Put another log on the reparations fire: Are you descended from enslaved Africans?

(AP Photo/Library of Congress)

The Biden administration just can’t help themselves trying to burn the whole place down before they are unceremoniously booted out of their cushy, dictatorial digs. They’re taking your stoves, your internal combustion engines, redefining the sex you thought you were born, handing out victimhood and status awards based on race and #feelings, weaponizing the justice system against those of us who’ve noticed, ad nauseum.

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So what could possibly be next?

Why setting the mechanism in place to award reparations to people who’ve never been slaves! Gonna make the pay-outs go so much faster, y’know?

The U.S. government is considering asking Black Americans on federal forms, including the census, whether their ancestors were enslaved.

In a proposed update to how the government tracks Americans’ race and ethnicity, the Biden administration is asking the public for input on how it might go about differentiating Black people who are descendants of slaves in America from those whose families arrived more recently as immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean or other countries.

The idea of adding more-detailed categories to the census has been gaining currency among some Black Americans, who say society too often conflates their experiences with those of Black immigrants, who only started moving to the U.S. in meaningful numbers in the past few decades. Roughly one in five Black people in the U.S. are immigrants or their children, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

It wouldn’t be just a once-every-ten-year question, either.

…If the slavery-related change were adopted, it wouldn’t only be used on the census but also on forms that Americans encounter on a more routine basis, such as applications for federal student loans and home loans.

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What would that become, then? I hesitate to put a label on it, but I’ve got a couple of ideas.

Put another log on that race war fire.

Had you heard about this, which is along very similar lines? There was an argument put forth over a year ago that, if the SCOTUS restricted college admissions based on race, then being a descendant of enslaved Africans should be considered as a factor – “ancestry based admissions for slave descendants.”

…With a more conservative Supreme Court poised to strike down or narrow the consideration of race in admissions, some civil rights advocates say that, as an alternative, colleges could broaden Georgetown’s approach and make being descended from any American slave a new factor in admissions. They compare such an ancestry-based approach to “legacy admissions,” in which the treatment of the children of alumni get prioritized, and say it would benefit most young people whom race-conscious admissions was originally intended to help. But critics point out that approach would leave out other minority groups who have benefited from the current practice.

Ted Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina, believes many civil rights lawyers would support ancestry-based admissions for descendants of slaves.

“Affirmative action, when it started, was aimed at addressing and remedying the history of discrimination against Black Americans and trying to open up opportunities for them,” Shaw, a former director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told GBH News. “It would be correct to return to the roots of these efforts.”

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Neat, huh? Kind of a spin on legacy admissions – who don’t always get in, by the by – to get around losing affirmative action quotas and those darn studious Asians.

How many of today’s African-Americans have American slave ancestors? I have never seen a number. They always say blacks are not a monolith, but when it comes to the slavery issue, suddenly they sure all are.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates – of “the police acted stupidly fame” – himself says that of the 10.7M Africans who survived the horrific Middle Passage to the New World, the tiniest fraction actually made it to North America. I did not know that.

…The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial “gold standard” in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.

And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.

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As of 2020, there are 41.6M African-Americans in the U.S. But they aren’t all descendants of the original colonial slaves. There are also plenty of families who have mixed blood in them as well with those same ancestors who don’t identify as black.

What are the numbers? How do you verify the bloodlines, which I know can be very much jumbled? But I do believe one can go a good way back with a majority of people, especially now with all the digital ancestry information and DNA tools if one was so inclined.

Then you’d also have to deal with “race is just something white people made up” reparations crowd.

This group believes tying reparations to ancestry is a “white social construct.” I really couldn’t read anymore.

I guess “everybody gets a reparations car” in their plan.

There’s also the contrast between the achievements of black immigrants compared to the African-Americans born here. Everything I’ve read says that as a group – even while facing the same discriminatory challenges – later black immigrants do better across the board economically. Why would that be? And do we owe anyone money for it, not having been any part of it?

…The government’s proposal comes in the midst of a broader debate among Black Americans over how much experience the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. share with those whose families came to America voluntarily. Many Black immigrants say they face much of the same discrimination, particularly at the hands of police. Black people from Africa were also brought to the Caribbean and Latin America as slaves. But many of those whose ancestors were enslaved in the U.S. believe they should be considered a distinct ethnic group.

That belief is based at least in part on limited data showing that Black immigrants and their children on average find higher-paying jobs and accumulate more wealth than people whose families have lived here for decades or centuries. Several studies suggest that Black immigrants and their children are overrepresented on elite college campuses—particularly if they emigrated from the African continent.

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It’s a mess. Me, personally, I don’t believe in reparations and feel that this is just one more wedge issue for the Progressives to feed their angry base. Millions of men in blue uniforms serving from 1860 on – including my great-great-grandfather in the Ohio regiment under Lew Wallace – and 650,000 dead by 1865 is payment rendered. Having come from a pre-Revolutionary Irish immigrant family who never owned anything but a Pennsylvania farmstead on one side, and a 23 yr old apprenticed English carpenter who sailed up the Connecticut River to Windsor in 1635 (later distinguishing himself during the Pequot War) on the other, nobody ever owned slaves to make their way in this country.

I know my story holds true for the vast majority of Americans, be they descended from Mayflower types, got off the boat at Ellis Island, or the Saigon airlift – whatever their story. Even in the Antebellum South, the stronghold of that vile trade, only 25% of the landholders owned slaves.

From the madness of the California reparations free-for-all to, now, this?

None of it adds up for rational people.

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Jazz Shaw 7:20 PM | March 18, 2024
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