The topic of reparations to African-Americans for the legacy of slavery & the legalized discrimination of the Jim Crow era emerged last year as a major issue in the Democratic Party's presidential primary debates. Some candidates made somewhat vague promises while others had specific proposals; for example, Cory Booker floated a proposal for "baby bonds" while Bernie Sanders touted James Clyburn's 10-20-30 Plan. So far, Joe Biden has only called for a commission to study the issue.
I figured it would be useful for our group to break down the issue of reparations into its components and analyze them individually...
The first half of this discussion looks at the harms of slavery & Jim Crow and their legacy for African-Americans today. The 1st section looks at the economic harms from these historic injustices and their contribution to the racial wealth gap, while the 2nd section looks at the alleged psychological & social harms that have echoed down through the generations. We can think of this as analogous to "pecuniary damages" (lost wages) and "pain & suffering" in a civil suit.
The second half of this discussion looks at what we should do as a society to address these harms. The 3rd section looks at the ethical debates over "collective guilt" and "white privilege" and how they figure into how we should assess who's responsible for paying reparations. The 4th section looks at specific programs that have been been tried in the past or recently proposed as "de facto reparations" and we'll see how experts assess their likelihood of achieving the desired outcomes.
RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM RELATED MEETUPS:
We had a discussion in the summer of 2017 where we covered property rights from the perspective of "classical liberalism". The 2nd section specifically dealt with the ethical arguments surrounding reparations for slavery & Indian removal. https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/242037334/
Although most of our other discussions haven't expressly discussed slavery or Jim Crow, we've focused on racial bias & its negative social outcomes a number of times:
In May of 2018, we had a meetup entitled "Does America Offer Equal Opportunity?" where we looked at the effects of family upbringing & residential factors, college admissions & graduation rates, hiring biases & career decisions, and how all of these factors contribute to the racial & gender wage gaps. In general, it looks like upbringing has a big role in determining income mobility and racial hiring biases are still prevalent. But there's also a misplaced tendency to see college as a panacea for problems, and a lot of the information in the news media on wage gaps neglects the role of individual educational & career choices on racial income disparities. https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/xvbrznyxgbtb/
We had a meetup in the summer of 2017 where we discussed the problem of wage stagnation since the 1970s and the meager results of the "War on Poverty" (reducing poverty rate from 19% to 15% in 50 years). One of the major takeaways from this discussion was that poverty is mostly a result not of low wages but unemployment & part-time employment, and it's also tied to the decline of marriage and the two-parent family. https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/238805096/
We covered the effect of race on economic success in the fall of 2017 called "Deep Culture and the American Dream". We looked at arguments surrounding the alleged "culture of poverty" that holds back both poor urban blacks & poor rural whites, and contrasted this with the cultural traits of "model minorities" like Jewish Americans & Asian Americans that allegedly lead them to be successful. The general takeaway was that experts are divided on the question of whether culture is the ultimate or merely proximate cause of an individual's economic success or failure. https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/zgmddnywnbcb/
In April of 2018, the Skeptics meetup examined the data on racial bias in police use of force incidents in the U.S. Two of the basic takeaways was that the data collection & aggregation on police use of force isn't very comprehensive, and there is a lot of dishonest "massaging" of statistics in both the liberal & conservative news media to either support or counter the charges of systematic racism by police. They looked at the debates over the Roland Fryer study that showed racial bias in police use of non-lethal force but not in lethal force, as well as a Michigan State study that found suspects are most likely to be shot by police officers of their own race. They also discussed Ezra Klein's debate with Scott Alexander following a post where Scott stated that the studies that control for crime rate differentials indicate there's ambiguity about the level of racial bias in police stops & minor drug arrests, but there seems to be little or no racial bias in arrests for violent crime, prosecutions or convictions. Scott claimed racial bias is only unambiguously present in sentencing at a level of 10-20%; but pointed out that income disparities between blacks & whites means that police work that focuses more on poor urban neighborhoods has disproportionate racial effects. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/249125196/
NOTE: This meetup will be immediately preceded by a Skeptics discussion from 1-3pm that will look at the debate over whether slavery made America rich, which is part of the justification for reparations: https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/djzwsrybckbjc/
