Time to be single issue voters in Democratic Primaries: The Official Reparations 2019 / 20 Thread

[Reality]

This is an update to a thread I made 2-3 years ago, but think it's worth a new thread entirely given the Democratic primary season is underway. I intend for this to be a thread to discuss strategies to hold Democratic politicians accountable while also evaluating their eventual policy proposals / stances (or lack thereof).

Please, KEEP THIS IN THE LOCKER ROOM. I'd rather have the open convo where more people are.

BEFORE we get into it, let's get some things out of the way:

• Reparations directly benefitting black people are the ultimate goal
• Reparations are not an end, but a means to an end in terms of black liberation / economic justice
  • Whatever alternative view you have for black progress / improvement (be it group economics, repatriation, etc.), reparations improve the ability of black people to do it with minimal cost outside of voting (we as a people can walk and chew gum at the same time)
• To that end, reparations ≠ cutting a check; reparations could take many forms including:
  • Tax breaks for AAs
  • Reduced / no interest / gov't backed loans to black small business owners / home buyers
  • Subsidized undergraduate / graduate education for blacks
  • Some combination of the above / other...
• The case for reparations does not need to be built around slavery (it may even be better if it's not)
  • Reparations are deserved for government programs that were government aid that were effectively administered to whites but not blacks in the 1930s and onwards (see "What are the reparations for?")
  • Great article here: The Case for Reparations
• Pushing for reparations has a number of secondary benefits even if you don't believe they are attainable, including:
  • Establishing reparations as a critical, concrete, black issue for Democratic politicians / elected officials to have to take a stance on the behalf of black people (like they do with gay rights and illegal immigration with homosexuals and Mexican / Latino Americans, respectively)
  • Shifting the conversation so that more progressive non-reparations-based programs / policies seem more palatable by comparison (though reparations should still be the goal)
  • Making the conversation around reparations a national conversation, and educating Americans (of all colors) about what's driving the need (especially the fact that it's not just about slavery
• Logistical / executional concerns MUST be secondary and are not an excuse to dead the conversation
  • A program to determine eligibility would have some difficulties but is completely achievable, ESPECIALLY when tying reparations to more modern injustices (it is wholly feasible to establish lineage for people who are descendants of blacks who were American citizens as of the 1930s, for example)

So, what do we do and how might we do it? Some initial thoughts:

• 1st step: make it known to friends / family that you will be a single issue voter this election cycle, and explain why
  • this alone takes the conversation around reparations in the US to a place it's never been; the point is to normalize the conversation around reparations as part of the conversation so that it becomes just as much of a no-brainer / taken for granted as gay rights or illegal immigration being part of the conversation
• 2nd step: demand that politicians take a stance as to whether or not reparations will be a policy they will drive once elected: we need clarity on who stands where on the issue - this will help narrow down the list of candidates and shift the convo early
• 3rd step: demand specific policy proposals from those who say "yes"
  • No major democratic candidate for the presidency has had any reparations frameworks as part of their platform - that must change
• 4th step: Keep to your word about being a single issue voter on reparations in the primary
  • No plan = no vote
  • If no one has a plan, then no one gets your vote (low black turnout / enthusiasm in primaries will send a strong message about what needs to happen in the general, and no one can juelz about "why didn't black people show up?"; it'll be abundantly clear

Lastly, I am traditionally a person who views politics through a realist lens. I've very much been in the camp of "vote for the lesser of two evils" and was in that camp in 2016. HOWEVER, if reparations become part of the national debate, and the Democratic platform actively chooses not to include it in the party platform, I cannot say with confidence that sitting out the general would be the wrong move. Let's just hope we don't have to go there.

The below is from my previous thread back in 2016...I'll be following up with a placeholder second post to keep track of / update politicians' stances through 2019 / 2020.


What are reparations for?

1. Institutionalized, systemic racism ignored if not condoned by the US government:

• Redlining enabled by the National Housing Act of 1934; enabled banks to develop maps that would "color code" certain neighborhoods in 240 cities in the US. Incidentally, African American neighborhoods were "red lined", meaning no lending money could flow into those areas for home ownership or small businesses
  • This lead to "contract lending" in these neighborhoods...an especially predatory lending scheme in which blacks had to pay much more to purchase a home. and NEVER ACTUALLY OWNING THE DEED FOR THE HOME.
  • MOST of the disparity in household wealth between African Americans and white Americans (the average white household has 20 times the wealth of the average African American household) is due to AAs being cut off from home ownership, which has been the main method of building wealth in the US

• WWII's GI Bill, which offered free education and made it easier for veterans to buy homes, overwhelmingly benefited White Americans while AAs were excluded due to racism

• "Of the first 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill, fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites"
  
• The bill was passed so that the program was administrated by LOCAL governments...in the 1950s ; the same local governments that blacks were barred from voting for

2. 400 Years of slavery: Trillions of dollars worth of labor STOLEN from blacks...most of us are familiar with this

 

[Reality]

Democratic candidates for 2020

Candidates who have voiced plans for reparations
Marianne Williamson

• Called for $100B in reparations to be paid over 10 years to descents of slavery via a council that would distribute economic and educational projects

Candidates who have voiced support for reparations

• Kamala Harris (D) - Vocalized support for "some kind" of reparations when asked on the Breakfast Club on 2/11

Candidates who have not called for reparations / unclear on position
@Me if not accurate

Officially declared / filed

• Cory Booker (D), a U.S. senator from New Jersey, announced that he was running for president on February 1, 2019.[1]
• Pete Buttigieg (D), the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, announced that he was running for president on January 23, 2019.[5]
• Julian Castro (D), a former U.S. secretary of housing and urban development and San Antonio mayor, formally announced his candidacy on January 12, 2019.[9]
• John Delaney (D), a former U.S. representative from Maryland, filed to run for president on August 10, 2017.
• Tulsi Gabbard (D), a U.S. representative from Hawaii, announced that she had decided to run for president on January 11, 2019.[10]
• Kirsten Gillibrand (D), a U.S. senator from New York, announced that she was running for president on January 15, 2019.[11]
• Elizabeth Warren (D), U.S. senator from Massachusetts, announced she had formed an exploratory committee on December 31, 2018.[12]
• Andrew Yang (D), an entrepreneur from New York, filed to run for president on November 6, 2017

 

[George's Dilemma]

The case for reparations does not need to be built around slavery (it may even be better if it's not)

Admittedly I'm of the reparations will never happen crowd, but I do think a better case can be made for such around talking points not associated directly with slavery. When white people say they've never owned any slaves, it's a fair point even if they are disingenuous. Still, their bullsh!t aside, the damage that was done in the past several decades have put us at a tremendous disadvantage that warrants not only assistance but punitive damages. When I think about what whites have done in this country, slavery is not the first thing that comes to my mind.

 

[Reality]

Admittedly I'm of the reparations will never happen crowd, but I do think a better case can be made for such around talking points not associated directly with slavery. When white people say they've never owned any slaves, it's a fair point even if they are disingenuous. Still, their bullsh!t aside, the damage that was done in the past several decades have put us at a tremendous disadvantage that warrants not only assistance but punitive damages. When I think about what whites have done in this country, slavery is not the first thing that comes to my mind.

Yep. I think we can't ignore slavery and the horrible immediate impact it had to African Americans as well as the long term impact, but it gives white people an out on at least three fronts:

• "But most white people didn't own slaves"
• "But that was 400 years ago" (It wasn't)
• "But how would you even know who's a descendant of slaves?"

To my point, tying the case back to something more recent and tangible is critical both in terms of case made and in the eventual administration of whatever reparation program(s) would be enacted.

 

[CreepyMcCreeperson]

Do you honestly believe a candidate who even mentions reparations could beat Trump? He is there because of the whitelash of a black president. So you think the logical course of action is to get behind a candidate that is offering reparations? Not only will they not have the white vote, but they won't have other minorities either. That is how Obama won. He didn't run on doing anything specific for us. You are not considering the amount of people in middle america who will be put off by this, especially if there is no incentive for them.

Who is paying? Are we paying ourselves? Are minorities who weren't even here at the time paying? Is this going to be a lump sum payment? What if we can't trace our roots, and prove our heritage? What about the children of mulattos who went on to marry white, and wipe the blackness out? Legally thry would have a claim. That is money right back to white people? Do we get a tax break? Student loans dismissed?

 

[Reality]

Interesting on a not-so-reparations "Baby Bond" program advocated by Cory Booker

How Cory Booker’s “Baby Bond” Proposal Could Transform the Reparations Debate

There was a deeper inequity that those [minimum wage and healthcare programs] could not touch, Booker went on, which was that “wealth disparities in our country are growing and growing,” and they are particularly acute between whites and blacks. The average black family has wealth of about seventeen thousand dollars, while the average white family has wealth of about a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, according to William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke. During the Obama Administration, Darity concluded that his preferred remedy, direct reparations to African-Americans, was not politically feasible. So he and a colleague, Darrick Hamilton, of the New School, began modelling a proposal to provide a trust account to each American child. The idea had been kicking around in liberal policy circles for years—Gordon Brown implemented a version in the United Kingdom, and Hillary Clinton proposed one in a speech in September, 2016—but Darity and Hamilton wanted a “birthright endowment” big enough to begin to reduce the wealth gap and its adverse effects on African-Americans. They tilted it so that vast benefits would flow to the children of the poorest Americans, allowing them to pay for college or a new home, and only modest ones to the richest. They developed a program that could meaningfully change the distribution of wealth in the United States.

For Booker, who has long been allied with hedge funders and tech titans, Darity and Hamilton’s emphasis on the relationship between race and wealth was a gift, because it gave him a way into the debate about inequality. At the end of the summer, a Booker aide named Chad Maisel worked over the details of a proposal modelled in part on Darity and Hamilton’s work. “I beat up on him so much,” Booker told me in his offices, grinning and gesturing at Maisel, who was sitting quietly on a couch. “Every week I was, like, ‘Where’s my big idea?’ ”

One of the many ways that the Democratic Presidential primaries of 2020, with their dozens of plausible candidates, will differ from those of 2016 is that the Party’s ideological camps are less fixed. The left-wing insistence that inequality and billionaire influence pose a real threat to American democracy, and that big ideas were needed to fight that threat, has seeped through the Party, so that even more mainstream Democrats, such as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, and Booker, have signalled their interest in versions of a federal jobs guarantee. If the expectation had been that the Party’s left wing would be stronger in 2020, then the new complication is that its ideas—particularly those that have followed in the wake of Thomas Piketty’s revelation of how much the gains of capital have outpaced those of wages—no longer belong to leftists alone. “I think the Piketty effect has been profound,” Darity told me. “People were saying his book was Marx’s ‘Capital’ for the twenty-first century, which isn’t true. But it may be Keynes’s ‘General Theory’ for the twenty-first century.” Keynes helped to orient the Democratic Party for a generation.

In the “baby bond” proposal that Booker announced as a bill this fall, the government would create a trust account containing a thousand dollars for each infant. Each year, the Treasury would add as much as two thousand dollars, depending on the child’s household income, so that by adulthood the children of the poorest families would have a nest egg of nearly fifty thousand dollars. The money could be withdrawn only to buy a house or to pay for higher education or professional training. Booker estimated the cost of the proposal at sixty billion dollars a year, and said that he planned to pay for it by, among other things, raising estate taxes back to their 2009 levels and then raising taxes on the largest inherited fortunes—those of more than eighty million dollars—further still. Democratic policy has long taxed the wealthy to pay for social programs (schools, health care, jobs training) that enable social ascent; Booker is proposing a more direct conversion of wealth of the rich into wealth for the poor. His plan is not as precisely targeted toward people of color as it might be: because the federal government cannot determine the value of the assets held by any given American family, the amount children receive is determined by their parents’ wages, a scale on which black families tend to appear better off than they actually are. Even so, Booker’s staff has calculated that the average white child would accrue about fifteen thousand dollars through the program, and the average black child would gain twenty-nine thousand dollars—making it the largest asset for most black families.

Red is the part I have a problem with - why can FAFSA be administered based on a hybrid of savings account info and income info, but not reparations? At the very least this needs to be a hybrid based own property ownership, liquid savings, and income. How can the government levy property taxes but act like having a view on a family's net worth is a black box so everyone has to get some?

 

[Crude Abolitionist]

Racial Reconciliation & Healing | Marianne Williamson 2020

 

[Crude Abolitionist]

 

[dj-method-x]

That is not what she's saying at all. Her plan calls for a council to decide how the money is disbursed, meaning how reparations are implemented (ie tax cuts vs cash or other benefits, lump sum vs payments, etc). She did not mean that the money would go directly to a council who would keep it in their bank accounts to give out lol.

 

[Reality]

Do you honestly believe a candidate who even mentions reparations could beat Trump? He is there because of the whitelash of a black president. So you think the logical course of action is to get behind a candidate that is offering reparations? Not only will they not have the white vote, but they won't have other minorities either. That is how Obama won. He didn't run on doing anything specific for us. You are not considering the amount of people in middle america who will be put off by this, especially if there is no incentive for them.

Who is paying? Are we paying ourselves? Are minorities who weren't even here at the time paying? Is this going to be a lump sum payment? What if we can't trace our roots, and prove our heritage? What about the children of mulattos who went on to marry white, and wipe the blackness out? Legally thry would have a claim. That is money right back to white people? Do we get a tax break? Student loans dismissed?

Trump lost the popular vote by 3M votes and got help from Russia to win the election. And I am considering the people in middle America who will "be put off" by this, but that's not a reason to put your head in the sand and give up. It calls for creativity.

On your 2nd paragraph, it's clear you didn't read any of the 1st post so instead of me reiterating its arguments, take a read and let me know what questions / issues you have.

 

[CreepyMcCreeperson]

Trump lost the popular vote by 3M votes and got help from Russia to win the election. And I am considering the people in middle America who will "be put off" by this, but that's not a reason to put your head in the sand and give up. It calls for creativity.

On your 2nd paragraph, it's clear you didn't read any of the 1st post so instead of me reiterating its arguments, take a read and let me know what questions / issues you have.

The word reparations needs to go. You have to call it "American black economic reinvestment initiative" or something slick like that. Reparations is going to be a turnoff. I'm not saying we give up, but it needs to be more strategic.

 

[Donald J Trump]

if it aint a check i dont want it

fukk i look like settling for no money when them crackers made MONEY off my people for centuries

 

[Crude Abolitionist]

if it aint a check i dont want it

fukk i look like settling for no money when them crackers made MONEY off my people for centuries

 

[Dr. Acula]

You're free to do what you want.

If reparations is your priority, then do you. I have other issues I consider when voting.

 

[Reality]

if it aint a check i dont want it

fukk i look like settling for no money when them crackers made MONEY off my people for centuries

So you're saying if option A was getting a check for $10k (with the hitch being that it would never come) and option B was getting $10K in tax relief, you'd choose option A?