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1/ It's hilarious when white folks respond to discussions about reparations or even affirmative action with things like "I never owned a slave & you (black person) never were one," or something similar, and say, "we should just treat everyone the same." Ok, thought experiment...
2/ Imagine that a few hundred years ago two men started playing cards every Friday night. One man was white, the other black. And imagine that the white man cheated the black man consistently: applied rules differently, dealt off the bottom of the deck, hid cards, etc...
3/ But imagine that the black player couldn't quit the game. He had to keep playing, even though he was getting cheated. And when these two men died, they handed the game off to their kids, and the process repeated: white guy cheats the black guy over and over again...
4/ And then when they die, they pass the game off again to their kids, and the process repeats yet again, and this continues for 12 more generations...
5/ Then finally, after hundreds of years, the 13th great-grandson of the original white cheater announces that from that day forward there will be one set of rules for both he and the 13th great grandson of the originally cheated black player. No more cheating....
6/ All players will be treated the same from here on out, down through future generations. Now, obviously this is a good thing, and no doubt an improvement in the odds for that generation's black player, and his future descendants...
7/ But, would we find it surprising, let alone untoward, if the 13th black great grandson, even as he acknowledged the new regime of fairness, looked at his white tablemate and said, 'yeah that's great, but can we discuss all those chips on your side of the table?'...
8/ And if he did broach that subject, and perhaps suggested that there might be some redistribution (since everything the white guy has was obtained in a system of unfairness), would it make ANY sense for the white guy to say "whoah! Wait a minute. I never cheated you...
9/ "...and you were never cheated! I'm being nice and agreeing not to cheat any more...you can't blame ME for the sins of my fathers! You just want something for nothing!!!" Yeah...no, but see, that's precisely American history in a nutshell, and the whining is the same...
10/ And yes, I know, I know...some will say, well my family wasn't even at the table! I get it...but the point is, intergenerational advantage was/is real...both materially and psychologically. It has been passed down...
11/ And even those of us whose families came after the game was well underway, so to speak, have reaped certain benefits and access by virtue of our identity as whites in this society...
12/ And literally nothing that was obtained by ANY White person under formal white supremacy (enslavement, segregation, etc) was truly earned in any fair sense...it was all ill-gotten gain under a system of unequal opportunity....
13/ So even in theory, only since 1964, 65 or 68 when the last of the major civil rights bills were passed, could we even think of speaking of fairness...and yet by that time whites had been able to accumulate trillions in wealth under a system of formal white supremacy...
14/ While not all whites benefitted equally by a long shot, the aggregate disparities in well being speak to a systemic truth. And it is aggregate disparities that we must rectify, when we as a society have been so implicated in their production...
15/ Not to mention, the passage of "fairness" laws didn't stop the process of racial subordination any more than laws against murder and assault and robbery have stopped those things...less so in fact bc there is no real punishment for discrimination...
16/ No jail time, no major fines in most cases...nothing to really deter the behavior except moral suasion which often fails (certainly it's not enough to stop other crimes and wrongdoing)...so the clock didn't even stop in 64, 5 or 8...it has continued to run...
