Reparations

[oskar]

The legacy of racism is strong in our culture. There's no denying it. A simple look at the recent census data for St Louis shows that white and black communities are very much still a thing. It's like half the city is one color, the other half the other color (red and blue on the census map, but whatever).

The legacy of institutional racism is still strong.

All of this is deplorable.

However, not caused by any active tempering by the feds. So you can't point your finger at the US gov't and blame them for the current state of things in any direct manner.
They'd have a claim that they've been actively trying to stamp down racism in law. It is illegal to discriminate based on race for any national matter, AFAIK.

So while there is this legacy... it's not been actively supported by the gov't for almost 150 years.

Just because you can't single out one cause doesn't mean there isn't discrimination. You don't go from counterintelpro, Jim Crow laws and the migrant worker crisis to a post racial utopia in less than 50 years. Where do you get 150 years from?
A lot of people directly affected by those are still alive. Just because it's not happening currently, doesn't mean it has no lasting effect. If you start from a lower socioeconomic standing you're going to have less chances in life.

I get sick to my stomach every time someone points out what a success Trump is. He inherited 500 million. He could afford to fail over and over again, and still he defaulted on hundreds of millions more in loans, quite possibly being worth less today than what his father left him. If you come from a wealthier background you can fail a lot more often. The average white kid is backed by a family with 15x the wealth of the average black family. So if you're white you're more likely to be able to afford a better education, pay for a wedding, afford birth control, pay for tuition, take a risk on a business idea etc...

If you think the much lower socioeconomic standing of blacks in the US has nothing to do with the very recent history of systemic racial discrimination in the US I'd love for you to tell me why you don't think those are factors, and what your alternative explanation for such an enormous discrepancy in wealth is.

And while there is no federal discrimination, there is a clear discrimination in the courts. If you adjust for wealth these numbers would probably a lot closer since your net worth is directly tied to the sentence you can expect to get, but this is why I think reparations of a magnitude that would shock you are justified. You'd probably do that with a negative tax or something like that, but I think it's laughable that you can bail out billionaires for trillions out of the federal budget, but you can't spend money to fix shocking racial disparities in a post apartheid society.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/...on-race-booker