January 27 roundup

2 Comments

  • If any government is to pay reparation for slavery, why shouldn’t it be the governments of the former slave states rather than the federal government? Coates invokes reparations for Japanese-American internment, but that was a federal remedy for a federal action.

    This is not to say that the federal government and the free states never discriminated against blacks, but their lesser sins ought to be covered by the reparations already paid under other names that McWhorter listed, as well as by the blood and treasure they committed to the Civil War and to Reconstruction.

  • @Ed Roberts–
    Pursuant to your last sentence, I have sometimes invoked Old Osawatomie: “the crimes of this guilty land can not be purged away but with blood.” That might cover slavery, but there remain the lesser but still serious crimes of Jim Crow.