It’s stupid to hold anyone accountable for the acts of their ancestors.
In the sense of retribution, sure. However, restitution is still necessary. All slaveowner property should have been confiscated and given to the former slaves, down to the very last penny. We never did that, so the resulting racial wealth disparity has persisted to this day.
Fixing the problem has gotten more complicated due to the passage of time, but it still needs to be fixed. Ideally we’d trace where the wealth of the slaveowners went, confiscate it, and use it for restitution. People aren’t entitled to keep stolen property, even if they receive it unknowingly.
Practically speaking though, restitution would likely need to be funded though taxation. As an anarchist I don’t like the idea of increased taxation, but if such a thing were to gain momentum I wouldn’t feel right opposing it either.
Fixing the problem has gotten more complicated due to the passage of time, but it still needs to be fixed. Ideally we’d trace where the wealth of the slaveowners went, confiscate it, and use it for restitution. People aren’t entitled to keep stolen property, even if they receive it unknowingly.
See, here’s where my problem comes in - I have no issue with punishing those actually involved, but how many degrees of separation are we pursuing here? I don’t find the idea of playing genealogist for the sake of determining whose wealth gets seized appealing. None of us choose to be born who we are - we only choose our actions. The time for that kind of justice is, sadly, long past, even if having every slaver hanged and every freedman granted their property would have been a dream end to the Civil War, instead of the nightmare we ended up with.
No, at this point, the only just means of restitution is necessarily a broad and societal correction rather than attempts at seizing individual property - that is to say, the government should use the resources at its disposal to attempt to correct existing racial wealth disparities rather than try to identify the descendants of the guilty who originally caused it and take it out of their metaphorical hides.
I mean, man, I’m probably clear, since even my white ancestors were post-Civil War immigrants, but that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, matter. It’s a duty to support equitable redistribution of wealth to eliminate racial disparities as a human being and as a countryman, not as someone with white or white slaver ancestors. This started with bigotry - it must end with unity. All of us have a duty to each other, to raise up those who are kept in unequal condition, to stand with those who are isolated, to refuse cooperation to the ideologically prejudiced.
I tend to take a more individualist view of things. I agree that we have some level of duty to each other, but I don’t believe that duty should be enforceable with anything stronger than social pressure. As such, I feel that taxation for collective benefit is fundamentally unjust.
However, unlike right-libertarians, I’m not okay with class stratification. We need to be actively dismantling the power structures that maintain the disparities in our society. I believe that in doing so, we’ll find that taxation isn’t actually necessary, and that we can have a society which is both voluntary and reasonably equal.
It seems like we’re largely in agreement here in practical terms. However on principle, confiscating stolen wealth that someone has been given isn’t a punishment, since they were never entitled to it in the first place.
But how far away do we judge it to be given? That blood money wasn’t just sitting around - it was used to undertake countless projects. Is the architect who was paid for his work now in debt? Is the otherwise-uninvolved merchant of post-war goods subject to seizure (ignoring the enormous problem of Jim Crow and complicity there, for the sake of the argument in the abstract)? His kids? His kids’ kids? His employees? All of them were paid with money stolen from the sweat, toil, tears, and blood of slaves. Generational wealth and the generation of wealth is not a simple matter like “This is your great-great grandfather’s watch, here you go”, and I don’t think it can be, even just in principle, resolved by the same methods that immediate theft can. There are too many degrees of separation involved even just in inheritance from 5+ generations ago.
For a more modern example, if man robs a bank, uses the money to put his kids through college, and only after they graduate, he’s caught and is killed in a shootout with the police, is it moral to suddenly saddle the kids with the debt of their college years? What about the earnings they made afterwards? Are they illegitimate too? They were only made possible by the expenditure of the illegitimately acquired wealth.
None of this is meant to assert that we disagree strongly, I just love discussing hypotheticals, abstracts, and principles.
Lines do get blurry, and that causes real problems with trying to ensure a just outcome. No real way around that. However, sometimes things are more clear cut. If the plantation (or at least the land it was on) is still in the family, maybe it shouldn’t be anymore?
However, there’s an argument to be made that such a confiscation would be too sudden and severe of a shift in the social contract. I still think it should be considered, though. Of course, I also think we shouldn’t allow absentee land ownership in the first place.
In the sense of retribution, sure. However, restitution is still necessary. All slaveowner property should have been confiscated and given to the former slaves, down to the very last penny. We never did that, so the resulting racial wealth disparity has persisted to this day.
Fixing the problem has gotten more complicated due to the passage of time, but it still needs to be fixed. Ideally we’d trace where the wealth of the slaveowners went, confiscate it, and use it for restitution. People aren’t entitled to keep stolen property, even if they receive it unknowingly.
Practically speaking though, restitution would likely need to be funded though taxation. As an anarchist I don’t like the idea of increased taxation, but if such a thing were to gain momentum I wouldn’t feel right opposing it either.
See, here’s where my problem comes in - I have no issue with punishing those actually involved, but how many degrees of separation are we pursuing here? I don’t find the idea of playing genealogist for the sake of determining whose wealth gets seized appealing. None of us choose to be born who we are - we only choose our actions. The time for that kind of justice is, sadly, long past, even if having every slaver hanged and every freedman granted their property would have been a dream end to the Civil War, instead of the nightmare we ended up with.
No, at this point, the only just means of restitution is necessarily a broad and societal correction rather than attempts at seizing individual property - that is to say, the government should use the resources at its disposal to attempt to correct existing racial wealth disparities rather than try to identify the descendants of the guilty who originally caused it and take it out of their metaphorical hides.
I mean, man, I’m probably clear, since even my white ancestors were post-Civil War immigrants, but that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, matter. It’s a duty to support equitable redistribution of wealth to eliminate racial disparities as a human being and as a countryman, not as someone with white or white slaver ancestors. This started with bigotry - it must end with unity. All of us have a duty to each other, to raise up those who are kept in unequal condition, to stand with those who are isolated, to refuse cooperation to the ideologically prejudiced.
I tend to take a more individualist view of things. I agree that we have some level of duty to each other, but I don’t believe that duty should be enforceable with anything stronger than social pressure. As such, I feel that taxation for collective benefit is fundamentally unjust.
However, unlike right-libertarians, I’m not okay with class stratification. We need to be actively dismantling the power structures that maintain the disparities in our society. I believe that in doing so, we’ll find that taxation isn’t actually necessary, and that we can have a society which is both voluntary and reasonably equal.
It seems like we’re largely in agreement here in practical terms. However on principle, confiscating stolen wealth that someone has been given isn’t a punishment, since they were never entitled to it in the first place.
But how far away do we judge it to be given? That blood money wasn’t just sitting around - it was used to undertake countless projects. Is the architect who was paid for his work now in debt? Is the otherwise-uninvolved merchant of post-war goods subject to seizure (ignoring the enormous problem of Jim Crow and complicity there, for the sake of the argument in the abstract)? His kids? His kids’ kids? His employees? All of them were paid with money stolen from the sweat, toil, tears, and blood of slaves. Generational wealth and the generation of wealth is not a simple matter like “This is your great-great grandfather’s watch, here you go”, and I don’t think it can be, even just in principle, resolved by the same methods that immediate theft can. There are too many degrees of separation involved even just in inheritance from 5+ generations ago.
For a more modern example, if man robs a bank, uses the money to put his kids through college, and only after they graduate, he’s caught and is killed in a shootout with the police, is it moral to suddenly saddle the kids with the debt of their college years? What about the earnings they made afterwards? Are they illegitimate too? They were only made possible by the expenditure of the illegitimately acquired wealth.
None of this is meant to assert that we disagree strongly, I just love discussing hypotheticals, abstracts, and principles.
Lines do get blurry, and that causes real problems with trying to ensure a just outcome. No real way around that. However, sometimes things are more clear cut. If the plantation (or at least the land it was on) is still in the family, maybe it shouldn’t be anymore?
However, there’s an argument to be made that such a confiscation would be too sudden and severe of a shift in the social contract. I still think it should be considered, though. Of course, I also think we shouldn’t allow absentee land ownership in the first place.