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The #BlackLivesMatter Platform
Via the NYT:
More than 60 organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have released a series of demands on Monday, including for reparations. […] “We seek radical transformation, not reactionary reform,” Michaela Brown, communications director of Baltimore Bloc, another participating group, said in a statement. “As the 2016 election continues, this platform provides us with a way to intervene with an agenda that resists state and corporate power, an opportunity to implement policies that truly value the safety and humanity of black lives, and an overall means to hold elected leaders accountable.”
The six planks of this platform are: End the War on Black People, Reparations, Invest-Divest, Economic Justice, Community Control, and Political Power. And if you follow that link, you’ll likely find — as I did — that the actual proposals are even worse than than the titles imply.
In the years leading up to the present, many folks on the Right began adopting a skepticism toward some police powers, including night-time no-knock warrants on drug suspects and “Stop, Question, and Frisk” when used to ensure that all citizens are legally disarmed. The mean-spirited challenge such people often gave — I know because I did it myself several times — is that some folks’ well-earned skepticism for government power evaporated the moment somebody appeared with a badge and a gun muttering something about law and order.
This was not, of course, to deny civil peace required both that there be people with badges and guns protecting our lives and property and that the people doing so required our support for doing their jobs well as much as our opprobrium for abusing their powers. It also acknowledged that our legislators often put police in impossible positions by requiring them to to enforce unjust laws and that the media was often a knowing and eager participant in the trouble.
The Black Lives Matter Movement, however, does not believe any of that. This is evidenced not only by this manifesto, but by their actions, including their celebration of criminals alongside genuine victims, their dismissal of the sacrifices made by black officers, and their repeated incitements to violence. These are not police critics, but Marxist race-separatists.
Policing is deadly serious work and officers deserve to have their work judged — positively and negative — on its merits. But this summer has brought me to the point where reading this profile of some of the hundreds of applicants to the Dallas PD filled me with unmitigated relief.
May they chose the best candidates.
Published in Policing
That’ll help Trump get elected.
I’d like to address one issue: reparations. After thinking about this in the context of historical precedent. I think there should be reparations.
This is in spite of the fact that, as I’ve often written elsewhere, our country is not the MOST culpable, but is in fact the LEAST culpable, of any nation in the world for the horror of African slavery, by the measures of duration, intensity and sheer numbers.
However, why does nobody blame present-day Germans for the Holocaust?
Of course, logically, they shouldn’t–it happened before they were born–but this logic doesn’t prevent the world from holding present-day Americans guilty for African slavery.
Germany paid reparations to Israel after the war. I have heard Jewish people advance this as the reason they don’t evils present-day Germans. The country paid for its crime, in money.
But here’s what I want to publicize: HOW to do it.
I’m telling my daughter and all her friends, who will come to power some day–and Ricocheti, do you likewise!
Cuz it’s the only way I can come up with that makes sense:
Give American blacks a holiday , two years, five years–from the “regressive” taxes, (those that are not scaled to income) like sales tax, real estate transfer tax, real property taxes.
Main objection I can think of is that these are mostly state and local,taxes, not fed, and it would be hard on local governments. . True, but the Divine Reagan imposed a lot of unfounded mandates on local govts, too, and they survived.
Maybe also consider imposing it only on former slave states? But I guess that wouldn’t be fair to slave-descended people in the other states…
Someone actually suggested there would be too big a problem determining who is entitled! That’s always an issue with a benefit program, but THIS program seems to me to be the least problematic in that regard!
Well–any thoughts, anybody?
We gotta do something to dig our way out of this pit of unwarranted national guilt over African slavery.
A good start would be for the blacks to stop slaughtering each other in all major cities around the USA. No amount of money or law changes will accomplish that, only a change in their own attitudes.
Yup. I’m starting to think socialism/Marxism/communism/statism, etc. is effect rather than cause. The cause might be as simple as the crooked timber of humanity.
Another yup. Embrace the power of and. The police power is the most common and most personal interaction an individual citizen has with the state. Why wouldn’t we be extremely vigilant in monitoring it?
Even if you manage to instate some form of reparations, how do you ensure the recipients will think it sufficient. If they get some kind of windfall, what happens if it is squandered?
Eliminating any kind of tax, for anyone, would be a good thing, and therefor I wouldn’t object to in on principle, but I just have trouble believing a small tax break would be sufficient for the majority of people to think “reparations” happened.
It is accurate that the actual proposals are worse than the “planks of the platform.” Many (most?) have little to do with policing. Here is a subset:
Ironically, they also call for an end to body cameras, referring to them as part of “mass surveillance of Black communities”.
I don’t think it would be that small a break (which is why I raised the inevitable issue about state and local gov’t funding.) if you think how much we all pay in sales tax each year; if you think of the annual burden of property tax…
Anyway, I see your point:” they’ll never be satisfied anyway”–but it IS a tangible benefit they would all feel, right away, every day. When they buy cigarettes, they’d be paying half (in many states) of what the wheezing white guy ahead of ’em in line just paid! When they buy a TV, a refrigerator, an air conditioner: it could be like $100 or more less! It is SOMETHING, as opposed to nothing.
You can’t trace today’s problems in the black community to slavery. At least not directly. The connection would be that guilt over slavery, among other things, prompted the war on poverty which deeply damaged the black family. If anything, the reparations should be to make up for the fact that the government paid black people not to have intact families.
As racism becomes a less and less believable explanation for the problems in the black community, we naturally see more and more shouting about racism as the cause, since the BLM people don’t want to look where the real problem is, the state of the black family.
Here are some more….(hard core socialism and wealth redistribution)
People don’t know that the black middle class BEFORE the Civil Rights Act was becoming more and more successful, was intact with two parents, and was moral. Then the “Liberals” came along to help them out.
NO.
At some point, we’ve got to draw a line and move on with life. There are historical injustices EVERYWHERE you look. You cannot right a past wrong my making the innocent pay! This is an injustice in itself. You are only going to create additonally instability and resentment Look at the mess that is the Middle East where people have held grudges against each other for 100’s of years. It comes to no good.
And you should read their material. Go to their website and read their demands for yourself. They are not interested in getting along with anyone! They are not interested in justice! They are interested in power, money and socialism.
My husband’s family immigrated here from Italy in the 1930’s. My family fought for the Union in the Civil War. Why do we owe anyone anything?
Walter Williams (Economist, who also happens to be black) on reparations.
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/06/18/slavery-reparations-n1852058
I didn’t support that, my parent’s and grandparents didn’t support that, and I reject any responsibly for it.
#NotInMyName
It’s a buffet of leftist policies. I was going to make a crack about stopping drilling in Alaska, but they beat me to it. They could have replaced the whole thing with “We should be Venezuela.”
*facepalm* And people accuse poor conservatives of voting against their interests.
And then the white person looks at the black person and says, “Why are you getting a break and not me? You were never a slave. Your parents were never slaves. Your grandparents were probably never slaves – maybe not even your great-grandparents. I don’t own slaves. My parents never owned slaves. My grandparents probably never owned slaves – maybe not even my great-grandparents. No one has owned slaves or been a slave in this country for an entire century-and-a-half. Tell me again why you think you’re owed something for a situation that you have never directly been a part of.”
I’ll admit that on the surface some kind of reparations sounds like a nice thing to do. But ultimately, it’s not going to do anything to improve the situation. It’ll only make it worse because the white side of the equation will resent it, and the black side will only be emboldened to double down and ask for more – generally speaking.
On the tangent of reparations, I’m with Lincoln on this one:
“‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense commeth.’
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of these offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gave to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom of the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
The United States paid all the reparations relating to slavery in the 750,000+ dead in the Civil War.
What I think is the more interesting question regarding the modern movement for reparations in the form of lump sum payments: if this is to be a settlement, then what do I get in return? For a settlement means that you never come knocking on my door with your claims again. If some amount of money makes you whole for your historical grievances, then I assume that a whole architecture of preferences and support can now be done away with, right?
I agree. That’s what my husband says too. BUT: the whole world blames us, present day Americans all born well after the Civil War–and we’re so ignorant of the history of African slavery that we let ’em (but that’s another issue). So I thought maybe, if we can say we’ve paid up, we can move on. And a break on the regressive taxes is a way to accomplish that.
That’s interesting, because I was thinking that literal mass surveillance is probably the only thing that could cut down on the murder in places like Chicago.
Here you go @hypatia. Empty your bank account using the donate button at the bottom of the page and you can sleep better.
So, race relations will improve if we . . . divest from fossil fuels?
And, of course, no good Leftist uprising would be complete if it didn’t take some time to blame the Jews.
If white people could get away with saying “why are you getting a break and not me?” we wouldn’t even be discussing this issue.
We SHOULD be able to say this, logically, as @lilybart also pointed out.
But we can’t. The Left promotes the lie that we were the largest slave-owning nation in the world. Michelle Omega earns teary-eyed applause for the meme the White House was built by slaves. Europeans–French, Spanish, Dutch, English–the ones who brought the Africans here to begin with!! –constantly throw it up in our face–and our leaders collapse in attitudes of guilt. THAT’S why I think we should try something–and the main point of my comment was that a break on the regressive taxes might be a way to do it.
i am totally on board with you: our nation has nothing to feel guilty about–or at least, far, far, less than every other nation.
But I don’t think anybody else sees it our way.
People are free to believe what they wish to believe. They are free to say what they think. What they are not free to do is confiscate my personal property or steal my own freedom (end private education???) for this scheme.
I don’t care what they think. I have a clear conscience. THEY are the ones in the wrong. And, again, it has nothing to do ‘righting historical wrongs’. It has to do with power and money. That’s all. Nothing more.
At some point you have to stand up for yourself. I’m not ashamed, I have nothing to be ashamed of, and I will not let them make me feel ashamed.
The platform sound largely ridiculous– like a grab bag of far-left ideas. It’s sad because a more community based policing, and cops walking around more, where feasible, are probably good concepts.
I’m sympathetic to some of the aims of their “community control plank.” I think people should be able to hold the police more accountable. Though I think the specific way they want to go about empowering these civilian oversight agencies (like they would want to) would open up an entirely new can of worms that may be comparatively worse.
I think participatory budgeting would probably be a nightmare for the large communities where blacks live. Small stable towns? You can give it a try, but not large areas. And ending privatization of schools would be bad. But breaking up teachers’ unions would be good.
The only “reparations” I am prepared to offer these BLM lunatics is a free one-way airplane ticket to any other country they wish to move to. They clearly hate living in the U.S.A. and I would be happy to see them all leave. Win-win.
Those looks more like “Progressive Policy planks”.
Yes and you are right! But–reality bites.
Amen.
So, to whom shall reparations be paid? Would one need to demonstrate that they have ancestors that were slaves? Would one need only prove some level of African ancestry? Because frankly, when I look around today — at least where I am in CA — mostly what I see is folks that could best be described as racially ambiguous.
The earlier question about whether or not it would be deemed sufficient is right on the money. As someone that grew up lower-middle class I can assure you that any reparations paid would be squandered quickly. If you have time and you don’t mind a little Dave Chappelle, check out the reparations skit on the Chappelle show available on Youtube.
No, see, what I hoped to get a response on was my possible methodology. I do not feel guilty about African slavery. For the, I don’t know, fourth of fifth time in these pages, I reaffirm that present day Americans have NO reason to feel guilty about, nor responsible for, African slavery.
I’m of Scottish-Irish heritage and my people came here as slaves, convicts (yes, until our revolution we were a penal colony like Australia) or indentured servants–all forms of “slavery”, i.e., unpaid forced labor.
Ideally, all Americans would stand up and say: African slavery ended in 1863, long before we were born! It has nothing to do with us, nor we with it!
But we are not in that ideal world! So my point was: what can we do to get these damn historical ignoramuses off our back?!?!
you got a better idea than mine?
I am under no illusions; no matter how much money was forthcoming, it would NOT get them off of our backs.