Be It Enacted by the People of the State of Oregon:
SECTION 1.(1) The Department of Revenue shall establish a program to pay reparations to Black Oregonians who can demonstrate heritage in slavery and who submit an application to the department no later than December 31, 2022.
(2) A person is eligible for reparations under this section if the person demonstrates that the person:
(a) Is descended from an American slave;
(b) Has identified as African-American on legal documents for at least 10 years before the date of the application;
(c) Is at least 18 years of age, an emancipated minor or a ward, as defined in ORS 419A.004, whose parents are deceased or for whom parental rights have been terminated and have not been reinstated; and
(d) Has resided in Oregon for at least two years before the date of the application.
(3) The department shall pay to each eligible applicant the amount of $123,000 in the form of an annuity payable annually for the life of the applicant.
(4) Reparations paid under this section and the right of a person to an annuity under this section are exempt from garnishment and all state, county and municipal taxation, except as provided under ORS chapter 118, are not subject to execution, garnishment, attachment or any other process or to the operation of any bankruptcy or insolvency law and are unassignable.
Do you suppose this might violate the "equal protection clause"? Remember Oregon was never a slave state but did contribute two regiments to fight the Confederacy.
If you wanted to stir racist sentiment against black people what more could you do? I think it would be fairer to track down every descendant of a slave owner (black or white) and confiscate their wealth.
OR in a race with CA to see which will descend into the depths further following a "Brown" governance.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I am aware, there is only one organization still in existence that actively contributed to the cause of slavery, organized militias to hunt down blacks and people who were against slavery, instituted laws to segregate and disenfranchise blacks from civil society as well as the economy at large, and never apologized for it. That would be the Democrat Party. If reparations for slavery are to be paid (please no!), then they should be paid by the guilty party, not the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteNo one alive has ever been an American owned slave. No one in America ever owned a slave. So sue slave sellers: African Muslims.
ReplyDeleteOregon wasn't a slave state, but blacks were unconstitutional there until the 1930s.
ReplyDeleteGiven the number of American blacks that are descended from slaveowners? LOL...
ReplyDeleteSee, here's the problem: How far back do you go, with this whole racial guilt thing? Say I go back 8 generations of black ancestry, and then hit the ninth one where Massah done gone down to the slave sheds and had some fun...
If we're doing this by ancestry, how are you going to account for that ninth generation? Sure, a lot of those cases of "miscegenation" resulted from rape, but how many were from slave women trying to better their situation and work their way into house slave status by boinking their owner? That did happen...
The whole thing is an exercise in stupidity, when you get down to it. There is no way, at this time, to determine the merits of someone's ancestry in 2021. So, the smart thing is, forget about it and move forward. If we're really going to do this, then I want reparations from American blacks for what it cost to free them, given that several generations of my own ancestry suffered from the losses incurred due to deaths in the Civil War, and all the other costs that have accrued. I mean, how do you assess racial responsibility for the state of cities like Detroit, which have been run by black Democrats for a couple of generations now?
End of the day, were you to do a fair working out of who owes who what, I am pretty sure that the blacks are gonna wind up owing a lot more money than they're due, particularly when you factor in the effects of racism in terms of affirmative action and other LBJ-era programs...