Posted: Tue Aug 20, 2002 7:03 pm
The sins of the father are not the sins of the son
I do not believe that the people suing for reparations are entitled under the law to reparations. I believe this for two reasons:
1. No one alive today suffered irreparable harm from having been enslaved in the United States.
2. No one alive today ever held anyone in institutional bondage or caused irreparable harm by enslaving someone else.
The legal precedent for slavery exists; we only have to look at the first draft of the Constitution, which made provisions for slavery which were not removed until the passage of the 13th Amendment.
The people advocating reparation cite the Neisi (Japanese-Americans who were held in concentration camps during the Second World War) who received an apology and reparation payments from the US government. The difference is that reparations were not paid to the families or descendents of people interred in these camps; if my memory serves me correctly, only living detainees were compensated.
There is clearly no one alive who was ever the victim of institutional slavery in the United States and has been directly wronged by its practise in this country. I believe that the United States government needs to issue a statement that says in effect, that slavery is wrong, that the United States is sorry that it was ever practised here and that we are ashamed that we were the last "civilised" nation to consider people as property.
However, I do not believe that the US owes any money to anyone over slavery because when slavery was brought here by the British, its practise was widely accepted around the world and that it was considered both legal and moral at the time. The problem for the people asking for reparations is that they want to project todays values up on the past, which is something we cannot do.
Many of the founding fathers of our nation were good and generally moral men. Many of them owned slaves, as was their right at the time. We should not judge them because they acted improperly according to our standards, because by theirs they were acting fully within the law and the social mores of the time.
I do not believe that the people suing for reparations are entitled under the law to reparations. I believe this for two reasons:
1. No one alive today suffered irreparable harm from having been enslaved in the United States.
2. No one alive today ever held anyone in institutional bondage or caused irreparable harm by enslaving someone else.
The legal precedent for slavery exists; we only have to look at the first draft of the Constitution, which made provisions for slavery which were not removed until the passage of the 13th Amendment.
The people advocating reparation cite the Neisi (Japanese-Americans who were held in concentration camps during the Second World War) who received an apology and reparation payments from the US government. The difference is that reparations were not paid to the families or descendents of people interred in these camps; if my memory serves me correctly, only living detainees were compensated.
There is clearly no one alive who was ever the victim of institutional slavery in the United States and has been directly wronged by its practise in this country. I believe that the United States government needs to issue a statement that says in effect, that slavery is wrong, that the United States is sorry that it was ever practised here and that we are ashamed that we were the last "civilised" nation to consider people as property.
However, I do not believe that the US owes any money to anyone over slavery because when slavery was brought here by the British, its practise was widely accepted around the world and that it was considered both legal and moral at the time. The problem for the people asking for reparations is that they want to project todays values up on the past, which is something we cannot do.
Many of the founding fathers of our nation were good and generally moral men. Many of them owned slaves, as was their right at the time. We should not judge them because they acted improperly according to our standards, because by theirs they were acting fully within the law and the social mores of the time.