Battles with Integrity

You make my point for me. Where do Americans of Irish descent fall on the scale of those-who-are-to-be-compensated? How about those of southern and eastern european descent? How about those of Chinese descent? How about Africans whose ancestors were freed prior to the Civil War? Who immigrated here after the Civil War? After 1965?

Again I ask the question, who owes how much for how long to whom? Do European immigrants who became citizens in the last 10 years owe as much as those whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower? What about people of mixed ancestry - I'm 1/32 Cherokee, what am I owed for the Trail of Tears?

I understand the impulse to compensate those who have, or whose ancestors did, suffer legal oppression, or even just hatred and bigotry. As noble as such a desire might be, implementing a "fair" solution is, I think, impossible, when you begin trying to judge the responsibility of each person's ancestors, or the compensation due for each claim of victimization. Other than the infamous and vaguely described inflation- and -compound-interest-adjusted "forty acres and a mule," I've yet to hear a concrete, much less workable, plan.

As an example, let's step away from monetary compensation for a moment. For the first 130 years of the republic, from the ratification of the Constitution to the passing of the 18th Amendment, women could not vote in national elections. Should only women be allowed to vote for the next 130 years? For the first 76 years, slaves were not allowed to vote, but were counted as 3/5 of a person for purposes of calculating representation in Congress. Should the votes descendants of slaves be weighted according to the number of their ancestors who were slaves?

As to your last paragraph, I'd ask you to define what you mean by "overdeveloped," "underdeveloped," and "preyed upon." The fact is that for 11,000 years, since the beginnings of agriculturally-based "civilization," some cultures or communities or societies, call them what you will, have been more successful than others in terms of feeding their people, increasing their population, developing technology, and, sadly, waging warfare. I don't applaud the human impulses to war and theft (which predate H. sapiens), but neither do I think that it's possible, or even necessarily good, to try compensate those who've been less successful. By that logic, Englishmen of Anglo-Saxon ancestry should compensate the Welsh; Italy would have to compensate much of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East for the Roman Empire; most of Europe would have to compensate the Basques, Laplanders, and so on for the Indo-European migrations of 5,000 years ago. Should we genetically test people for remnants H. neanderthalis genes to compensate? To whom do we make out the check for the extinction of genus Australopithecus?

And not just to focus on "race," what compensation do we offer gays who, in previous generations, under social pressure, felt compelled to marry and have icky heterosexual relations? Are their heterosexual descendants entitled to compensation, even though they might not even have existed but for that oppression?

Now, as a propertied heterosexual male who checks "White" on surveys and forms (being, in addition to the aforementioned quasi-indigenous ancestry, 1/4 European Jew, and the rest various strains of mongrelized mostly-European Kentucky and Okie trash), I'll be the first to admit that I have a vested interest in this issue. But really, an issue that admits so easily of reductio ad absurdum seems to be little more than an empty, perhaps even inflammatory, slogan, don't you think?