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Name: McNasty

Comment: We get reparations and what? they walk us to the border?

Name: jazzfan

Comment: Read Robert Taylor's essay also in today's EUR "Other News" section. Blacks have reparations in the form of opportunities, and rather than waiting on someone to give us something, we need to go and take advantage of these opportunites and take it.

Name: PRDC

Comment: Jazzfan..I agree totally. If black people sit around waiting for money, they can forget it. it shouldn't be about money to every black person, could you imagine how many others willcome out thr woodwork. Now is the time for black to take a stand and be proud of what our ancestors did for this country, they are no longer here, but we are and should show them just how proud we are for what they have done. Even if they gave money to all blach people. next year would be like some of us never got it. They would spend it on everything but something positive. So let work to make our race a proud and happy race like days before we even had anything. Put your hands back in your pockets......

Name: PhrozenPharaoh

Comment: Personally, I would rather something like forgiving student loans or giving business grants to start legitimate businesses or free tuition for college instead of flat out giving every slave descendent money. That way those of us that are really trying to do something with ourself will benefit and the ones that will just go buy some rims, gold teeth & pimp out their ride while being on welfare won't get anything. Just my two cents.

Name: ss69054

Comment: So if we are rewarded reparations, how many of us will put the money to good use??? Lottery tickets, liqour, weed and the next overhyped name brand. This is a waste of time and I hope he shoots it down. There is no check EVER that can bring closure on my ancestors pain and inhumane mistreatment!!! This is such an insult. Stupid azz Negroes!!!!

Name: McNasty

Comment: *standing O* SS69054!

Name: Kofi

Comment: The Japanese who were interned in WW2 got reparations, Native Americans still get reparations. Inuit's in Alaska still get reparations in the form of regualar payments. Why when it comes to black folks people (including other black people) suddenly get stupid with wild specultion around how we will mis-use the money. If someone harms you, you have the right for legal redress. Read Randall Robinson's The Debt.

Name: HarrisThomas

Comment: according to Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15, "confiscated as Federal property a strip of coastal land extending about 30 miles inland from the Atlantic and stretching from Charleston, South Carolina 245 miles south to Jacksonville, Florida. The order gave most of the roughly 400,000 acres to newly emancipated slaves in forty-acre sections" [link: http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/special-field-orde rs-no-15] . . . . . it seems from the text of the historical document that there are no 40 acres and a mule due to all decendants of slaves because the order was very specific about the location of the forty-acre sections of confiscated federal property . . . . . moving on past slavery, the long, horrific, and continuing vestiges of Jim Crow are what ails us: don't we really want to be repararated for the human rights violations of Jim Crow? and, if so, what should be appropriate reparations? - we need to have consensus on what we want and why we want it to effectively lobby for it

Name: HarrisThomas

Comment: it’s possible to receive reparations of the sort provided by President Johnson . . . . . consider whether Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” policies and programs included components that could be considered reparations because of some of the issues that the policies and programs addressed such as success in translating some of the demands of the civil rights movement into law; the policy centerpiece of the War on Poverty through which the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs; dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youth develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the first summer jobs established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; the Food Stamps program; the Community Action Program, which initiated local Community Action Agencies charged with helping the poor become self-sufficient; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children [which had originally been started by the Office of Economic Opportunity as an eight-week summer program, as a permanent program]; In 1966 welfare recipients of all ages received medical care through the Medicaid program. ____ Several observers have noted that funding for many Great Society programs, particularly the poverty initiatives, became difficult beginning in 1968, chiefly due to the Vietnam War and Johnson's desire to maintain a balanced budget. Many Great Society initiatives, especially those that benefited the middle class, continue to exist in some form. Civil rights laws remain on the books in amended versions. Some programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, have been criticized as inefficient and unwieldy, but enjoy wide support and have grown considerably since the 1960s.

Name: HarrisThomas

Comment: Interpretations of the War on Poverty remain controversial. The Office of Economic Opportunity was dismantled by the Nixon and Ford administrations, largely by transferring poverty programs to other government departments. Funding for many of these programs were further cut in President Ronald Reagan's first budget in 1981. ____ Conservative economist Thomas Sowell argues that the Great Society programs only contributed to the destruction of African American families, saying "the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life." _____ link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society

Name: ss69054

Comment: Kofi: c'mon now most of our folks would not use that money the way our ancestors would want us too. Will there be new businesses, better schools, etc.? Lets be very realistic because we have more tgan what we have on the past and many of us are not saving a dime to build a legacy in our families let along our community. It is what it us. I mean yes it would be there money and they are entitled do whatever but it just doesnt make sense if it wont be used to advanced our community. In my opinion, I'm sorry no check can erase over 400 years of what my ancestors went through and we still catching it. Money can't erase that and u can't put a price tag on wrongly unjustified humanity that has washed away our true identity as a people.

Name: selina

Comment: ***mixedmate.com*** is a best place for interracial singles, black or white to interact with each other. It is said that love is color blind there. Maybe you wanna check it out.

Name: Big10

Comment: Time to let it go. It's never going to happen. The only people who would benefit from reparations is Walmart and the big three. We all know someone who would take that money and do something stupid with it. Then again if the big 3 did benefit from it I wouldn't mind since I work for a supplier to the big 3.

Name: Oplease

Comment: Kitk said, "If someone harms you, you have the right for legal redress". Slavery ended in 1863. Nobody alive today was harmed by slavery. In fact, African American descendants of slaves have benefitted from slavery. They can lament what happened to their ancestors, but if their ancestors hadn't been slaves they would have been born in Africa instead of the US. Africa is a pit of wretched poverty, brutal violence, and disease. No sane person would wish to have been born there instead of here. Further, most Americans today are descended from people who arrived after slavery ended. Even those descended from people who were here during slavery are most likely descended from non-slave owners. So paying reparations would be unfair. Besides, America has probably spent more helping blacks through Welfare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and education expenses than they claim to be due in reparations. It's long since past time for black people to stop blaming others for their failure to thrive and start expecting more of themselves in terms of behavior and achievement.

Name: HarrisThomas

Comment: Ople%*$e, the US set up a system of apatheid with fe facto and de jure segregation along with Jim Crow policies to take the place of slavery, all of which continue to be economic and sociological cancers that manifest in current day situations whereby blacks are shot in the BART transit system and/or driveways of relative's homes without provocation . . . . . we will never know how the continent of Africa would have evolved sociologically and politically because of continuos European fvcked up meddling for 800+ years . . . . as noted in my comments above, there have been aborted federal government efforts to right the horrific wrongs heaped upon blacks by the US system of aparteid . . . . we blacks may not agree on the fix but we know that the wrongness continues and that the US is not post-racial

Name: Oplease

Comment: Try to stay on topic Harris. The issue is "reparations for slavery". What you term post-slavery apartheid is different. However, moving on to that new topic, the Jim Crow laws were in the South, not the whole US. And those ended before most blacks living were born. It's silly to bring up anecdotes like the shooting recently and say they are proof of racism. They may be proof of racism on the part of the individual perpetrators, but they aren't evidence of widespread racism. There is far more racism on the part of blacks towards whites than on the part of whites towards blacks. Whites are taught not to be racist, and most of the time expressionisms of racism by whites are met with condemnation. Blacks, by contrast, are taught to dislike and even hate whites, and to blame whites for their failures. Overt racism by blacks is allowed to flourish. You can claim blacks' violence and poor education and myriad other problems are white people's fault, but then you are left with the success of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and now Hispanic people. All are readily identifiable by their skin color and features (because I know your type uses skin color to invalidate the comparison to the Irish experience), yet all have managed to succeed in America. It's hard to believe whites would be racist against blacks but not against all those other people. Black people have to embrace education, not deride it as "acting white". They have to marry and raise their kids together. 70% of black children being born out of wedlock is an abomination. They have to teach their kids how lucky they are to be in America, not that America is a bad place that enslaved them. They have to take responsibility for their actions and for the culture they raise their kids in. We're in tough economic times, and we cant' afford to have 14% of the population utterly dysfunctional and draining resources.

Name: HarrisThomas

Comment: oh, I am very much on topic, Oplease and it's interesting to note that you take issue with Jim Crow but not the totality of the American system of apartheid which simultaneously included segregation . . . . . I don't like people saying that we should be reparated for slavery, however, Jews, Japanese, and to an extent, Native Americans have been reparated [casinos] so, why not blacks? . . . . . there are those who see slavery/apartheid as the same piece with one existing because of the other . . . . . Jim Crow policies may have greatly impacted the south but de jure and de facto segregation definitely impacted the rest of the country with much similarity to Jim Crow [a great example is sub-prime lending/community red lining by banks that have been major economic inequatable situations applicable to blacks that did not take into consideration excellent credit history; another example is treatment both by police as well as the judicial system] . . . . . ALL police are taught to protect white people and white people's culture/property: justice in America is vastly different for whites than for people of color, especially blacks . . . . . if you choose to close your eyes and mind to the hateful conditions that exist because of race-based policies and judicial renderings, that is your picnic and I am not trying to attend it

Name: Oplease

Comment: If you want to sound intelligent, you should try writing in complete sentences and using punctuation and capitalization. Repeated use of a couple of Latin phrases doesn't comunicate what you think it is communicating. You're a victim of the black victimization culture. Blacks fester in anger over wrongs committed against their ancestors while one group after another passes them in terms of accomplishment, education, and income. Then you accept as gospel myths like "driving while black". A year or 2 ago an actual, rigorous study was done in one area and it found that blacks were no more likely to be pulled over than whites. Naturally the study didn't get much attention because it didn't fit the liberal/victim culture agenda. You should google it, you might be able to find it.

Name: HarrisThomas

Comment: attacking my writing style does not deflect my argument . . . . . if it is victimization to draw attention to inequality based upon race, then so be it . . . . . . living in America while black trumps driving while black because the vast range of inequalities exist and rear up when least expected and certainly unbidden at times that make absolutely no sense and white people don't get it . . . . . as a life-long liberal independent, I call it how I see it the same as you and notice that I am not using an adhominem attack [link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem] on you

Name: MelodyCool

Comment: It's so ridiculous reading these type of ignorant comments from Black folks regarding reparations. We have so devalued ourselves we can watch Jews and Asians collect for their mistreatment yet some of you sit and spew the exact same stereotypes but consider yourselves the "exception" of course.

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