re: #209 steve_davis

not sure how I feel about reparations. My Pennsylvania great-great uncles fought in a war to destroy slavery. I think we did our part. I also really, really don’t want to pay for someone else’s stupid student loan decisions, thank you very much.

My feeling about reparations is that it should be limited to 20th-century offenses.

Red-lining and other kinds of state-sanctioned housing discrimination, stable middle-class black neighborhoods being bulldozed to make room for a highway that serves whites-only suburbs, massive resistance to school desegregation, the way WWII GI-Bill benefits elevated an entire generation of white men & their families while black men & their families were excluded…

These were recent enough that there’s a great many living witnesses, living perpetrators, living victims, and substantial documentation proving that it was a deliberate federal and/or state policy.