What are your beliefs about the idea of slave reparations? To me, I don’t even know if I am qualified to answer the question. Maybe it should be left to decide by those who are actually descendants of slavery. My initial thoughts on it were that rather than making slave reparations we should devote those funds to decreasing the disparities that still exist today, such as the lack of color among ceo’s, the wage disparity between blacks and whites etc…
© 2026 – SoulSequel
14 responses to “Slave reparations”
It sounds silly to me that people who were never slaves want payment from people who never owned slaves. My bloodline is Native American and after the Modoc Wars my Great Grandmother was taken to the San Diego Mission in California to be used as a squaw slave. On my father’s side, he was French from LaCern, France. I’m sure his family did not own slaves.
So many people come from families that had nothing to do with the owning of slaves.
@ladybarbara yeah, if it ever were to come into fruition there would beed to be some sort of criteria one would have to meet to receive payment, and then think of the money spent researching and verifying everyone’s claims? Seems simpler just to adjust things to be more fair today.
I’d be down with it. I would like to hear some of the suggestions they have to do it though. I understand that doing harm to generations of people can harm later generations even if they are no longer treated as such. You leave the whole group in a hole to dig themselves out of. If you force people into terrible housing with terrible schools and little to no jobs, they aren’t going to be able to get out of that as easy as those whose generations have always had the resources. I don’t know the best way to help people out of that hole that was created for them, so I’d need some smarter people to suggest some.
@yin what would be nice is if we were given a checklist when we paid our taxes and we could select where our money goes. I’d much rather designate my money to slave reparations than a fighter jet.
@Scarlett2 I am hesitant to totally go with that just based on there would be things that would absolutely need funding that would only get like 50% or so and would ruin it, like medicare stuff. I’m open to hear some suggestions on how to implement such a thing though. I do agree it would be better than a lot of the crap we spend it on now, like the over inflated military spending. We somehow have an endless pit of money for all of that. Everything else is a brawl. Can’t help people, but at least we kill good. Such a damn shame.
@Scarlett2 omg yes! Or we could contribute a little extra (optionally) like they do for pres. campaign or wildlife conservation.
The bill is too high.
A culture that exists by sweeping everything under the rug isn’t looking to pay its bills. It’s too busy just running from itself.
I have thought about this a lot, and I have come up with an idea:
The money could come from taxes, for a certain number of years from the entire US population (including non-white people). BUT the intent would be to gather funds for rehabilitating black communities that are, at the moment, riddled with poverty, drugs, lack of education, and high incarceration rates.
The funds would then be administered by a temporary branch of the government made up of an elected body of most probably black people to administer the funds into building up schools in poor black neighborhoods, address incarceration problems and drugs and violence, all to bring as many black people as possible up to the level of the average citizen with a clean criminal record. And I think the best place to start for that would be building a good school infrastructure.
@georockstar09
“… all to bring as many black people as possible up to the level of the average citizen”
um, what??
@Santa Bunny Most people living below the poverty line are black, and a lot of inner city children (who are mostly black) living in poor neighborhood receive poorer quality education than other parts of the nation. Not to mention incarceration rates, which has been termed the “New Jim Crow” as a ploy to keep black people from voting, and so on. A lot of these issues stem from a cycle of poverty, as an indirect method to keep black people at substandard living levels compared to other American citizens. Some kind of reparation, especially financial ones, could help with some of these issues and break that cycle.
I should add, regarding the criminal record, I’ve known a lot of white people who, for instance, smoke pot, and they have a clean criminal record. Whereas black people are sometimes targeted for arrests for possessing pot. So by “clean criminal record” I mean incriminating and arresting black people less often than they do, considering that white people get less than a slap on the wrist or get off with a warning for the same offence.
@georockstar09 I get it, sounded bad.
@Santa Bunny Yeah, didn’t mean blacks were inferior, just their living conditions because of circumstances caused by whites exploiting and oppressing them.
@georockstar09
that’s going pretty far, but I think I understand what you mean.
@Scarlett2
How about those of us who are Native American?
How about us??????????????????? We got fucked too.