years of the Black-White Wealth Gap

www.nber.org

The ratio of White to Black per capita wealth, which was almost 60 in 1860 when 90 percent of Blacks were enslaved, fell rapidly in the decades immediately after Emancipation. By 1870, it was less than 30. Since Blacks were starting from virtually nothing, their wealth rose at a much faster rate than that of Whites.

Large racial disparities in wealth holding began to decline after slavery ended. The decline slowed in the segregation era, accelerated in the civil rights era, and has reversed since the 1980s.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the rate of decline in the White to Black wealth ratio slowed. It would take another 50 years for the gap to fall by half again, as the emergence of discriminatory laws and policies curtailed Black social, political, and economic advancement. With unequal pay and limited access to capital, Blacks faced challenges that made it difficult to save, invest, and accumulate wealth.

The researchers estimate that if Whites and Blacks had had equal opportunities for wealth accumulation over the last century and a half, the wealth gap today would be 3 to 1, rather than twice that.

With the migration of Blacks to the North, advances in civil rights, and the dismantling of legal segregation of housing and schools, the pace of racial wealth convergence increased between 1960 and 1980, averaging 1.5 percent per year — five times the 0.3 percent annual average value between 1900 and 1930.

 

[Foxfyre]

Thanks for a well thought out answer (it’s refreshing here). I haven’t read Walter Williams so I can’t speak to it, but I don’t think it is entirely correct because it ignores other factors.

First, the idea that tbe OP represents reparations: “the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”

The homestead act was open to everyone equally, which makes it hard to see it as reparations such as were given to the Japanese Americans who were interned or that Germany gave victims of the Holocaust, which included the returning of stolen properties.

What makes the idea of reparations having been given a very mixed bag is how short lived it was:

The government opened up opportunities to freemen that were denied before, and made promises that had they been kept would have constituted reparations. But they weren’t kept and worse they were revoked:

The Short-Lived Promise of '40 Acres and a Mule' | HISTORY

As the Civil War was ending, recently freed Black people were promised land to start independent lives—but Lincoln's assassination led to that plan's demise.

www.history.com

After meeting with the 20 ministers, Sherman signed Field Order 15 on January 16, 1865. The order would reserve 400,000 acres of Confederate land for members of the formerly enslaved population. When the land near the Southeast coast was evenly redistributed, each family would have 40 acres of tillable ground.

“Union generals were attempting to divide these slave plantations into small farm settlements and make them available to the newly freed slaves,” says Valerie Grim, director of Undergraduate Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies and professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

No mention of mules appeared in the order, but some of the formerly enslaved population were granted Army mules, resulting in this reparations program being widely known as “40 acres and a mule.”

The freedmen set out to begin working their new land immediately, with a group of 1,000 settling on Georgia’s Skidaway Island. In subsequent months as many as 40,000 freedmen settled on the redistributed land.

“They were able to parcel it out to some of the former slaves, but for the most part, this dream was never realized,” Grim says.

The order was rescinded after Lincoln’s assassination on in April of 1865, and the 400,000 acres was returned to the Confederate landowners. It lasted only 4 months.

At that point most were forced to become share croppers and tenant farmers, a system not a whole lot better than their former one and one which provided a subsistence level of living and no land of their own which means little they could then pass on.

The period immediately following the Civil War saw the advent of Black Codes, which affected mostly the rural areas but the 1880’s brought Jim Crowe which basically ended a short period of incredible and unprecedented political representation for Blacks.

IMO…the idea of reparations cannot be done for slavery, too complicated, too much time has passed, but it certainly can be done for Jim Crowe.

The other points, that of decline Black income and advent “socio-regression“ due to liberal policies is also problematic.

Black income, best measured by looking at the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, doesn’t exactly reflect the advent of Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Sowell is deceptive in his claims, in part because the appearance of rapid and large economic gains was due, in large part, to the fact they started with nothing, and he ignores the slowdown in decreasing the gap well before liberal policies.

The other thing I would disagree with is Sowell’s statements on public housing in the first half of the 19th century.

The first attempt at public housing began in 193O’s, as part of the New Deal, and they were segregated.

Public Housing History

HOW DID WE GET HERE? A QUICK REVIEW OF PUBLIC HOUSING HISTORY: A New Deal Program with Segregationist Beginnings This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Housing Act of 1949, which significantly increased the number of public housing agencies (PHAs) and led to more widespread construction of...

nlihc.org

In his book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein explains the intensely segregationist beginnings of public housing. The federal government helped local governments carry out their housing segregation policies or did little to stop them. The Public Works Administration (PWA), created under the New Deal to address the country’s housing and infrastructure needs, constructed Techwood Homes in Atlanta, GA, in 1935 as the first federal public housing project. The project evicted hundreds of black families to create a 604-unit, whites-only neighborhood. That same year the Supreme Court ruled the federal government lacked authority to seize property through eminent domain – but local PHAs did have this authority, allowing them to act without proper oversight regarding the placement of public housing.

The federal government’s practice of creating segregated public housing persisted throughout the second half of the 1900s. In 1954, shortly after the federal government expanded the public housing program under the Housing Act of 1949, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision invalidating “separate but equal” public education. Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) General Counsel Berchmans Fitzpatrick stated the decision did not apply to housing. And one year later the Eisenhower administration ended the policy that black and white communities should receive equal quality housing.

The reality of “seperate but equal” is that it was anything but and far more resources were allocated to the White projects than the Black projects, and though the changed, the segregation persisted (much like redlining in real estate) through the 70’s.

When areas become run down, it isn’t due to a “drop in standards” in who they rent to so much as other things leading to an overall deterioration.


part of the effort to clean out the horrible slums little different than that chronicaled by Jacob Rhys at the end of the 19th century. It didn’t really become widespread until the 50’s and 60’s

Exploring 160 Years of the Black-White Wealth Gap

www.nber.org

The ratio of White to Black per capita wealth, which was almost 60 in 1860 when 90 percent of Blacks were enslaved, fell rapidly in the decades immediately after Emancipation. By 1870, it was less than 30. Since Blacks were starting from virtually nothing, their wealth rose at a much faster rate than that of Whites.

Large racial disparities in wealth holding began to decline after slavery ended. The decline slowed in the segregation era, accelerated in the civil rights era, and has reversed since the 1980s.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the rate of decline in the White to Black wealth ratio slowed. It would take another 50 years for the gap to fall by half again, as the emergence of discriminatory laws and policies curtailed Black social, political, and economic advancement. With unequal pay and limited access to capital, Blacks faced challenges that made it difficult to save, invest, and accumulate wealth.

The researchers estimate that if Whites and Blacks had had equal opportunities for wealth accumulation over the last century and a half, the wealth gap today would be 3 to 1, rather than twice that.

With the migration of Blacks to the North, advances in civil rights, and the dismantling of legal segregation of housing and schools, the pace of racial wealth convergence increased between 1960 and 1980, averaging 1.5 percent per year — five times the 0.3 percent annual average value between 1900 and 1930.

That is what separates modern American conservatives from progressives.

Achieving equality to conservatives means preventing people from taking unfair advantage of each other and giving all people opportunity to compete and be the best that they can be. Those choosing that concept will almost always progress far more than those who do not.

Achieving equality to progressives means taking from those who earned it and giving it to those who did not and arbitrarily separating people into victims and oppressors by advantaging the 'victims' and punishing the 'oppressors.' Those who choose that concept are disadvantaged from the beginning.

The government in the 19th Century did what it reasonably could to give freed slaves the chance to help themselves and most did. Most continued to do so despite segregation in the first half of the 20th Century. That is how Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell, born and raised in segregation, were able to get first rate prestigious educations and went on to be powerful influences in the world. You never read Williams? I strongly recommend that everybody does. Start here with one of my favorite Williams' syndicated columns that I have pretty much committed to memory:

Economic Miracle

The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit. Why? It is impossible for anyone to possess the knowledge that would be necessary for such an undertaking. At the risk of...

walterewilliams.com

And on reparations, you'll have a very hard task to refute what he and Thomas Sowell have spent a lifetime researching:

Reparations for Slavery

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for Americans to make reparations for slavery. On June 19, the House judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was “to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the...

walterewilliams.com

Walter Williams: If We're Doing Reparations, Should African Nations Pay for Selling Innocent Black People?

'There is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help.'

www.westernjournal.com

Slavery Reparations, by Walter E.Williams

Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates'

www.creators.com

Or Thomas Sowell noting: “The number of whites who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies …"

Dismantling the Jim Crow laws removed the last of the barriers to black people to be able to compete equally with whites and a few years of affirmative action broke down the last of the institutional barriers. That was almost 60 years ago and the huge majority of black people now never experienced them in their working years.

There will always be isolated cases of unfairness due to people's experience and/or perceptions, but any barriers to success now are not inherited or cultural but are artificially imposed by people who, for their own purposes or however well meaning, demand that black people act, speak, behave, think as 'black' and appreciate that their government is saving them.

 

[MizMolly]

I’m a merciless Indian savage per your Declaration of Independence.

I have Native American ancestry too but I don’t dwell on what happened in the past.

 

[Hellbilly]

I have Native American ancestry too but I don’t dwell on what happened in the past.

"There's a difference between those who see themselves merely as a Native descendant, versus those who embrace their Native roots as being a living and integral part of who they are. One who considers themselves only a descendant says things like, "I'm 1/16th (insert random popularized Native Nation title)” or, "My great grandmother was a Cherokee princess."
This statement may or may not be true, but either way its declaration is largely anecdotal, and only acknowledged when it's perceived as beneficial to them, i.e. a job, a scholarship, a new boyfriend's Pocahottie fetish, or as an excuse for why it's ok for them to wear a headdress while half dressed and drunk on Halloween or at a concert, festival, or sporting event.
These folks will go weeks, months or years without considering their Native ancestry and it's certainly not a part of their everyday lives.
That's why they don't care about the tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women, treaty rights, or extreme poverty in Native communities.
While not a “full blood” others with mixed ancestry can and do embrace their Native roots and a sense of ownership takes place.
When they see race based mascots or ridiculous Native caricatures, they don't see some remote extinct group being "honored." They see that they personally are being mocked, and know they are not a buckskin pantied sexbot, or a silly redskinned stereotype.
They know Natives are alive, human and real because they are Native. They also understand that the land and water and our ceremonies must be protected, because it is theirs as well as their grandparent's, and children's, and children's children.
They are not just descendants- they are Native. As such they will seek out the truth of their heritage and you will find them thirsting for knowledge about their people, culture, language, and ways. They become part of the whole- from tiospaye to Oyate."
-Ruth H. Hopkins, Dakota/Lakota Sioux writer and enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe.

 

[AZrailwhale]

Thanks for a well thought out answer (it’s refreshing here). I haven’t read Walter Williams so I can’t speak to it, but I don’t think it is entirely correct because it ignores other factors.

First, the idea that tbe OP represents reparations: “the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”

The homestead act was open to everyone equally, which makes it hard to see it as reparations such as were given to the Japanese Americans who were interned or that Germany gave victims of the Holocaust, which included the returning of stolen properties.

What makes the idea of reparations having been given a very mixed bag is how short lived it was:

The government opened up opportunities to freemen that were denied before, and made promises that had they been kept would have constituted reparations. But they weren’t kept and worse they were revoked:

The Short-Lived Promise of '40 Acres and a Mule' | HISTORY

As the Civil War was ending, recently freed Black people were promised land to start independent lives—but Lincoln's assassination led to that plan's demise.

www.history.com

After meeting with the 20 ministers, Sherman signed Field Order 15 on January 16, 1865. The order would reserve 400,000 acres of Confederate land for members of the formerly enslaved population. When the land near the Southeast coast was evenly redistributed, each family would have 40 acres of tillable ground.

“Union generals were attempting to divide these slave plantations into small farm settlements and make them available to the newly freed slaves,” says Valerie Grim, director of Undergraduate Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies and professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

No mention of mules appeared in the order, but some of the formerly enslaved population were granted Army mules, resulting in this reparations program being widely known as “40 acres and a mule.”

The freedmen set out to begin working their new land immediately, with a group of 1,000 settling on Georgia’s Skidaway Island. In subsequent months as many as 40,000 freedmen settled on the redistributed land.

“They were able to parcel it out to some of the former slaves, but for the most part, this dream was never realized,” Grim says.

The order was rescinded after Lincoln’s assassination on in April of 1865, and the 400,000 acres was returned to the Confederate landowners. It lasted only 4 months.

At that point most were forced to become share croppers and tenant farmers, a system not a whole lot better than their former one and one which provided a subsistence level of living and no land of their own which means little they could then pass on.

The period immediately following the Civil War saw the advent of Black Codes, which affected mostly the rural areas but the 1880’s brought Jim Crowe which basically ended a short period of incredible and unprecedented political representation for Blacks.

IMO…the idea of reparations cannot be done for slavery, too complicated, too much time has passed, but it certainly can be done for Jim Crowe.

The other points, that of decline Black income and advent “socio-regression“ due to liberal policies is also problematic.

Black income, best measured by looking at the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, doesn’t exactly reflect the advent of Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Sowell is deceptive in his claims, in part because the appearance of rapid and large economic gains was due, in large part, to the fact they started with nothing, and he ignores the slowdown in decreasing the gap well before liberal policies.

The other thing I would disagree with is Sowell’s statements on public housing in the first half of the 19th century.

The first attempt at public housing began in 193O’s, as part of the New Deal, and they were segregated.

Public Housing History

HOW DID WE GET HERE? A QUICK REVIEW OF PUBLIC HOUSING HISTORY: A New Deal Program with Segregationist Beginnings This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Housing Act of 1949, which significantly increased the number of public housing agencies (PHAs) and led to more widespread construction of...

nlihc.org

In his book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein explains the intensely segregationist beginnings of public housing. The federal government helped local governments carry out their housing segregation policies or did little to stop them. The Public Works Administration (PWA), created under the New Deal to address the country’s housing and infrastructure needs, constructed Techwood Homes in Atlanta, GA, in 1935 as the first federal public housing project. The project evicted hundreds of black families to create a 604-unit, whites-only neighborhood. That same year the Supreme Court ruled the federal government lacked authority to seize property through eminent domain – but local PHAs did have this authority, allowing them to act without proper oversight regarding the placement of public housing.

The federal government’s practice of creating segregated public housing persisted throughout the second half of the 1900s. In 1954, shortly after the federal government expanded the public housing program under the Housing Act of 1949, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision invalidating “separate but equal” public education. Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) General Counsel Berchmans Fitzpatrick stated the decision did not apply to housing. And one year later the Eisenhower administration ended the policy that black and white communities should receive equal quality housing.

The reality of “seperate but equal” is that it was anything but and far more resources were allocated to the White projects than the Black projects, and though the changed, the segregation persisted (much like redlining in real estate) through the 70’s.

When areas become run down, it isn’t due to a “drop in standards” in who they rent to so much as other things leading to an overall deterioration.


part of the effort to clean out the horrible slums little different than that chronicaled by Jacob Rhys at the end of the 19th century. It didn’t really become widespread until the 50’s and 60’s

Exploring 160 Years of the Black-White Wealth Gap

www.nber.org

The ratio of White to Black per capita wealth, which was almost 60 in 1860 when 90 percent of Blacks were enslaved, fell rapidly in the decades immediately after Emancipation. By 1870, it was less than 30. Since Blacks were starting from virtually nothing, their wealth rose at a much faster rate than that of Whites.

Large racial disparities in wealth holding began to decline after slavery ended. The decline slowed in the segregation era, accelerated in the civil rights era, and has reversed since the 1980s.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the rate of decline in the White to Black wealth ratio slowed. It would take another 50 years for the gap to fall by half again, as the emergence of discriminatory laws and policies curtailed Black social, political, and economic advancement. With unequal pay and limited access to capital, Blacks faced challenges that made it difficult to save, invest, and accumulate wealth.

The researchers estimate that if Whites and Blacks had had equal opportunities for wealth accumulation over the last century and a half, the wealth gap today would be 3 to 1, rather than twice that.

With the migration of Blacks to the North, advances in civil rights, and the dismantling of legal segregation of housing and schools, the pace of racial wealth convergence increased between 1960 and 1980, averaging 1.5 percent per year — five times the 0.3 percent annual average value between 1900 and 1930.

Sherman didn't have the authority to make promises binding the US Government.

 

[Coyote]

That is what separates modern American conservatives from progressives.

Achieving equality to conservatives means preventing people from taking unfair advantage of each other and giving all people opportunity to compete and be the best that they can be. Those choosing that concept will almost always progress far more than those who do not.

Achieving equality to progressives means taking from those who earned it and giving it to those who did not and arbitrarily separating people into victims and oppressors by advantaging the 'victims' and punishing the 'oppressors.' Those who choose that concept are disadvantaged from the beginning.

The government in the 19th Century did what it reasonably could to give freed slaves the chance to help themselves and most did. Most continued to do so despite segregation in the first half of the 20th Century. That is how Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell, born and raised in segregation, were able to get first rate prestigious educations and went on to be powerful influences in the world. You never read Williams? I strongly recommend that everybody does. Start here with one of my favorite Williams' syndicated columns that I have pretty much committed to memory:

Economic Miracle

The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit. Why? It is impossible for anyone to possess the knowledge that would be necessary for such an undertaking. At the risk of...

walterewilliams.com

And on reparations, you'll have a very hard task to refute what he and Thomas Sowell have spent a lifetime researching:

Reparations for Slavery

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for Americans to make reparations for slavery. On June 19, the House judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was “to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the...

walterewilliams.com

Walter Williams: If We're Doing Reparations, Should African Nations Pay for Selling Innocent Black People?

'There is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help.'

www.westernjournal.com

Slavery Reparations, by Walter E.Williams

Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates'

www.creators.com

Or Thomas Sowell noting: “The number of whites who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies …"

Dismantling the Jim Crow laws removed the last of the barriers to black people to be able to compete equally with whites and a few years of affirmative action broke down the last of the institutional barriers. That was almost 60 years ago and the huge majority of black people now never experienced them in their working years.

There will always be isolated cases of unfairness due to people's experience and/or perceptions, but any barriers to success now are not inherited or cultural but are artificially imposed by people who, for their own purposes or however well meaning, demand that black people act, speak, behave, think as 'black' and appreciate that their government is saving them.

I’m trying to address the points you make without splitting your reply and it is hard, not the way I tend to respond.

First: Conservatives and Liberals.

Both believe in equality and the essential difference is:

Conservatives believe in equal access to the startling.
Liberals believe in equality at the start line.

That is the first difference, and it is not about “being a victim”. It is the recognition that not everyone starts out with the same tools, which can often be a product of privilege (economic, cultural, situational) or sheer luck. Now, once they have those tools (are at the start line) the rest is up to them.

An example is first generation college students

Your statement here:

Achieving equality to progressives means taking from those who earned it and giving it to those who did not.

…is arguable, the most obvious being those inherited family wealth did little to nothing to “earn it” and that wealth could well have been earned off the backs of unacknowledged and underpaid workers. I’m also not sure applies to the discussion because it would seem to be about the safetynet programs?

What Thomas Sowell skips over in his referencing that slavery was everywhere (no one disagrees there) are several facts unique to slavery in America.

Though it did not START out that way, it became race based.

It was generational.

It effectively continued after Emancipation through a system of laws and practices that limited the jobs they could have, where they could live and even what property they could own. It made it difficult to accumulate wealth and property that could be passed on.

There is a good book that touches on the cultural underpinnings of this: American Nations by Colin Woodward

Another excellent book (I’m only just now reading) is Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson, which goes into it in depth.

Striking down Jim Crowe was not like a magic wand that made everything fine. Cultural attitudes and behavior don’t change overnight or in just one generation nor did change occur evenly across the country, it took decades.

Walter Walter Williams. Thomas Sowell and many others (including liberals) succeeded inspite of adversity and I’m certainly not going to diss them.

 

[Foxfyre]

I’m trying to address the points you make without splitting your reply and it is hard, not the way I tend to respond.

First: Conservatives and Liberals.

Both believe in equality and the essential difference is:

Conservatives believe in equal access to the startling.
Liberals believe in equality at the start line.

That is the first difference, and it is not about “being a victim”. It is the recognition that not everyone starts out with the same tools, which can often be a product of privilege (economic, cultural, situational) or sheer luck. Now, once they have those tools (are at the start line) the rest is up to them.

An example is first generation college students

Your statement here:


…is arguable, the most obvious being those inherited family wealth did little to nothing to “earn it” and that wealth could well have been earned off the backs of unacknowledged and underpaid workers. I’m also not sure applies to the discussion because it would seem to be about the safetynet programs?

What Thomas Sowell skips over in his referencing that slavery was everywhere (no one disagrees there) are several facts unique to slavery in America.

Though it did not START out that way, it became race based.

It was generational.

It effectively continued after Emancipation through a system of laws and practices that limited the jobs they could have, where they could live and even what property they could own. It made it difficult to accumulate wealth and property that could be passed on.

There is a good book that touches on the cultural underpinnings of this: American Nations by Colin Woodward

Another excellent book (I’m only just now reading) is Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson, which goes into it in depth.

Striking down Jim Crowe was not like a magic wand that made everything fine. Cultural attitudes and behavior don’t change overnight or in just one generation nor did change occur evenly across the country, it took decades.

Walter Walter Williams. Thomas Sowell and many others (including liberals) succeeded inspite of adversity and I’m certainly not going to diss them.

Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell were not unique among their generation but rather representative of it.

Sowell especially was born into poverty and grew up in a poor inner New York City neighborhood and was educated in a segregated black school. He qualified for the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, the finest in New York, though he dropped out due to family issues at home. After a stint in the Marines he qualified for Harvard, and Columbia and University of Chicago where he earned his PhD in economics.

He would go back to that inner city neighborhood and did an in depth analysis of the track record of his black school as compared to the white kids school two blocks away during the 40's and 50's. He found some years the white school edged out the black school in math, reading, science whatever scores and some years the black school did better but all in all there was complete parity. And he got an education that allowed him to compete with anybody. That was all before the SJW meddling began.

My husband and I both grew up poorer than our classmates and without many of the advantages they enjoyed. Neither of us thought of ourselves as poor--his family didn't have an indoor bathroom until he was 21--nor did we think of ourselves as disadvantaged. Neither of us got a great deal of support or encouragement from our families. On our wedding night we were $21 overdrawn at the bank and we were both working at or near minimum wage.

But we literally built our lives from the ground up and have done pretty darn well. We didn't look to anybody to do it for us, to make it easier for us. It never occurred to us that our success and happiness was not our responsibility alone.

Our kids didn't have anywhere near as much as some of their classmates but we did without a lot of nice things to make sure they got as much advantage as we could afford. They both graduated college with pretty heavy student loan debt that they paid off themselves. Neither started out with much in the way of material resources. They have both gone on to have successful lives and they both make a LOT of money now.

My sister and brother-in-law were educators with master degrees. Of their five kids, one graduated college, three have some college, one chose not to go to college at all. The one who chose not to go to college is now a multi-millionaire who could buy and sell all the others combined.

Now you tell me. How much importance do we put on 'equality' at the starting line when it has almost nothing to do with what success a person achieves in life?

Yes a mom and dad in the home home givse kids a leg up.
Yes a good education in core subjects gives kids a leg up.
Yes a religious faith gives kids a leg up.
Yes staying away from illegal substances and activities gives kids a leg up.
Yes good role models give kids a leg up.
Yes positive reinforcement gives kids a leg up.

All that is far more important than how much money somebody has in the bank.

There is no way to make it equal for everybody at the starting line. The best thing we can do for them is encourage them to look for possibilities, go after their dream, and get out of their way.

 

[MizMolly]

You know damn well when I say your people I’m talking about white people, not your family.

Those white people are long dead. So why do you want whites today to make it right?

 

[Hellbilly]

Those white people are long dead. So why do you want whites today to make it right?

1. Your ancestors never made it right.
2. The effects of what happened is still felt to this day by black people.
The ironic part is if folks who suffered and are still alive is the criteria, we Natives deserve reparations. Personally, I don’t want that. I want my people to have the freedom to be who we are. You white folks demand we respect your culture but refuse to respect our culture or the culture of black people. Unacceptable.

My question to you is why are you white people so opposed to it?

 

[justoffal]

Your people profited at the expense of black people. You need to acknowledge that and make it right.

There are 893.4 MILLION Acres of farmland in the US. So you think giving black people 2% of the farmland and quickly grabbing that back from them was a solution?

Sharecropping was just a way to put black people in debt, it wasn't really doing them any favors. Sure, I'll loan you the money to run your farm that will never allow you to pay it back. It was effectively a form of debt peonage.

Sharecropping - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

When blacks started to migrate north to get those new better paying industrial jobs, white southerners made it a crime for black people to walk along the railroad tracks.

There were probably as many white sharecroppers.

It's still illegal today to walk the tracks

 

[justoffal]

The Blacks gave up the land they were given to move up north to live in shitholes like Detroit.

When they got there they voted in Democrats that promised them everything and delivered nothing but poverty and corruption and that is how the big cities became shitholes.

The Dems were quick to realize that the vote was an easy buy and that the promise was an easy out.

 

[IM2]

There were probably as many white sharecroppers.

It's still illegal today to walk the tracks

Why do whites like you always try these false equivalences?

 

[IM2]

The Dems were quick to realize that the vote was an easy buy and that the promise was an easy out.

Wronng. That's what republicans have done with white racists.

 

[Lisa558]

It meant that the government did what was reasonably possible/feasible for the freed slaves which was make it possible for them to help themselves. And by the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century according to Thomas Sowell PhD and Walter Williams PhD et al, the black demographic was advancing economically more than any other demographic. All that came to a screeching halt with the "Great Society" initiatives when the government ripped apart black families and designated victim status to all black people. Recommended reading by Walter E. Williams PhD:

Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press Publication) Paperback – April 1, 2011​

Thomas Sowell: "Sowell presents an argument about why a plan for reparations is not only illogical but also impossible to implement, with so many US citizens’ ancestors arriving long after the Civil War. He also explains that slavery was common throughout the known world for thousands of years and that abolition movements didn’t begin anywhere in the world until the late 18th century. He reminds us that the United States was not the only country guilty of participating in slavery and yet is the only country debating reparations." Thomas Sowell On The Origins Of Economic Disparities

And also per Sowell: ". . .
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.

If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about."

Thomas Sowell on the Legacy of Slavery Vs. the Legacy of Liberalism

In a November 15, 2014 article in the New York Times (“When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4“) op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that (emphasis added): … the presumption on the part of so many well-meaning white Americans [is] that racism is a historical artifact. They don’t appreciate the...

www.aei.org

The best thing we can do for all Americans, most especially black Americans, is to do away with the modern progressive mentality that divides and separates people into groups and demands they stay there. The underlying factors and the truth of the matter will rarely be seen in U.S. media that buys into that progressive agenda and participates in erroneous group think.

Absolutely true! Blacks were doing much better when they were born into two-parent households. They started to go backwards once the Dems and LBJ decided to replace the husband with government payouts, and thus destroyed the intact families.

The absolutely best thing that blacks could do for themselves is to stay in school and delay children until after marriage. But saying that in these here parts gets you labeled a white supremacist.

 

[IM2]

Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell were not unique among their generation but rather representative of it.

Sowell especially was born into poverty and grew up in a poor inner New York City neighborhood and was educated in a segregated black school. He qualified for the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, the finest in New York, though he dropped out due to family issues at home. After a stint in the Marines he qualified for Harvard, and Columbia and University of Chicago where he earned his PhD in economics.

He would go back to that inner city neighborhood and did an in depth analysis of the track record of his black school as compared to the white kids school two blocks away during the 40's and 50's. He found some years the white school edged out the black school in math, reading, science whatever scores and some years the black school did better but all in all there was complete parity. And he got an education that allowed him to compete with anybody. That was all before the SJW meddling began.

My husband and I both grew up poorer than our classmates and without many of the advantages they enjoyed. Neither of us thought of ourselves as poor--his family didn't have an indoor bathroom until he was 21--nor did we think of ourselves as disadvantaged. Neither of us got a great deal of support or encouragement from our families. On our wedding night we were $21 overdrawn at the bank and we were both working at or near minimum wage.

But we literally built our lives from the ground up and have done pretty darn well. We didn't look to anybody to do it for us, to make it easier for us. It never occurred to us that our success and happiness was not our responsibility alone.

Our kids didn't have anywhere near as much as some of their classmates but we did without a lot of nice things to make sure they got as much advantage as we could afford. They both graduated college with pretty heavy student loan debt that they paid off themselves. Neither started out with much in the way of material resources. They have both gone on to have successful lives and they both make a LOT of money now.

My sister and brother-in-law were educators with master degrees. Of their five kids, one graduated college, three have some college, one chose not to go to college at all. The one who chose not to go to college is now a multi-millionaire who could buy and sell all the others combined.

Now you tell me. How much importance do we put on 'equality' at the starting line when it has almost nothing to do with what success a person achieves in life?

Yes a mom and dad in the home home givse kids a leg up.
Yes a good education in core subjects gives kids a leg up.
Yes a religious faith gives kids a leg up.
Yes staying away from illegal substances and activities gives kids a leg up.
Yes good role models give kids a leg up.
Yes positive reinforcement gives kids a leg up.

All that is far more important than how much money somebody has in the bank.

There is no way to make it equal for everybody at the starting line. The best thing we can do for them is encourage them to look for possibilities, go after their dream, and get out of their way.

Sowell and Williams are idiots. And ignorant white racists use them to defend their racist beliefs.

Here is an example of their stupidity.

“As late as 1950, only 18% of black households were single parent. From 1890 to 1940, a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. In 1938, black illegitimacy was about 11% instead of today’s 75%. In 1925, 85% of black households in New York City were two-parent. Today, the black family is a mere shadow of its past.”
-Walter Williams

In 1939, during this time of great black two-parent families, the poverty rate for employed married black couples was 89 percent. In 1959, the poverty rate for that same couple was 54.9 percent. These sky-high rates of poverty occurred during the time “conservatives” rant about.

Ross, C., Danziger, S. & Smolensky, E. The level and trend of poverty in the United States, 1939–1979. Demography 24, pg.596 (1987)

“In 1965, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, attributed racial inequality as well as poverty and crime in the black community to family structure, particularly the prevalence of families headed by single mothers. Not only did research at the time cast doubt on this causality, but evidence over the last the 50 years demonstrates that rates of child poverty, educational attainment, and crime do not track rates of single parenthood. Thus, even though the share of children living with a single mother rose for all racial and ethnic groups through the mid-1990s and has remained high since then, school completion and youth arrests for violent crimes have declined significantly, while poverty rates have fluctuated according to economic conditions. Family structure does not drive racial inequity, and racial inequity persists regardless of family structure.”
-Amy Traub, Laura Sullivan, Tatjana Meschede and ThomasShapiro, DEMOS, “The Asset Value of Whiteness:Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap.”

Your entire post is nothing more than racist drivel. YOU, a white female, benefitted more from Affirmative Action than anyone else but yet you talk stupid. And even with all those things you presume whites have and do but blacks don't, whites lead the country in crime on an annual basis.

We are owed reparations and not just for slavery. Let's make things clear for the ignoramuses who always want to bring up reparations and run their mouths about slavery. We are demanding reparations for these things(and it's not a complete list):

Slavery, black codes, convict leasing, the fraud perpetrated on blacks landowners after slavery, redlining, restrictive covenants, contract selling, the exclusion of blacks from New Deal Programs and GI Bill, Housing segregation, predatory lending, Human rights violations in law enforcement, medical racism, retail redlining, terrorism, and much more.

And I'm not even including what was done to Native Nations here and their relatives located south of our border. I'm not qualified to do this, brother Hellbilly is and has spoken, All of these things show a consistent pattern of blatant white immorality. So don't try lecturing based on a psychosis whereby you think that you get to forget everything whites have done and continue doing while thinking you can gaslight and bully those whites have wronged into silence.

 

[Foxfyre]

Absolutely true! Blacks were doing much better when they were born into two-parent households. They started to go backwards once the Dems and LBJ decided to replace the husband with government payouts, and thus destroyed the intact families.

The absolutely best thing that blacks could do for themselves is to stay in school and delay children until after marriage. But saying that in these here parts gets you labeled a white supremacist.

That's the truth for people of all skin colors, ethnicities, countries of origin, circumstances. The white liberal's programs and efforts to 'help' black people have done them far more harm than good.

In 1982 the field in the Kentucky Derby was large and they had to set up a second set of gates. No horse starting from a second set of gates had ever won the Kentucky Derby, much less the horse starting from the furthest gate. But that year starting from the furthest gate, Gato del Sol won the Kentucky Derby.

People aren't in a horse race and the inequality of starting positions, sometimes huge inequities, are real and inevitable. And inequities in individual ability can greatly vary from person to person no matter what his/her skin color. Everybody isn't cut out to be a movie star or athlete or entertainer who can command massive salaries. Everybody doesn't have the aptitude, intuition, ambition to become wealthy doing business.

But among factors that determine a person's success in life, starting position is one of the least important.

Regardless of starting position the best formula for success remains the same for the huge majority of people to enjoy not only more prosperity, but a better, more stable life if they:

Have two responsible parents in the home
Stay in school in educate themselves
Stay away from illegal substances and activities
Be willing to take whatever jobs they can get at whatever wages to develop a work ethic, acquire experience and skill set, earn references
Delay having children until they are in a marriage with a responsible spouse
Have liberty to provide for themselves instead of looking to government to do it for them.

The drug culture has done immeasurable harm to American society, but also. . .

Progressives whose policies decimated the black families and relegated them to victim status, destroyed the institutions they could count on, and encouraged black people to look to government to take care of them have done every bit as much harm to them as Jim Crow laws and maybe more.

 

[Foxfyre]

Sowell and Williams are idiots. And ignorant white racists use them to defend their racist beliefs.

Here is an example of their stupidity.

“As late as 1950, only 18% of black households were single parent. From 1890 to 1940, a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. In 1938, black illegitimacy was about 11% instead of today’s 75%. In 1925, 85% of black households in New York City were two-parent. Today, the black family is a mere shadow of its past.”
-Walter Williams

In 1939, during this time of great black two-parent families, the poverty rate for employed married black couples was 89 percent. In 1959, the poverty rate for that same couple was 54.9 percent. These sky-high rates of poverty occurred during the time “conservatives” rant about.

Ross, C., Danziger, S. & Smolensky, E. The level and trend of poverty in the United States, 1939–1979. Demography 24, pg.596 (1987)

“In 1965, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, attributed racial inequality as well as poverty and crime in the black community to family structure, particularly the prevalence of families headed by single mothers. Not only did research at the time cast doubt on this causality, but evidence over the last the 50 years demonstrates that rates of child poverty, educational attainment, and crime do not track rates of single parenthood. Thus, even though the share of children living with a single mother rose for all racial and ethnic groups through the mid-1990s and has remained high since then, school completion and youth arrests for violent crimes have declined significantly, while poverty rates have fluctuated according to economic conditions. Family structure does not drive racial inequity, and racial inequity persists regardless of family structure.”
-Amy Traub, Laura Sullivan, Tatjana Meschede and ThomasShapiro, DEMOS, “The Asset Value of Whiteness:Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap.”

Your entire post is nothing more than racist drivel. YOU, a white female, benefitted more from Affirmative Action than anyone else but yet you talk stupid. And even with all those things you presume whites have and do but blacks don't, whites lead the country in crime on an annual basis.

We are owed reparations and not just for slavery. Let's make things clear for the ignoramuses who always want to bring up reparations and run their mouths about slavery. We are demanding reparations for these things(and it's not a complete list):

Slavery, black codes, convict leasing, the fraud perpetrated on blacks landowners after slavery, redlining, restrictive covenants, contract selling, the exclusion of blacks from New Deal Programs and GI Bill, Housing segregation, predatory lending, Human rights violations in law enforcement, medical racism, retail redlining, terrorism, and much more.

And I'm not even including what was done to Native Nations here and their relatives located south of our border. I'm not qualified to do this, brother Hellbilly is and has spoken, All of these things show a consistent pattern of blatant white immorality. So don't try lecturing based on a psychosis whereby you think that you get to forget everything whites have done and continue doing while thinking you can gaslight and bully those whites have wronged into silence.

Bless your heart.

 

[IM2]

It meant that the government did what was reasonably possible/feasible for the freed slaves which was make it possible for them to help themselves. And by the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century according to Thomas Sowell PhD and Walter Williams PhD et al, the black demographic was advancing economically more than any other demographic. All that came to a screeching halt with the "Great Society" initiatives when the government ripped apart black families and designated victim status to all black people. Recommended reading by Walter E. Williams PhD:

Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press Publication) Paperback – April 1, 2011​

Thomas Sowell: "Sowell presents an argument about why a plan for reparations is not only illogical but also impossible to implement, with so many US citizens’ ancestors arriving long after the Civil War. He also explains that slavery was common throughout the known world for thousands of years and that abolition movements didn’t begin anywhere in the world until the late 18th century. He reminds us that the United States was not the only country guilty of participating in slavery and yet is the only country debating reparations." Thomas Sowell On The Origins Of Economic Disparities

And also per Sowell: ". . .
Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.

If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about."

Thomas Sowell on the Legacy of Slavery Vs. the Legacy of Liberalism

In a November 15, 2014 article in the New York Times (“When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4“) op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that (emphasis added): … the presumption on the part of so many well-meaning white Americans [is] that racism is a historical artifact. They don’t appreciate the...

www.aei.org

The best thing we can do for all Americans, most especially black Americans, is to do away with the modern progressive mentality that divides and separates people into groups and demands they stay there. The underlying factors and the truth of the matter will rarely be seen in U.S. media that buys into that progressive agenda and participates in erroneous group think.

Like I said, Sowell is an idiot.

Passed in 1862, the Homestead Acts gave away 246 million acres of land.To qualify for Homestead land, a person had to be a citizen of the United States, and blacks were not given citizenship until 1866. This alone should provide evidence of the limited benefit this act had for blacks in America. Research shows that 99.73 percent of that land went to whites, including white immigrants. 1.5 million white families were given free land, the equivalent of a minimum of $500,000 per family. Today, 93 millionwhites still benefit from the Homestead Act, this is about forty percentof the current white population in America.

Shawn D Rochester, The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America, pp, 49

“As early as 1865, certain white Southerners put legal obstacles in place to prevent ex-slaves from acquiring property. In the provisional state governments under President Johnson’s protective leniency, planters not only prohibited black landownership but enacted extreme measures of social control that virtually restored slavery. The black codes struck directly at freedmen striving to escape their subordination and to obtain their communities. It was class and race legislation.”

Williams, T. (2000). The Homestead Act: A major asset-building policy in American history (CSD Working Paper No. 00-9). St.Louis, MO: Washington University, Center for SocialDevelopment. The Homestead Act: A Major Asset-Building Policy in American History

So let's take a look at what the government actually did instead of Sowells apology to white racists for blacks that chose to say we are equal.

On March 3, 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act was passed by congress. The Freedman’s Bureau was supposed to be a temporary agency with the mission to provide “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel states.”

The Freedmen’s Bureau was the beginning of a long line of halfmeasures using public policy to create solutions to assist black people. The bureau was supposed to help blacks acquire what was necessary to live successfully as free American citizens. But as in every other effort of its kind, the agency was understaffed and underfunded. What made things even worse was that it was managed by individuals who either had paternalistic beliefs or had no genuine interest in helping the newly freed blacks.

The primary indicator of the lack of importance placed on the agency was that it was temporary. Initially, the bureau was supposed to be open for one year. Think about that for a second. The United Statesgovernment believed that it would take one year to solve a problem createdby 246 years of actions by colonial and federal governments. In 1866, the charter came up for review. Lincoln was gone, and in his place was Andrew Johnson. Johnson opposed the continuance of the Freedmen’s Bureau after only one year. His reasons sounded much like some today, claiming that it would make blacks dependent on the same government that had depended on their free labor for nearly one hundred years and because the bureau provided services to blacks that poor whites could not get. Johnson“conveniently” ignored that poor whites had not been enslaved since 1619.

Johnson vetoed the charter to keep the bureau open after just one year. His veto was overridden. Southern members of Congress then went to work weakening the bureau. It was supposed to be funded by Congress and rent paid by freedmen for land. Thanks mostly to its southern members, Congress never provided enough funding for the Bureau. The revenue that was supposed to come from rent didn’t because President Andrew Johnson pardoned southern planters in 1865 and gave the land back to them. The bureau stayed understaffed and underfunded.

M.I. Marshall, Get Your Knee of Our Necks, pgs 80-81

“During a period where many citizens were given public land by the government, Blacks who wanted to be small farm owners had to pay for their land and struggle against obstacles that most of their White counterparts did not.”

Williams, T. (2000). The Homestead Act: A major asset-building policy in American history (CSD Working Paper No. 00-9). St.Louis, MO: Washington University, Center for SocialDevelopment. The Homestead Act: A Major Asset-Building Policy in American History

Freedmen also faced the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”attitude of people the freedmen’s labor helped to live comfortably ignoring how the government had been THEIR bootstraps. During those times, that was called the Free Labor Philosophy. The Free Labor Philosophy was a northern belief about labor. As it pertains to the newly freed blacks, the northern whites in charge of the Freemans Bureau believed that blacks should earn the land they wanted by working to make money to buy it. These northern whites thought that if the government gave the land away, blacks would not respect work and would get used toliving off the government.

M.I. Marshall, Get Your Knee of Our Necks, pgs 81

So while whites were being given land during the first years of the Homestead Act, blacks had to make the money to pay for that same land. Sowell doesn't mention that and no one wants to listen to white female paternalism given the fact that white women can marry white men and benefit from their racism and have done so.