Other than "white guilt" what does this accomplish. To the best of my knowledge we have spent 19 trillion on LBJ's War on Poverty and poverty still exits, All we have accomplished is creating generations dependent on government hand outs. Obviously the only thing reparations will accomplish is buying the black vote. Where is Galt's Gulch and when is the plane leaving?

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I got into a discussion about this on another board, and I just had to paste it in here, in increasing order of ridiculousness...

1. What if a black person had slaves on one side of his family but not the other? Does he get half a reparation?

2. If his wife’s family immigrated in the 20th century, do they get a quarter reparation?

3. What if the man is a quarter AfAm and the wife is half and did descend from slaves? Ok, so now they get 5/16 reparation? If I as a white person had slave owners in half of my family who owned the man’s ancestors, is it now… I lose track… 5/32 reparations for the man and 1/16 for the wife… AUUGH!

4. Ok, let’s try one more. Suppose I, as a white person, have one parent whose parents came from Europe in 1880 (thus are clean), but the other had some slave owners on his mother’s side, but the whites on his father’s side lived in the north, or didn’t own slaves, and perhaps there were mulattoes on his mother’s side, and some owned slaves and some didn’t (There were black slave owners and white slaves, people don't realize that)… so I would pay nothing on my father’s side, but maybe 31/64 on my mother’s… but of course it’s possible that her great-great-grandfather owned slaves but her great-great-grandmother didn’t marry him until after 1865, which makes it now 61/128, ok now I’m just making up these numbers, but you get the idea.

Okay, I tell you what:

[sarcasm mode="on" level="high"]
We'll give a black citizen reparations IF they can prove that they are directly descended from a slave, but it must be divided equally among all living descendants of said slave. But subtracted from the total amount will be the difference in living standards between that citizen's living standard and that which he would have had were his ancestors NOT brought over and was therefore born in socialist Zimbabwe and living on $1 per day.
While we're at it, let's just give our "stolen" Texas and California back to Mexico, on the condition that they turn around and give it back to Spain, and Spain give it back to the Aztecs, and they give it back to the Mayans... And of course we'll give the Dakota Indians back South Dakota, if they give it to the tribe THEY took it from, and they give it to the tribe THEY took it from...
[/sarcasm]

I'm still waiting for someone to announce their operation of a working time machine. Otherwise, how are we going to correct a condition which hasn't existed (outside of Democratic policies) for >150 years?

In all seriousness: unless you were personally a slave, there are zero reparations due to you. Unless you were personally a slave owner, there are zero punishments due to you. This whole issue is so repulsive and devoid of any rational basis it makes my head spin.

You can't fix stupid. Stupid can milk some stupid votes from stupid voters, though.

All those individuals who are proven to have owned slaves should be made to pay! That is justice.

Consider the fact that had there not been slavery, then none of those who would have had parents who were slaves would have been born and those those asking for reparations today, would never have existed.
In a way the reparations would be for having to live their lives rather than having never existed.
Likely most other living humans would not have ever existed.
The past must have happened for the present to exist.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If the estimated number of slaves brought into the colonies was 350K (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave...) and the Union lost 360K lives in reuniting the country and freeing them (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/sc..., then I'd say that each freed slave family should send a thank you note to each union family that lost lives (including many from my home county that died defending Cemetery Ridge @ Gettysburg), honor their descendants for persevering, count their blessings, and shut the F up.

Since black slavery at the time was a
southern institution, any reparations should be made from the Confederate treasury in Confederate money.

When will i get reparations for these scumbag democrats using up my Social Security to buy votes and I have to work till 66.5 before I get SS. I never owned a damn slave and no one in my family ever did......In fact my Father was an indentured servant in England when he was an apprentice. I have copies of his papers of indentured servitude. When will I get my reparations????

So, they're going to get testimony from an author exploiting skin color and an actor doing the same. Both have benefited enormously from living in the U.S. and neither as far as I can tell have the slightest experience in being a slave.

The original slaves were forced unwillingly from Africa to the Americas. Maybe any payments to the descendants demanding reparations should include free willing or unwilling repatriation to Africa and then from there they can willingly decide what to do next. Think of the benefits for those repatriated descendants! They will no longer have to put up with "continuing discrimination" or "the social effects of slavery and segregation" because they will be living in virtually all black countries with all black leadership! There will be no cause to worry about such things as "economic issues are the root cause of many critical issues in the African-American community today" because they will be completely free to do whatever they wish for their own economic benefit in an entire continent of people just like themselves!

This is a bunch of crap! It's the New Jim Crow trying to place a tax or fee on millions of innocent people just for being born white and pay an unearned benefit for being born black. Restating the quote "economic issues are the root cause of many critical issues in the African-American community today" simply means the race baiters and poverty pimps haven't found a way to loot enough so this is a way to loot more. Hell, "economic issues" are the root cause of the critical issue that I don't have a huge yacht and a private jet, too!

So people are proposing reparations to victims of a practice that ended 150 years ago?--Can they produce one single individual who was made a slave?--Since both the perpetrators and the victims are long dead, why do they keep it up?

We wouldn't have had this discussion, if the Confederacy had won. Just sayin'.

This is too much, so the rest of US citizens have to pay for this Slavery Reparations. The damn dem's will do anything to make over the USA in there own image and philosophy screw the Constitution. I don't necessarily like the white supremacists but the First Amendment permits them to believe what they want. This is to put the blame on the current Caucasian population. This is past history but they can't seem to let it go. They want to take down every statue of our founding fathers' because they were slave owners. Dem's just want to rape and pillage this country!

the largest slave owner pre-civil war was a black man in the south...owned his own plantation...plus they need to get the money back from those who sold them into slavery in Africa....and today there are more whites in slavery in Africa than slaves ever sold to the U.S.

Everyone who is a slave or has been one in their lifetime line up on the left and all slave owners line up on the right. Let those two groups work out what should be done. Don't forget to include the Africans who were in the business of kidnapping Africans and selling them to the slave traders. They owe reparations to those they harmed.
There is no one alive that owes reparations and no one who is reparations.

Well, if they want reparations then they'd have to start with the descendants from the country one is descendant from that sold or allowed your descendants to be slaves. Next go after the descendants of the Muslim Slave Hunters, then the descendants of the Shipping Companies that took your descendants to a country to serve as a slave.
Then, a descendant of all those descendants would first go after the Last country to abolish slavery and descending from that point to the first to abolish slavery.

OH, WAIT!...scratch the above because slavery still exist today! In Africa, the Middle East, In China and many Islands...in fact...Every Conscious Being and those that could become so...is still a slave of their own Governments!

Now, What will you do?

Here are a recently discovered Muslims holding a Slave: https://explainlife.com/muslim-immigr...

It is soooo ridiculous!

I;m 6-4, 230 pounds and white. Just self identified as a 5-1, 99 pound black grandma.

What a waste of OUR money to hold hearings, let alone actually pay out taxpayer money to living people who were never even slaves. BS to the max.

If they want to talk about reparations, how about reimbursing my family for the theft of property committed by the Government and the slaves themselves when they freed them? I know that this would be controversial but it is just as reasonable as what they are asking for.

This has been something on the slow burner for decades. Many colleges are not requiring students to pay a fee to support reparations to African American students-- Georgetown University comes to mind.

I don't know how I feel about this in light of knowing a great deal about my family tree. I know one ancestor tried to free his slaves long before the war but they refused to go, so my ancestor left his property to the slaves in his will. I know of another member of the family line, a woman with three small children who was left widowed and penniless at the end of the civil war. Her land was taken from her, then she walked the children through the mountains across two states in winter till she reached Maryland, Her and her children, almost dead from starvation, begged for mercy. Her oldest son, 10 years of age became an indentured slave to a Maryland farm owner. It's heart-wrenching: children becoming slaves to keep from starving. As I looked into my family history I would say I found quite a bit of reparation already.
None-the-less... I went to school with kids whose parents couldn't use the same drinking fountain as I did. The anger, the blowback...of course they want reparation. Symbolically, the idea has value. I certainly consider my dignity a matter of high value. I don't think any monetary amount the government can offer would replace what was lost, but let them give it a shot, what the hell. They certainly have wasted plenty of my money on 'ideas' that have no value at all.

Those 'leftist loosies' better be careful. Is there a statute of limitations on this? Our country was only 54-60 years old when a lot of folks freed their slaves and came to Texas. Baby steps! They can't even agree on impeaching our innocent President! They better think about their next election.

Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest. Do it! Go back 6 generations and try to blame me for what they did! Are you considering that some freed their slaves in 1830? You will be researching something that took place more than 189 years ago.

If they really want to be historically accurate we would need to go back probably to paleolithic times
to encompass the history for reparations which would mean genetically everyone alive at some point on a genetic basis lol