I'm Not Paying for The Past

On The Demand for Reparations

Oh look, another demand for reparations to be paid to people who were never slaves, to be paid by people who never owned slaves. It doesn’t matter what the facts of the issue are, someone at some point in their family trees was wronged centuries ago and they expect restitution to compensate for their ancestor’s pain and suffering.

Recently, in California, a public meeting was held in the Oakland City Hall by the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals (because where else would you expect something like this to happen than California). The task force was created in 2020 by liberal darling Governor Gavin Newsom. The group has been at it for over a year, no doubt sucking as money as they can in government compensation over how to financially rationalize the debt owed to Black Americans for such sins as slavery, housing discrimination, mass incarceration, etc. They have until July 1st of next year to complete their findings and send them on to the State Legislature (I can see they’re really pressed for time on this).

What caught my eye about this particular meeting was the fact that a gentleman by the name of Max Fennell, 35-year-old local businessman, stood up and made his wishes known of how much he felt that he, and every other Black American in California, should receive in compensation for something that ended 157 years ago.

Here’s what he had to say about what he felt was fair compensation for something that he never directly experienced: "It's a debt that's owed, we worked for free ... we're not asking; we're telling you. The tangibles of what I'm asking for is $350,000 per black American in California — that's tangible, small business grant $250,000, and land 15-20 acres."

I love the “we” part like he was actually living this experience 150-200 years ago.

In addition, economic research was presented to the task force that suggested California's maximum liability for housing discrimination inflicted upon black residents between 1933 and 1977 was about $225,000, but panel Chairwoman Kamilah Moore suggested that reparations recommendations from the task force will likely be more narrowly tailored. (Side note so you don’t have to do the math. Fennell is 35 years old, yet he’s demanding reparations for housing discrimination that ended ten years before he was born).

Moore had this to say in explaining why any reparations couldn’t justifiably go to just one group based on housing discrimination: "In reality, that number would be minimized when you take into account the fact that the task force decided in March that the community of eligibility would be lineage-based rather than race-based. When you really look at who was really impacted by housing discrimination during that particular time period, it most likely won't be all black folks."

Anyone want to take a guess at how much Black Lives Matter propaganda Fennell has around his home?

This is just more of the same old grift, trying to play on white liberal guilt to get compensation for a wrong the ones demanding it never actually experienced. It’s why you saw millions of dollars pour into BLM’s wallets after St. George Floyd died. But did any of that money go toward improving the lives of inner-city Black Americans? No, it went into paying for lavish mansions for the BLM founders, a scam they still haven’t been made to answer for.

Maybe Fennell and the rest of the BLM grifters should be reminded of another group of individuals who faced physical hardship with little monetary compensation from a century and a half back in America’s existence.

California was a preferred landing spot for many of the Chinese immigrants making the trip across the ocean for a better life. (Yes, I know, the African slaves arrived here unwillingly, whereas the Chinese came of their own choosing, but stay with me for a minute). When Chinese immigrants began arriving, the Federal government was pushing to get the Transcontinental Railroad completed. Those agencies tasked with building the railroad going east from California to the section advancing west hired large numbers of Chinese to facilitate the construction.

The Chinese railroad crews were paid a total of $26/month (around $493/month today), working six days a week, and were making around 30-50% lower wages than white workers were being paid for the same work. These were unskilled laborers, yet they were routinely tasked with tunnelling and the use of explosives, as well as having to deal with physical abuse from their supervisors and being required to pay for their own meals on their meager wages. Yes, their circumstances were different from those experienced by African slaves of the same time period, but it certainly can’t be said that their lives were any easier or at less risk of injury or death. And yet, I have never seen anyone of Asian descent demanding reparations for how their ancestors were treated in the 1860s.

I’m also left wondering why BLM is so hellbent on demanding reparations from modern day American government officials. The last time I checked, the ones who are most responsible for Africans being sold into slavery were the European slave traders, as well as African tribes that sold prisoners into the slavery trade. Why is BLM not demanding money from those groups? Aren’t they the true guilty parties in the slave trade, having gathered BLM’s ancestors up and shipping them around the world?

And where is the cutoff for who BLM thinks deserves reparations? What percentage of African ancestry has to be met to qualify?

Now, you might be thinking, but David, you live in Texas. How does something California might do really affect you?

Let’s play what if. Suppose California passes this recommendation that Mr. Fennell thinks should be implemented. According to the 2019 Census, 2,282,144 people in California identify themselves as solely African American. So, $350,000 times 2,282,144 comes out to $798,750,400,000. Then you start getting into the population that doesn’t identify as exclusively African American but has African lineage in their past that they claim when identifying themselves. People who identify as black in California also identify as Mexican, Spanish, Irish, Jamaican, German, Filipino, Nigerian, Italian, Puerto Rican, Ethiopian, French, Belizean, English, Haitian, Caribbean, Japanese, Eritrean, Congolese, Portuguese, Kenyan, Salvadoran, Panamanian, Somali, Dominican, Cuban, Chinese, Polish, Ghanaian, Egyptian, Dutch, Swedish, sub-Saharan, Samoan, Norwegian, Guyanese, Guatemalan, Indian, Trinidadian, Scottish, Latin American, Korean, Cameroonian, British, Brazilian and/or South African. Where does it end? How many millions are going to go those with mixed ethnicities? Will they be cut out of the deal because they can’t prove their racial purity? I seem to recall another society that insisted on racial purity in order to reap the benefits being granted. Some country in central Europe back in the 1930s and 40s, run by an angry little man with a funny mustache. What country was that again?

Here’s the part where it could affect me as a Texas resident. Let’s say that Newsom signs off on this reparations scam, and the Obama Biden crowd swoon and praise Newsom for how progressive he is. California quickly bankrupts itself paying out all of this money for past sins and can’t make ends meet. States like Texas send their annual tax revenue to the Federal government, and “Biden” starts sending more money to California to help them out while shortchanging states like Texas on getting tax revenue back for infrastructure projects and other expenses. I don’t think so, Skippy.

One would hope that this whole thing goes nowhere. But it’s California under an almost exclusively liberal Democratic leadership that loves to virtue signal while never giving a second thought to the consequences of their actions.