Reparations "not radical" |
How’s this, then? Conservative Cable, FOX News, is promoting the very Leftie idea of reparations to African Americans for the harm done by slavery, Jim Crow and the New Deal.
Steve Hilton, a Hungarian-born Brit now resident in California made the case on FOX this morning.
A couple of Hilton's figures stuck in my mind:
(i) Wealth: for every $100 of wealth owned by a white family, a black family has $7.73.
(ii) Wages: for every $100 earned by a white, an African American earns just $70 to $80.
Hilton traces this directly back to the legacy of slavery. And to post-war programs the GI bill which promoted home ownership, but for whites only. Thats true. I happened to see a doco on this just the other day. The policy was explicitly racist; blacks were not allowed to buy or rent in white neighbourhoods right up to the 60s! And this after black Americans had fought in WW2.
Economist figures. From here |
Of course, there are issues about how the amount would be calculated and who would get them. At least Hilton is getting the convo going on the white side — before its only been black activists like Ta-Nahesi Coates who've pushed it, and those folks can be safely ignored as "too radical".
Trump has kind of started on this with the recently-passed Prison reform bill.
Where are the Dems on this?