Affirmative Action and Reparations

Affirmative action was adopted by congress and signed by the President because it had mass appeal. It made life a little more fair for women, gays, Muslims, Jews, African Americans, Asians, Latinos, Indian tribes and so on. Reparations is a movement to address the obvious wrongs done to black people, whose recent ancestors were enslaved and who live, much of the time, in a Jim Crow nation today.

Years ago I was walking along some tracks in Buffalo at night and came upon several local Indians sitting around a fire and drinking beer. We got to talking, and they told me how deeply they resented the government help then going to African-Americans--the help should, in their view, be going to the tribes. They'd had a continent stolen from them by the Europeans. Then, in the 1840s our nation took half of Mexico at gunpoint and added it to our western border. American women worked for 300 years without pay or the right to vote. Latino dons who had once owned California were cheated in American courts and died broke. So I suspect that who will pay reparations to whom is a complex matter. I still remember when white men from the city came and took my grandfather's little ranch. They used eminent domain--they wanted the rough land so they could hunt deer on it. 

Social Security and Medicare have survived because there are a lot of poor people and some of them vote. Social programs gain mass support when everyone gets helped.