How are slavery reparations fair?
How are slavery reparations fair?
This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states "the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries".
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That's 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I've paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn't this just a country that isn't doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying "oh there's this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling"?
Shouldn't payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don't flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don't know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
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Reparations are fair because of wealth that it created for a group of citizens: It doesn’t mean your personal wealth. Also just a note: repatriation doesn’t have to be monetary because labor can create wealth as well.
For example we are japanese american, wealth made from 1900-1945 was wiped out by internment. My husband’s family farmed on property that is now worth millions of dollars. That’s wealth that went to people who took the land from his family after they were forcefully removed. That wealth could have helped the next generation of japanese americans, that wealth went to white people instead because of policies made by white people. THIS IS NOT ABOUT WHETHER INTERNMENT WAS RIGHT OR WRONG.
Same thing with slaves, the work they did became wealth for white people collectively. Then when they were freed it didn’t mean that they got to get the wealth back from them. They ate still discriminated so the wealth they created are still circulating within white people as a whole.
Reparation means to circulate the wealth that white people disproportionately have to the group of people who otherwise be using that wealth right now.
Also no one told white people how to spend money they made off of black slaves. Why do white people get to tell how the reparation money should be spent? That’s not reparation, that’s still white people trying to control people of color.