Slavery Reparations and 2020

[Belsnickel]

I have mixed feelings on reparations. As someone whose ancestry is a mixture of anti-slavery Anabaptists here from the mid-1700s and people who emigrated in the late 19th century, it would be easy for me to sit here and try to say this shouldn't be something i'm a part of. However, I do benefit from the vestiges of slavery that exist in the racism ever present in our society. Intergenerational mobility in this country is horrible, and it is worse for people of color than it is for white people. I am on track to be better off than my parents were, but not by much, and I am an abnormality in the dataset. When I look at my peers that grew up in my neighborhood, the same certainly isn't true for them. I have it a little easier because I am a white male than some of those peers have it.

It's easy to say it's an economic issue and not a racial one, but because there has been such a long history of oppression towards all minority groups, but especially the black community in wake of the end of slavery, there have been more barriers put in place such as codified racism with Jim Crow or redlining, or the more covert and hidden discrimination they still face, today. Generations have faced these struggles, and now with intergenerational mobility being so difficult and socioeconomic inequality being arguably the worse it has been in the history of our country, we can't deny the racial components of this issue.

We just need to figure out what to do about it. How do we fix the racial inequalities without causing more racial animus than we are already seeing? The argument exists that the current state of things with certain segments of society is that they are becoming more explicitly racist due to their own economic instability and their perceived slighting by the government in favor of minorities that has been stoked by years of propaganda fueling this feeling.