Fresh on the heels of a professor suggesting that blacks’ votes should be worth twice whites’ as a form of reparations, comes news of another bright idea from academia’s hallowed halls:
White people should perhaps be forced to submit their taxes to a check for ties to slavery.
Though just hitting the news recently, the idea was proposed during a November 18 Berkeley Conversations panel event entitled “The Future of Freedom: Reparations after 400 Years.” Live-streamed, the video description states that “a distinguished panel of scholars [uh-huh] will consider what the question of reparations means for this freedom’s fulfillment and what kind of future could follow for African-Americans beyond 400.”
Panel participants were law professor Bertrall Ross and assistant geography professor Jovan Scott Lewis, both of UC-Berkeley; law professor Katherine Franke of Columbia Law School; and associate anthropology professor Michael Ralph of New York University.
“Each professor provided past examples of reparations given to marginalized people, and said these could be examples of how to pay reparations to African Americans for 400 years of ‘systemic and violent racism,’” reports Campus Reform.
Franke, for instance, “presented the story of the people of the Sea Islands, a string of islands along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, who, after emancipation in the 1860s, received from the U.S. government titles to thousands of acres of land where they had been enslaved,” related the Berkeley News.
Of course, whether the example is the above, formerly interned Japanese-descent Americans after WWII, or Jewish families compensated by the German government, those given reparations have, in all the cases I’m aware of, been victims who were still alive.
With respect to American slavery, however, there’s a chasm-like disconnect between the victims/victimizers and those who would be compensated and do the compensating. The slaveholders and slaves are long dead.
