Reply #76: Why Are So Many People

[wellst0nev0ter]

Just so fundamentally dishonest on this issue?

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I recently wrote a piece saying America should apologize for slavery. This resulted in an expected deluge of e-mails castigating me for dredging up events that most white Americans today deny any tie to.

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So imagine my feigned surprise that even as many white readers continue to vent their anger at me, Congress is openly entertaining reparations for white people in the plains, the prairies, the swamps, and the mountains. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and 16 other Democratic and Republican senators representing South Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Georgia, Louisiana, and West Virginia have introduced the New Homestead Act.

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In the heartland, 70 percent of rural counties have lost an average of 30 percent of their population in the last 20 years. The states that have lost the most people since 1980 have been the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, and Iowa. ''The heartland of our country is being relentlessly depopulated, and we need to do something about it,'' Dorgan has said.

When factories and mills left the black community in the Northern Rust Belt or the Southern mills, America said tough luck, that's how the global economy crumbles. No one did anything about the redlining that froze home values in black communities while prices soared in the suburbs. Decimated black farmers say it is still hard to get loans from the US Department of Agriculture despite a 1999 settlement (there were black farmers who took advantage of the Homestead Act, but their communities withered away a long time ago). For years the Urban League called for a Marshall Plan to rescue inner cities.
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And rememeber, when surviving blacks wanted reparations for the Tulsa massacre, they were similarly denied, so I just don't buy the conventional reasoning behind the general opposition towards reparations.