Excerpt Of The Day: The Slavery Shakedown

10 Jun, 2005 by John Hawkins

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“For a host of reasons, reparations are a terrible idea — unjust, illogical, and dangerous. Living white Americans bear no culpability for slavery, and living black Americans never suffered from it. It would be unthinkable to make individuals responsible for the wrongdoing of their distant ancestors, or to require them to enrich the great-great-great grandchildren of the victims. The overwhelming majority of nonblack Americans have no family connection to slavery in any case — most of us are descended from the millions of immigrants who came to this country after the Civil War.

…America long ago paid the price for slavery: a horrific Civil War that killed 620,000 soldiers, more than half of them from the North. It is as vile to insist that white Americans today owe a debt for slavery as it would be to insist that black Americans owe a debt for freedom. What the reparations extremists are demanding would make a mockery of historical truth and inflame racial strife.” — Jeff Jacoby