comment: >
  
  Should lgbt people receive reparations too? How about Asians? Decedents Japanese-Americans for the internment camps? 
  Why are black people special compared to other minority groups for reparations?
context: /u/ICuriosityCatI (OP) has awarded 1 delta(s) in this post.
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  ^Delta System Explained ^| ^Deltaboards >
  
  There is a psychological concept called anchoring.  The short version is that whoever throws out the first number in a negotiation sets the basic parameters for that negotiation and greatly influences the final number that is agreed upon.
  It is very unlikely that they truly expect $5M/person, but by setting the initial bar that high, they can potentially get a higher final figure than if they had gone in with a more reasonable number off the bat.  Now, this could backfire and they could get dismissed entirely for being unreasonable, but that is a risk you take in negotiations.
  So, it isn't whacky if this is part of a broader negotiation strategy. >
  
  This is a fair point and I was thinking about this. But I don't think in this case proposing a wildly high figure in hopes of negotiating down to a lower figure but one that's higher than it would have been is a great strategy. 
  But !delta because it could be a strategy even if it does backfire (which I think is likely, especially given how much power conservatives have right now.) >
  
  Time will tell if it is a good strategy or not.
  It does influence the conversation, though.  Pretty much everyone in the negotiating room will be basing their offers on how much less than $5M they are, and that is the power of anchoring.  It becomes the baseline from which you determine the reasonableness of your counter. >
  
  Does that approach usually work though? If I'm negotiating with somebody and I throw out a ridiculous number and then a really high but not as ridiculous one do they say "well compared to the ridiculous one..." Or do they say "this guy is full of crap and I don't trust him, no deal."
  The psychology is very interesting to me, but I'm wondering how often it really works. >
  
  The further from “reasonable” your anchor the less likely it is to work.  I put reasonable in quotes because often (but certainly in this scenario) what is reasonable is very subjective.  However, my sense is that the 5mil will prove this be a mistake in hindsight because I think it will make independent people less likely to support this and give catalyzing talking points to the right. >
  
  Indeed. You don't even have to be right-wing to think that reparations is an asinine concept.
  I suppose those of us who are mixed-race are going to pay themselves? What about First Nations Americans? They were dealt an even worse hand.
  In all seriousness, I worry that the average Joe will read these headlines and surmise that "Black people think that we should have to pay them five million dollars for being Black."
  This seems to be an effective way to both shut down conversation and create actual racists. >
  
  
  I suppose those of us who are mixed-race are going to pay themselves? What about First Nations Americans? They were dealt an even worse hand.
  
  Raises the question, just who is going to pay for it?
  Do taxes get increased across the board? Is your tax burden increased because you're "White"? Or will there be a register of folks who's ancestors owned slaves who need to pay for this? >
  
  The vast majority of white people are not descended from slave owners. My ancestors were poor potato farmers who didn’t come to the US until after the civil war. Should I have to pay, not only for sins that I did not commit but also for sins that nobody I was even related to committed? This just seems ridiculous to me that people who were never slave owners should give people who were never slaves reparations for something that happened hundreds of years before either of us were born. That just seems like a more drawn out North Korean 3 generations of punishment abuses of power. >
  
  Hahaha, no. 
  You can qualify by any two. 
  Imagine how many people there are who
  
  descended from slaves
  have a drug conviction
  
  Gotta be a half-million people. >
  
  I wonder if you need to prove the descended from slaves part, or can you just claim it.  "Master didn't let us keep the birth certificates". >
  
  I totally agree. Further to this, I feel there needs to be legislation in place - or at the very least incentives - that stop the institutional racism that has crept into the capitalist corporate system. Decisions like banks not loaning out, and chain supermarkets not opening, things that would have profound affects in areas from jobs, to affordable groceries, to safer neighbourhoods. And these corporate decisions are all based on socio-economic parameters. In other words, legal racism.
  To OPs point and yours, money should be injected into the system directly to counteract these practices and truly give black communities a wider scope of opportunities while also protecting those communities from sky rocketing land prices and gentrification by keeping the money and business in black hands.
  Giving big hand outs to individuals won't fix the wider problem and is a short term solution at best, while also being contraversial and jeopardising support for the cause. >
  
  San Francisco wasn’t even a city during slavery. It’s a city of immigrants looking for a better life >
  
  The problem with this argument is that you and plenty of others are trying to hold and entire RACE of people to a higher standard than you hold any other group of people: Class action lawsuits happen all the time for discrimination or mistreatment at the hands of employers or the government: The entire point of compensation for damages is simply to make the person or persons who were harmed whole. It has no bearing on your class or income or financial literacy, because those factors have literally NOTHING to do with the original harm that was done by Party A to Party B.
  Furthermore we have proven that the US already has a framework for reparations that includes direct cash payments because we have done so for both Japanese internment and Native Americans. When the US recognized legally that they were liable for the harm they caused to those communities both 42 years and hundreds of years later for Native Americans, we didn’t do this game of making them jump through hoops to be compensated, because the point wasn’t about what these groups would do with the money, because it wasn’t actually ABOUT the money itself, it was about making them whole by holding the party that caused harm accountable.
  So please explain to me why we are so condescending when it comes to black people that we both assume that somehow they will mishandle money, OR that we have any right to even judge how someone else uses settlement money that is compensation for harm?
  To illustrate why this argument is messed up, let’s use an example: Say your grandparents worked in a factory in the 50s that knowingly kept them in conditions where they were exposed to lead for the entire duration of their work career. After 50 years there is a class action lawsuit not JUST for the ones left alive, but also their descendants due to the fact that lead poisoning can cause health problems in both offspring and grandchildren, thus making you eligible for financial compensation. Since a company is an entity without an expiry date (exactly like the government) and both directly benefited from the labor of the people who worked for it even IF they also paid for that labor at the same time, the new shareholders of the company who didn’t have anything to do with the original incident and conditions have still been found liable due to now owning the company. 
  So, How would you feel if the new shareholders then tried to dictate to you that, actually, even though you are entitled to financial compensation, they think they shouldn’t have to pay you in cash because you might spend it in a way that the shareholders don’t like. Instead they believe that THEY get to choose the means of compensation when THEY were the ones found liable for the harm they caused YOUR family. Wouldn’t you be pissed off that someone would have the gall to try to dictate to you how you spend what would be compensation that YOU are entitled to? So why are we treating black people like that?
  Do you see how it doesn’t make any sense? >
  
  The US paid $3 Billion in reparations to Japanese-Americans. Proposed African slave trade reparations are about 60,000x that. Just because something has been done on a relatively minute scale, does not mean it can be done on any level. It’s like saying since we landed people on the moon, this means we should be able to send people off to other galaxies. There’s complications in scale.
  And then there’s the reality of the world where just because something is morally right, doesn’t make it politically feasible. I agree African Americans are victims of one of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity. I also think any kind of cash reparation on anything remotely at the scale proposed would destroy our economy. And before anyone says “good, burn it to the ground,” go read up on what life is like in hugely inflationary environments where cash isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. Then multiply that by a thousand because we live in the largest economy in the world. >
  
  It's also a difference between reparations directly to those harmed (like the Japanese-Americans) and trying to give reparations to people 10 generations later. >
  
  CMV: cash reparations in any form are politically inconceivable, hugely inflationary, and just downright ill-advised. Therefore, these proposals and discussions are just a waste of time, unless they propose something reasonable. My idea are massive investments in the endowments of HBCU’s allowing for free top notch education for all African Americans who want it. >
  
  The actual committee draft actually says that. 
  The 5m was a stupid first suggested action out of a dozen, though I'll remind you that cash reparations are actually a common solution. >
  
  An even better question is "how are mixed-race Americans handled?" 
  There were also a number of Black slave owners with White slaves. 
  Once you get into the nitty-gritty, it gets murky quite quickly. >
  
  
  There were also a number of Black slave owners with White slaves
  
  I would like clarification on this, as far as I've been able to determine, in the US this wasn't a thing. Indentured Servitude yes, but there were no white slaves. >
  
  Seems like a great place to sort by controversial. >
  
  The bike analogy is pretty bad, because in it, your kid is directly stolen from when in the context of reparations everyone is multiple degrees removed from the original issue. If some kid came up to me and told me that my ancestor stole his ancestor's bike 200 years ago, I would tell him to get fucked. >
  
  I don’t understand, in any world where it would be fair to practice to enslave millions of people and keep them as third class citizens for generations based on the color of their skin. >
  
  It’s not ok same as it’s not ok in any world to punish and hold people liable for damages that they did not inflict nor have any hand in causing. 
  If there were a way to hold the actual slave owners liable it would be one thing then again you would have to also hold freedblacks who owned slaves liable as well because it happened more than you’d think. >
  
  They might not have caused it but they are benefiting from it. 
  It is easier for a white person who just immigrated to the US to get a loan for a house than a black person whose ancestors built this country. 
  White sounding names on resumes are more likely to get an interview. 
  Black kids are seen as older at a very young age whereas whites can act the fool till they are in their 30s and people will say “boys will be boys”. 
  One black person commits a crime and it’s ALL blacks are criminals. A white dude shoots up a school and it’s a “lone wolf”. 
  White women calling their henchmen aka police on black people just existing. Etc. >
  
  I'm Black and I argue against this victimhood thinking. This is a bunch of... To each their own but a lot of this is bullshit. It's what has been imbedded a lot of the time, look at these blanket statements. This is crap, stop eating this processed crap >
  
  My dude, people alive today are heavily affected by what happened in the last 60 years. Heck people are still alive that saw MLK. It wasn't just slavery. It was also racism. And very recent racism. Recent as in right now.