The Detroit Free Press has an excellent OpEd.
Three examples:
One of the premises behind the support of civil rights groups for all affirmative action programs is an unspoken demand for reparations.
….
A second premise behind reverse discrimination policies is the morally and logically indefensible notion that minorities are entitled to representation in every university class, profession, government contract award, etc., in proportion to their numbers in the population as a whole.
….
Ironically, anyone who advocates the genuine equal protection of the laws that can only come from a color-blind system is smeared as “racist” and “divisive.” Opponents of this long overdue reform will resort to the most vicious and ugly tactics to avoid having to address the merits of the issue.
Read, as they say, the whole thing.
My family came to Virginia in 1619. They owned slaves for almost 250 years. But I didn’t. We don’t punish the son for the sins of the fathers. There will never be reperations for slavery here. Any Congress that passed it would be turned out next election. Any president who signed such a bill would be impeached.
Very fine op/ed, John; thanks for posting it. (And, I tried to track back, but, something still not right. ONE of these days I will “track back” and figure out what the difficulty is!
Joel C. Mandleman writes:
>>>”Beyond the federal and state civil rights laws and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on poverty and education programs, job training and more, beyond the most bloody war in our nation’s history fought by Northern whites to put an end to slavery, how much compensation is due the great-great-grandchildren of enslaved people?”
This is an attempt by the author to obfuscate the situation. It was not simply “northern whites” who fought and died in the Civil War against SECESSION. Nearly 200,000 blacks served in the Union Army, a fact on its own that thwarts the author’s intent to emasculinate African American males as incapable of fighting for their own liberty.
Second, the end of slavery was not the end of anti-black racism in America. Institutional racism, as exhaustively pointed out by any number of my previous posts is rife in America in 2006.
Third, the “hundreds of billions of dollars on poverty and education” programs were NOT exclusively for black people. As a matter of fact, over the years these programs existed, MORE WHITE PEOPLE received the benefit of these programs than blacks. Sheer population demographics make this argument specious. However, those types of facts don’t support the author’s agenda, so they aren’t mentioned.
Very interesting op-ed, indeed.
–Cobra