The Wrongness of Inequality by any color or flavor is my musing about equality in America and reparations.
From time to time as I watch the American and Mexican news scenes, I get urges to make commentaries. Sorry, this is one of those times. In this commentary, I would like to examine what is right and wrong on the issue of “equality”. To give you “MY” context, I grew in in South Carolina, during the segregation years of the South when the issue of equality was being bandied about and public schools were being de-segregated. My high school was all black a few years before I entered there. Like 2-3 years before. Although whites were bused in, we were in the minority for most of my high school years. My elementary school was integrated, with many black students with white. I don’t know the percentage, but I would hazzard a guess at close to 40% to 50%.
Contents
What is going on with Equality in the United States?
First, what is “equality”? This foundational concept is lost on most people who pretend to speak on rights and such. Equal means equal, what one gets the rest equally get. The idea that equality demands that blacks are given privileges that whites, Hispanics, Asians, etc. don’t get is exactly the opposite of equality. That practice breaks equality. There are two terms here that we need to understand, what is a bias, what is prejudice.
A bias means you give benefits and privileges to somebody for some reason. Prejudice means to restrain benefits or privileges from somebody for some reason. So equality is a concept that neither prejudices NOR biases are done to people. Each person is dealt with equally. So in American history, people exercised prejudices against blacks, and under the idea of non-racism that would be wrong to exercise prejudices against them. But to now exercise prejudices against whites, or whites and Asians, this is no making things any better. The Wrongness of Inequality by any other color
Let me wander a bit here. The idea that only blacks have been discriminated against is really wrong. Because I did not come from a rich and powerful family, I was passed over many a time when benefits and privileges were being doled out. Going into college, I was not nominated for any scholarships even though I was high in my graduating class.
So let’s get real here. Everybody is discriminated against in life, and a person’s skin color is just one excuse among thousands and thousands that people in power use to excuse why they do what they do. Life is full of this bad stuff, and you have to just take whatever, and quit complaining and go on with whatever you can. I pitied the black people in my high school because they didn’t get college scholarships, but then against, I am white, and I didn’t get any either. The privileged elite got scholarships to a dozen schools yet they could only accept one. That is just life. I was on the out, they were on the in. But even though I didn’t like it, I had to pick up what was left to me and go on with them. My parents paid for my college totally without any help.
The Incorrectness of “Affirmative Action”
Without expressing any blame or antagonism against black people, because I do not hold anything against them, but you cannot correct prejudice errors from the past by making more mistakes of the same kind in the present.
The point here is that the practice is wrong and we shouldn’t hold a person’s race against that person and in some way cause them harm or prevent good from coming to them. That is the only road to go down. Actually, the foundation of the United States is based on that kind of concept of every man being equal. The Wrongness of Inequality by any other color
You may say that in the beginning, they had slaves. News flash! All nations had slaves and permitted slavery back then! That was the world norm. The United States fought to reverse and work against that norm. No other nation did so in those days. While this does not justify in the sight of God what people did back then, it does show how America was the leader in repealing slavery.
What affirmative action does is to make concrete and immovable the bias (giving privileges to them that whites don’t equally get) towards blacks. My questions about this are:
(1) Where in the constitution does it exalt one race above another? Neither blacks nor whites are privileged races in the US government founding documents nor when Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans gave blacks their freedom and their right to vote. Democrats voted in a block “no” against the Republicans in this effort.
(2) How can we negate the equality of all men and women from the constitution? The point here is not that blacks get rights and privileges that whites don’t but equality for all.
(3) In law, a person who has suffered a loss or damage can sue the person causing that loss or damage for reparations.
a.) The people who suffered loss by being slaves are all dead now, so how can their children be their proxies when they suffered no real loss? Moreover, the majority of blacks in the USA today are not descendants of slaves. Some are, but with open borders, the last 20 years or so, so many are fresh people in the US. So you are paying reparations to people who were not hurt, that never were hurt, and that most were born and raised in some other country, including their parents and grandparents. Paying people that cannot show how they were hurt doesn’t make sense.
If you look at how in the 1970s through 2020s how blacks have gotten a priority over whites in high paying jobs like doctors, engineers, etc. then you have to say where are the benefits and privileges of the white people in comparison? Try finding 5 white doctors. While you can do so, most are older. But try finding 5 women doctors that are of some non-causation race, and you will see the abundance on one side, and scarcity on the other. All doctors in the US get passed into medical school by a board of doctors that filter out who they don’t want and put in who they do. The Wrongness of Inequality by any other color
b.) The people who are being asked to make reparations did not own slaves. Nobody today living owned slaves. How can you ask or force them to pay reparations when they didn’t do the erroneous conduct? The children paying for the sins of the parents are not correct in God’s scheme of things.
Moreover, there are more considerations.
c.) Black people owned slaves. Many or most of the black people in Africa that first enslaved blacks to be sold to many countries at the time, were black people themselves of other tribes. So we must ask ourselves if those who sold blacks into slavery were also blacks, then skin color doesn’t have anything to do with who should pay who reparations.
Sorting this out equitably and fairly is impossible.
The Wrongness of Inequality by any other color
d.) Since the country that people today want to trash left and right has always been and is presently the dream country for so many in the world, white English people even sold themselves into slavery or indentured servitude in order to get into America. That breaks the back of the argument of so many in this idea of reparations.
While the Democratic party wants to be the nanny and godfather party that doles out free stuff to people to get them to vote Democrat, isn’t this pandering exactly what the slave owners did to their slaves? They gave them things in order to keep them quiet. But the gifts were not freedom and a source of livable income where they could be independent. So all this talk of reparations coming from the Democratic party is really hypocritical.
But the point is since white English people were slaves in this same time frame, then who are you going to pay? Would the descendants of these white slaves also be considered valid people to be recompensed? Even their descendants? Many of them came to America because they had debts and were sold into slavery to pay their debts. Does that situation validate their receiving reparations?
While these thoughts muddy the water, the points are very valid. You cannot just assume because somebody is black in the US they should get reparations from white people. Should black people be exempted from paying reparations? Why? Didn’t a black man born in the 1960s inherit the same America as a white man born back then? Whatever responsibilities a white American man “owes” to the descendants of slaves, black men owe the same. But when you move the focus from receiving millions of dollars to blacks also paying millions of dollars, they don’t accept that very easily. Why should whites accept it either?
If the black man complains that he never owned a slave, neither has the white man. Well, the black man says, “his ancestors have never owned a slave.” How does he know that? Blacks also owned slaves in the time of our country’s beginning until all were freed. The Wrongness of Inequality by any other color
The crux of the Matter
So the entire matter boils down to a single point. That point is what is morally right before God? and what is right as far as the American constitution, laws, and principles?
Before God, the matter is difficult. God never condemns slavery as a concept out of hand. The idea of being a slave is that somebody “owns” you. That owner also directs, guides, or outright forces the slave to do the owner’s will. Why is that concept not condemned by God? 1) That is the reality of our situation under Satan and sin, We are subject to that control whether we like it or not. 2) When God saves us from Satan and sin, we are “bondslaves” of God, or still slaves under God’s authority and person.
So we are really never free. Freedom for us is really all about the liberty that God gives us in doing things under our own will. Many slaves in the south had a better situation there than they did in Africa. It is interesting that all of the offended blacks that came through the channel of slavery from Africa wanting reparations, well, let’s pay them. Pay them $10,000 dollars each and pay their plane fare back to Africa, and pay for them to renounce their US citizenship. How many would take that offer? I would guess not many.
Life is not horrible for Blacks in America today
The Wrongness of Inequality by any other color
The truth of the matter is that almost every single black wanting reparations would fight to stay in America. They just want money for free, but they don’t want to return to where they came from. If I was a black person, I would not either. My ancestors came from England and Germany. I wouldn’t mind visiting those places but I would not want to give up my American citizenship.
In America, Americans have a great life, and that is based on the rights and freedoms that we all have equally because of our founding fathers and their foresight in making laws and structures that provide and protect those rights and freedoms that so many love.
What is wrong is inequality
We can define inequality as not treating all people in basically the same way. This is the crime, and in the name of “fixing” the wrongness of our country, these people are acting and forcing inequable actions on some people. Prejudice. Bias. These things will only make the matter worse.
If we want what is “equal”, then according to the number of blacks in the US, that number or percentage should be doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. Try that concept on BETA TV which is mostly white.
Ever see Obama’s cabinet? Mostly black. I saw pictures one time, and I didn’t see a single white person. So if a black man that has been discriminated against his whole life gets to be president, wouldn’t you think he would intersperse blacks and whites in his cabinet appointments? The criticism that there are no blacks in Trump’s cabinet is only for Trump, and Obama can do what he wants? See how “justice” only works one way, when it benefits me.
The Wrongness of Inequality by any other color
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