Re: reparations

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> 02/11/00 03:49PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:

>CB: How about if we make a special stipulation that every Black
>person except Vernon Jordan gets money ?  Or just every Black person
>with a net worth below x

How do you define a black person?

Where would the reparations come from? General tax revenues? If so,
then people of non-European origin would be paying in.

These may sound like wonky practical questions, distractions from the
principles under consideration, but they really go to the heart of
how difficult it is to define race.

&&&&&&&&&&

CB: The law solves sticky practical problems like this all the time. How much is a dead person worth in a wrongful death suit ?

Defining a Black person would be something like whether they have held themselves out as Black or been officially considered Black in the various places where race has been required to be chosen on forms and the like. If a person has identified as Black , then they have been Black , for purposes of compensation for racism, which is basically how the slavery has impacted people today ( that is through the impact of racism).

On the source, I don't think the fact that some of the money in immediate source, such as the one you mention,  comes from non-Europeans matters that much. We might add a special tax on the Fortune 500 or some equivalent. I think we should even specifically stipulate that the money will not be got by in anyway lowering the income of any White working class people. We could come up with a way that the reparations come directly from the surplus value holders.  We could argue that whatever the white workers might theoretically owe is due them by the corporations anyway. There's a specific legal claim of that type, name is escaping me right now. It is a third party claim, where one pleads "to the extent that I owe you, this other person owes me."  I remember it is called impleading. The white working class would have a general impleader against the bourgeoisie. "To the extent that we owe any reparations to Black working class people , we implead the bourgeoisie and they pay our pa!
rt to Black workers. "

And then the white working class ( in the class actioin suit of all times, of course)says and not only that, the bourgeois class owes us for all this surplus value they exploited from our ancestors too.

Then the overall remedy is everybody is guaranteed a job and decent income , prospectively. And not only that, the People as a whole now own the basic means of production.

This would be an old time Jubilee for all.

CB