Didn't the NAACP just make President or something a former large company CEO? And he agreed to this?

I may be speaking from naievete here (so I'm open to articles or arguments that will help me understand) but HOW will the collection of funds from companies with past ties to slavery be beneficial to Black America at large? Or is that beside the point, and the true goal is collecting money for its own sake? I suspect the latter, though I'd like to be proven wrong.

AWW;

Large companies are fine with this sort of thing. It weeds out the new, innovative, up and coming companies, thereby reducing the competition.

We have to put an end to this Danegeld. If we are going to offer 'reparations' for slavery then we should insist that the recipients of those 'reparations' move to Africa as a condition of receiving them. The notion of reparations is to return the injured party to the status quo ante.

..'"Many of the problems we have now including (SNIP) incarcerations can be directly tied to slavery."

God, that's funny. Imagine a mafia don : 'Jeez, were having a problem with incarcerations!'
LOL

The harm wasn't bringing them here--it was enslaving them and robbing them of the natural leg up provided by a first generation of immigration.

You were right the second time,John: the goal isn't to help anybody at large, it's to help the NAACP. That's no particular knock against the NAACP, this sort of thing happens to all groups sooner or later. An advocacy group serving its own interests instead of its constituents' is one example of the principal-agent problem.

"Absolutely, we will be EXTORTING MONEY from companies THAT WERE ACTING LEGALLY AND APPROPRIATLY UNDER THE STANDARDS OF THAT ERA and USING INTIMIDATION TO FORCE all parties to HAND OVER THE CASH.

Will the NAACP also expect the tribes who collected and transported slaves to the African coast to pay as well?

you shouldn't be able to make claims for reparations without leaving the country first; i.e. renouncing your u.s. citizenship.

Will the darker-skinned blacks also be suing the lighter-skinned ones?

Julian and Andy Young will have some 'splainin to do, if so.

I recently read about some bank (perhaps Chase) that confessed to its slave era sins. the problem is that they had to lie to do it.

The source of their sin was an acquired bank in New Orleans. The New Orleans bank had, it was claimed, participated in financing the slave trade ante-bellum. The problem with the claim is that the 19th century bank had failed in the Great Depression and had been reorganized by FDIC.

That meant that there was no corporate continuity between the ante-bellum bank and any modern bank. The modern bank had confessed even though it had not done the crime.

But once the reparations are paid, how will NAACP keep the resntment going?

What we're likely to find, over time, is that these reparations are actually marketing schemes. That is, hypothetically, a bank agrees to give blacks brought to it by the NAACP 25 basis points off the market mortgage rate, which would actually decrease the bank's mortgage acquisition costs or GM agrees to give NAACP members free oil changes for the first year of new car ownership. Pretty soon you'll see companies clamoring to pay "reparations."

Slavery in what was to become the United States was a reprieve from death and a ticket, a free ticket, to civiization. The alternative was to have been butchered out of hand by the local chieftain, or, worse, to have passed into extinction at the hands of the Muslims.

This reparations business is simple extortion, no more or no less. Examine the details of where the money winds up, and you will find that the present-day chieftains are getting their cut.

Lou, let's not go overboard. We can agree that slavery was evil without opening up the checkbook.

Slavery was evil, worse than death, IMO.
(Still is evil in Northern Africa and the Middle East).

However, the black American descended from slaves is, on averge, FAR better off than her stayed-at-home African counterpart.

As I once remarked:

Blacks have gotten what they were promised, and much more, although shamefully it took a hundred years.

"40 acres and a mule" was, at heart, a promise of self-sufficiency.
Setting aside for the moment the inadequacies, shortfalls and absurdities of the current system, a black kid can, with effort, get a decent education from free schools, and even get fed twice a day by the school if the kid is low-income.
After high school, a black kid can get grants and loans sufficient to allow her to attend a state college that will provide adequate instruction in most fields, or she can do the same to go to a trade school where, within a year, she can be trained to be an auto mechanic, HVAC tech, surgical tech, bookkeeper, etc.
If the black kid chooses a trade or college major wisely, trade school can be a route to a middle class life, and college to actual riches. All for free, or subsidized.

In addition, the Civil War era promise of self-sufficiency was not intended to imply that blacks would be equal to whites, merely not enslaved.
Now, however, blacks not only have their farm equivalents, but also first class citizenship.

Those stolen from Africa would have deserved far more compensation, but their children's children have gotten what they deserve.
After all, if blacks had never been taken from Africa, then almost all blacks now in America would have to live in Africa.
If we compare the current value of being an American citizen, raised in American society, with the value of being a citizen of a West African nation, we see that American blacks have gotten the equivalent of 4,000 acres, and a 20-mule team.

Some would say that American Black culture lost the benefit of the normal immigrant experience, even though there have been a lot of Haitian, Caribbean, and modern African immigrants; that the legacy of slavery runs deep and hard.
While accepting that, it's also true that many immigrant groups had a hard time being accepted in America, or were forced to leave their homes in foreign lands, being unwilling travelers, or both.

It's been six generations, at least, since there were any legal slaves in the United States.
At some point, it's up to individuals to make their own way, as best they can, through life. Right now, in America, one's socio-economic status has more influence on eventual success than skin color does.

Of course, no enslaved people has ever thought so.

This seems an appropriate time to highly recommend Keith Richburg's Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa.

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1003/

Thought so...
What ?

Of course slavery was, as Robert E. Lee, said, a moral calamity. Tell me, how would any significant number a black Africans have made their way to North America without it? It is over and done, and we have made a pretty good job on ending it, not just here, but, to the best of our ability, throughout the world.

Realizing Calhoun's dour prediction, that we would become the slaves of the Blacks, is not the answer. Racial entitlement, like racial disability, is an unamerican abomination.

This is economic not racial. The NAACP is becoming part of the tort-industrial complex because there's a lot of money in it; and they're going into the racial reparations concession because Peter Angelos has already got the asbestos market cornered. Kill some lawyers and get back to me.

Lou:

They come now, from Africa and Haiti and do as well as any other immigrants.