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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved

Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?

There were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.

That's my justification for affirmative action (not reparations). Should it last forever? No but it hasn't been that many generations since the civil rights act

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> Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?

No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from. Were it not for slavery, again as abhorrent as it was, they'd be a lot worse off today.

> here were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.

Yes, that's a fact.

It is also easy to forget that the suppliers of slaves were African nations that practiced slavery themselves. They found the Europeans to be great customers for their slaves. So descendants of the Ashanti and others benefited from the selling of slaves. If we really want to look at reparations, we probably need some way to determine what percentage each person benefited from slavery and what percentage they suffered from it. Also there were slaves from Asia and other places that are probably just as deserving of payments if that happens. But all of this flies in face of the narrative that slavery was something whites did to blacks.

A better approach would be to try to provide opportunities that people can take advantage of. The US actually does a great job of this which is why we don't see mass exodus of people trying to go back to the African nations.

Easily forgotten? It's brought up in just about every discussion on the subject, including this one, already, by the person you were replying to agree with.

I've never seen it as something that was thought about as part of any reparation ideas.

Why would it be a part of the discussion?

Well if you want to take money from the general population and give to people whose ancestors were harmed by slavery, you need some way to differentiate between ancestors who were harmed by and ancestors who benefited from slavery.

If that isn't part of the discussion, then people are just proposing a welfare system to give money to people based on the color of their skin.

No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from.

Because those countries were devastated by Europeans

Those countries were created by Europeans, they didn’t exist before that. The tribes that were there before were not much of a civilization. They weren’t behind the rest of the world because of colonialism, they were colonized because they were behind the rest of the world.

Behind the rest of the world how? Technology?

Would you say Native Americans were behind? They had a thriving society.

In technology, economy, health, longevity, and general well being. Yes, way behind.

"technology, economy"

That's subjective. Maybe happiness is the most important aspect of a society

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