The US Military Academy at West Point is being sued for its race-based admissions policies by the same group that won a landmark case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Supreme Court over affirmative action earlier this year, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
If you inherit a house with a leaky roof, it isn’t your fault the roof is leaking. It is your responsibility to fix the roof now though.
It isn’t just about the rich people who profited off slavery. It is also about the net effect of the entire society’s racism. Things like black children being given worse education or black families being prevented developing generational wealth through home ownership. We didn’t cause that, but we all inherited the house with the leaky roof and it’s our responsibility to fix it.
I am pretty sure if you inherit a house you can sell the house.
I guess the equivalent of that for a country would be moving to a different one.
Edit: That was a bit of a snarky answer.
From 1945-1956, the GI bill dispensed $33 billion in loans for over 4.3 million American families. Another 8 million more veterans received education or training. Those went almost entirely to whites.
My grandfather bought a home because of this. The only wealth he had to leave to his children when he passed was that house. My father put a down payment on his own home with that inheritance. In turn when my father passed, I sold his house and paid for a condo in Chicago. That all happened because my grandfather was white.
If I sold a house in my area I could get about half a million dollars, if I moved to say Canada I would have to spend money to do it.
How is gaining half a million equivalent to losing around ten thousand dollars? Also I don’t exactly have to repair a broken roof, I should but I don’t have to.
Generational sin/debt doesn’t make any sense. People are responsible, sometimes, for what they do not what some ancestor did.
I wasn’t literally comparing selling a house to moving out of the country. It’s a metaphor.
What I am saying is that participating in this society is a choice. Along with our rights and freedoms we also accept responsibilities and debts (just like inheriting a house is a choice and with the property you accept the responsibility of maintaining it).
It isn’t generational sin, it is a debt owed by this country to its citizens. It would be absurd for a new president to say the country didn’t have to pay the national debt because that debt was created by previous administrations, right? We all collectively owe that debt as will future generations of citizens until it is paid off.
Why do you keep comparing unrelated things instead of dealing with what you are arguing directly?
The national debt isn’t reparations, inheriting a house isn’t reparations. Reparations is reparations and is a form of generational debt. No one asked for their ancestors to do things that were awful and no one should have to pay for a sin that they did not committ.
The point is not that you committed the sin, but that you benefitted, and continue to benefit from slavery, at the expense of slaves and their descendants. That’s what the metaphor is supposed to illustrate. American society owes a debt too large to ever repay, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to level the playing field a bit.
How would that differ from a generational debt? Exactly. No metaphors to hide behind this time.
Oh now we are trying to sneak in collective judgement. Cute almost missed that.