Quote:
Robert Roeser wrote:
When the US govt payed the Japanese reparations they gave it directly to the people effected. Not the ancestors of the people effected from ancestors of people that did something horrible. If we're going to blame ancestors why not go back, and demand money from the Dutch, Portuguese, and British? Should we give people of Irish decent money for the horrible treatment the received during the 1800's?
Later,
Robert
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I don't think it's about blame. This isn't punitive. This is recognizing that groups of people were put in a bad situation over such a long period of time that simply removing the negative bias isn't enough for returning them to a "fair" state. Obviously the specifics of what that means are debatable, but the simple fact is that in some groups poverty is as heavily pervasive as it is because they were sytematically attacked and stolen from. When after two hundred years or more of overt and subversive discrimination those groups remain the poorest people in the nation, I believe it's not unreasonable to suggest extra resources come from the national collective that is said to be our government. Native reservations are one such example of a set of cultures which I believe deserve reparation-minded action.
Another possible factor to the "why" of AA, albeit a more off-topic one, is crime, which always seems to manifest more readily in poor areas because opportunism becomes a more accepted M.O. So many people think more cops equals less crime and I firmly disagree (knowing a small variety of criminals). It curbs crime a bit, but is a band-aid solution at best. Make it so these economically poor groups have more means than they do (which equates to more resources, including educational systems most notably) and I believe the perceived necessity of crime, and thus it's relative states of tolerance from within those same social groups, will go down.