Where the hell is all this money the blacks are demanding supposed to come from?

If they’re mad about being slaves hundreds of years ago, they should sue the descendants of Jewish slave traders.

Reuters:

After California state legislators passed bills addressing the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the most ambitious of the reparations proposals.

The setback last month followed turmoil at Harvard over that elite university’s plans to make amends for historic ties to slavery and a lawsuit challenging an Illinois city’s reparations payments. But advocates say they are undeterred.

Shortly before the California legislative session ended this summer, a state Senate reparations bill on land restitution proposed by state Sen. Steven Bradford passed 56-0. But the Black Caucus blocked votes on two other proposals in that package — one creating a fund and the third an agency to determine who would be eligible for reparations.

“It’s a shame,” Bradford said. “To be this close to the finish line, and not at least have a vote.”

The Black Caucus blocked the bills because the proposed agency, not the legislature, would have had oversight, members wrote on X.

pic.twitter.com/g7QwPB5S6e

— @clbcpolicyinstitute (@CABlackCaucus) August 31, 2024

“The setbacks have actually re-invigorated people in the reparations movement,” said Kamilah Moore, a lawyer and former chair of the California Reparations Task Force, which released a 2021 report documenting California’s role in perpetuating slavery and racial inequalities. A handful of its over 100 policy suggestions were turned into bills.

…

A Reuters/Ipsos survey last year showed that 74% of Black Americans support reparations, compared to 26% of white Americans. Common concerns include addressing persistent racial disparities in the labor market, education and health, along with the cost of the initiatives and questions about whether today’s taxpayers should pay for past wrongs.

Stop demanding tax money, nigger, and just go get your darkie discount at Gucci.

WATCH: “If somebody decides to loot a Gucci, that’s reparations” – BLM organizer #chicago #blacklivesmatter pic.twitter.com/HZxzyVjIZ0

— Prince Carlton 🇺🇸 (@_PrinceCarlton_) October 21, 2024

“However, this bill tasks a nonexistent state agency to carry out its various provisions and requirements, making it impossible to implement.” ️https://t.co/JCVtgRU9MQ pic.twitter.com/P0uqx24QtX

— DAP/ADOS TRIBE🇺🇸 (@Black_Action) September 26, 2024

Shut up, spook.

We’re taking all your shit, see, wise guy?

AP:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have helped Black families reclaim or be compensated for property that was unjustly taken by the government.

The bill would have created a process for families to file a claim with the state if they believe the government seized their property through eminent domain due to discriminatory motives and without providing fair compensation.

The proposal by itself would not have been able to take full effect because lawmakers blocked another bill to create a reparations agency that would have reviewed claims.

“I thank the author for his commitment to redressing past racial injustices,” Newsom said in a statement. “However, this bill tasks a nonexistent state agency to carry out its various provisions and requirements, making it impossible to implement.”

The veto dealt a blow to a key part of a package of reparations bills the California Legislative Black Caucus backed this year in an effort to help the state atone for decades of policies that drove racial disparities for Black Americans. The caucus sent other proposals to Newsom’s desk that would require the state to formally apologize for slavery and its lingering impacts, improve protections against hair discrimination for athletes and combat the banning of books in state prisons.

It doesn’t seem very likely that the blacks actually had land stolen from them.

But hey – whatever.

It’s good to not give free things to blacks, right?

This Newsom cat is alright, you feel me?

See: California: Governor Gavin Newsom Leads Assault on Homeless Encampment…!?

California Governor Newsome having himself filmed dismantling homeless encampments is aimed at graphically dissociating the Democrats from any policies of social reform, encouraging political backwardness and anti-immigrant attitudes, and forging a bloc with the far-right. pic.twitter.com/ZxfNoDd0U0

— Joseph Kishore (@jkishore) August 12, 2024

Oh, yeah. Let’s give even more free money to the blacks. Sure, oh yes.

Because this has worked out so well in the past to bring blacks up out of poverty. They are so very responsible with the money, that they take the handouts and turn them into real wealth through intelligent investments and hard work.

Oh, yes, friends, that’s exactly how it works.

The Guardian:

Portugal needs to “pay the costs” of slavery and other colonial-era crimes, the country’s president has said, in a rare instance of a European leader seemingly backing the need for reparations.

Portugal has long grappled with calls by campaigners to address its legacy as the European country with the longest historical involvement in the slave trade. During the span of four centuries, nearly 6 million Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported across the Atlantic by Portuguese vessels.

Those who managed to survive the voyage were enslaved and forced to toil on plantations in the Americas, mostly in Brazil, while Portugal and its institutions profited from their labour.

The country’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said at an event with foreign journalists on Tuesday that Portugal “takes full responsibility” for the wrongs of the past and that those crimes, including colonial massacres, had “costs”.

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa

“We have to pay the costs,” he said. “Are there actions that were not punished and those responsible were not arrested? Are there goods that were looted and not returned? Let’s see how we can repair this.”

The remarks came one year after Rebelo de Sousa said Portugal should apologise and “assume responsibility” for its role in the transatlantic slave trade, though he stopped short of providing any concrete details or a full apology.

It appears that all of this “reparations” talk is just the first phase in a worldwide program to transfer white wealth to colored people, for no explainable reason other than “oh but their feelings are hurt from something that happened hundreds of years ago.”

Furthermore, it was the Jews who ran the Portuguese slave trade.

Why not make Israel pay?

And why not make the Arabs and Turks pay for invading and enslaving whites?

If this project’s underlying assumptions are true, why are they not asking these questions?

Black people shouldn’t have to resort to armed robbery just to get the Reparations we are owed. pic.twitter.com/C6gHqzlwJg

— Rev. Ray Cistman ✊🏾🙏🏾 (@RevRayCistman) April 19, 2024

At least slavery actually happened. Unlike the Holocaust.

The thing is: slavery was the best thing that ever happened to the blacks. The blacks in Africa made a lot of money selling their enemies to Portuguese slave traders (who were mostly Jewish, by the way), and the blacks who ended up in slavery made a killing off of the social welfare systems in the West.

I don’t know what they’re complaining about. Actually, I do know. They found out whites feel really bad about slavery, so now they see an opportunity to get even more money. They don’t actually care about slavery hundreds of years ago, or think its relevant. There are places in Africa that still have slavery now.

Why don’t whites sue Turkey for enslaving us?

Reuters:

Support is building among Africa and Caribbean nations for the creation of an international tribunal on atrocities dating to the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, with the United States backing a U.N. panel at the heart of the effort.

A tribunal, modelled on other ad-hoc courts such as the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War Two, was proposed last year. It has now gained traction within a broader slavery reparations movement, Reuters reporting based on interviews with a dozen people reveals.

Formally recommended in June by the U.N. Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, the idea of a special tribunal has been explored further at African and Caribbean regional bodies, said Eric Phillips, a vice-chair of the slavery reparations commission for the Caribbean Community, CARICOM, which groups 15 member states.

The scope of any tribunal has not been determined but the U.N. Forum recommended in a preliminary report that it should address reparations for enslavement, apartheid, genocide, and colonialism.

That’s quite a list.

Advocates, including within CARICOM and the African Union (AU), which groups 55 nations across the continent, are working to build wider backing for the idea among U.N. members, Phillips said.

A special U.N. tribunal would help establish legal norms for complex international and historical reparations claims, its supporters say. Opponents of reparations argue, among other things, that contemporary states and institutions should not be held responsible for historical slavery.

Even its supporters recognise that establishing an international tribunal for slavery will not be easy.

There are “huge obstacles,” said Martin Okumu-Masiga, Secretary-General of the Africa Judges and Jurists Forum (AJJF), which is providing reparations-related advice to the AU.

Hurdles include obtaining the cooperation of nations that were involved in the trade of enslaved people and the legal complexities of finding responsible parties and determining remedies.

“These things happened many years ago and historical records and evidence can be challenging to access and even verify,” Okumo-Masiga said.

Unlike the Nuremberg trials, nobody directly involved in transatlantic slavery is alive.

Yeah, so maybe we can all just move on?

Asked about the idea of a tribunal, a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office acknowledged the country’s role in transatlantic slavery, but said it had no plan to pay reparations. Instead, past wrongs should be tackled by learning lessons from history and tackling “today’s challenges,” the spokesperson said.

However, advocates for reparations say Western countries and institutions that continue to benefit from the wealth slavery generated should be held accountable, particularly given ongoing legacies of racial discrimination.

A tribunal would help establish an “official record of history,” said Brian Kagoro, a Zimbabwean lawyer who has been advocating for reparations for over two decades.

Racism, impoverishment and economic underdevelopment are linked to the longstanding consequences of transatlantic slavery from the United States to Europe and the African continent, according to U.N. studies.

Why not talk about the fact that the French still own all of the resources in their former colonies, and use it as leverage to try to force blacks to have gay anal sex with men?

We’re talking about this slavery gibberish, meanwhile, the same people pushing this want to invade Niger for kicking out the French.

Further: what about the IMF loans these countries have been burdened with? Isn’t that a whole lot more relevant than slavery hundreds of years ago?

“These legacies are alive and well,” said Clive Lewis, a British Labour MP and a descendant of people enslaved in the Caribbean nation of Grenada.

Black people “live in poorer and more polluted areas, they have worse diets, they have worse educational outcomes… because structural racism is embedded deep.”

…

Reuters could not establish how many countries in Africa and the Caribbean were likely to support the idea.

People want to support the blacks. They are against gays and they stand up to the Anal Empire.

But then they do stuff like this, and they just look whiny and annoying.

That said: this is all driven more by white women at the UN than it is by the blacks themselves, who wouldn’t ever even have thought of this on their own.

UN demands US pay slavery reparations to Black people for “generations of discrimination.”

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/fy5UTs2qkV

— AF Post (@AFpost) March 29, 2024

Blacks are going to be poorer than whites on average simply because of the IQ gap. But they don’t have to be this poor. They are this poor because of meddling by the former colonial powers.

During colonialism, white countries had some responsibilities. When colonialism ended, they gave up all of those responsibilities, while keeping control of the resources. Then they started this loan system, which effectively enslaved entire countries under a tsunami of debt, where Western nations were able to steal their resources to pay interest on these scam loans.

Why would blacks who weren’t even slaves get the reparations?

How would you figure out who was a slave?

What if they were slaves in other countries?

New York Post:

A New York commission that will recommend whether to give reparations for slavery and discrimination to black residents hasn’t even met yet — but it’s already sparked a rift among black New Yorkers over who should be eligible for payouts.

A similar panel in California said monetary reparations should be limited only to descendants of chattel enslaved persons to the US — $360,000 per eligible person — but not for other black Americans who may have suffered from discrimination.

Even with that restriction, the pricetag for the proposal has been estimated at an eyewatering $800 billion.

However, a huge segment of New York’s black residents are not descendants of US slavery. In New York City alone, well over 500,000 people are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants — more than 25% of the black population, census figures show.

But some New York black activists said California’s reparations package was too restrictive.

Bertha Lewis, head of the Brooklyn-based Black Institute, told The Post that reparations must be considered for all black residents, because they have suffered from decades of systemic racism resulting from slavery — even if they are not direct descendants of slaves.

“That’s a false narrative,” Lewis said. “I don’t give a f**k what California did.”

Bertha Lewis

But others disagreed, saying any black people who moved to the US for better opportunities have no right to reparations for slavery in this country.

“It was our choice to come here,” said Mona Davids, a black South African who moved to New York as a child.

“The only beneficiaries of reparations should be descendants of chattel slavery — not African immigrants or Afro-Caribbean descendants.”

She added: “Descendants of slaves didn’t have a choice. White people benefited from slavery.”

Davids, who publishes “Little Africa News,” which serves that African community in the US, said reparations advocates should also go after the African countries, where rulers rounded and sold people to slave traders.

“In many cases it was black Africans who sold slaves. Ghana is rich. Nigeria is rich,” she said.

Yeah, make Nigeria pay for this shit.

Let’s send a black army to Nigeria to loot the place in revenge for selling these people to the Jews.

No joke: I’d rather give the money to Barbados than Jews in the Ukraine and Israel.

It’s not an option to spend the money on our own people, so give it to Barbados. At least they’re probably friendly and good natured, and won’t use the money to murder innocent people.

The Guardian:

King Charles’s comment that the “time has come” to acknowledge the enduring impact of slavery has been welcomed by the prime minister of Barbados as she spoke in London about the need for reparations.

Mia Mottley said Barbados was owed $4.9tn (£3.9tn) by slave-owning nations, noting that conversations over how this debt should be repaid would “be difficult and will take time”, she said on Wednesday evening.

“We’re not expecting that the reparatory damages will be paid in a year, or two, or five because the extraction of wealth and the damages took place over centuries. But we are demanding that we be seen and that we are heard,” she said.

Mottley met David Cameron on Tuesday but would not give details of the foreign secretary’s thoughts on the UK’s slavery-related debt.

“I’m not going to get into the details of our conversation but suffice to say I think the foreign secretary will take his lead from his majesty,” she said.

During a speech at the London School of Economics’ International Inequalities Institute, she repeatedly commended King Charles’s apparent willingness to confront slavery. Her belief in the king’s openness to discussion stems from a speech he gave in June 2022 at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Rwanda.

The king spoke of his “personal sorrow at the suffering of so many”, and how he continues to “deepen [his] understanding of slavery’s enduring impact”. He added: “To forge a common future, that benefits all our citizens, we too must find new ways to acknowledge our past … This is a conversation whose time has come.” The speech made no reference to financial reparations.

Since becoming prime minister in 2018, Mottley has become a powerful voice globally on the legacy of colonialism and has helped transform the call for reparations into a mainstream political issue.

Citing calculations made in a report by the Brattle Group, which factors in the wealth and GDP amassed by countries that enslaved African people, she set out that the UK owes $24tn in reparations to 14 countries affected by transatlantic slavery, Spain owes $17.1tn, France owes $9.2tn and the Netherlands owes $4.86tn.

“These numbers, if taken out of context, can appear to be staggering. But in relation to the total wealth accumulated over a period of time, the numbers are actually minuscule,” said Mottley.

Addressing the historical legacy of slavery would allow the global community to “move on in strength rather than languishing in the shadows of a disgraceful history”, she said.

Mottley said the call for reparations had gained urgency in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

“For the first time the world recognised that we could no longer ignore the trauma of four centuries of enslavement and barbarism and of denying people their humanity,” she added. “I want to salute the king for having the courage to understand that this is a conversation whose time has come.”

Thomas Massie should introduce a bill to forward all money intended for Israel to Barbados.

Let’s just see how people react.

Let’s see if it’s really all about “social justice.”

Reparations are the extraction of money from people who were never slave owners, to be given to people who were never slaves.@willcain pic.twitter.com/ftg98MI9vE

— Larry Elder (@larryelder) July 10, 2023

Them niggas be needs that money, what for they ain’t got none cuz dey been in slavery like a mf.

Best be handing that shit over, whitey.

Niggas be slipping.

New York Post:

A suburban Chicago city has become the first to start paying reparations to qualifying black residents in what is being seen as “a test run for the whole country.”

Evanston has already paid 16 locals from a $10 million package first approved in 2019, the Evanston RoundTable said Monday.

By the end of the year, the reparations committee expects to have paid $25,000 each to 140 qualifying residents in the city of about 75,000, officials also told the Wall Street Journal.

“I see it as like a test run for the whole country,” Justin Hansford, head of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University, told the paper.

Justin Hansford

Those qualifying had to be at least 18 and living in the city between 1919 and 1969, when the city passed a fair-housing ordinance, the WSJ said.

…

Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss said that the city is not concerned over whether reparations are paid out elsewhere, including at the federal level.

Daniel Biss

Bennett Johnson

“Our job here is just to move forward and to continue being that example, to continue illustrating that a small municipality can make real tangible progress,” he told the WSJ.

Still, not everyone is satisfied at the pioneering payouts.

Local civil rights activist Bennett Johnson told a recent meeting that the $25,000 was not enough — and the 1969 year cutoff “totally arbitrary” given that black people were “discriminated” against long after that.

This is another one of those “how is this happening in real life???” situations.

You have the conservative talking points about how these blacks have had equal opportunity for a very long time.

But then you have the amount of money they have received in the form of government handouts, which is in the tens of billions.

We do not owe these people anything.

However, I would be find giving them a lump sum and a one way ticket to Africa.

If they want to stay here, they need to work, and they need to be subjected to the same justice system as everyone else.

Related: Chaos at the Reparations Meeting! Blacks Demand Half the Country and Immediate Reparations NOW!

California reparations meeting: speaker says that $5 million is too little, suggests a higher figure. Do you agree?

pic.twitter.com/Pf5B6F7PnQ

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 8, 2023

Florida man wants his reparations during city council meeting pic.twitter.com/c1rc7UfCfV

— Asian Dawn (@AsianDawn4) May 19, 2023

The final meeting of the Reparations Task Force in California descended into chaos as members of the public demanded immediate reparations.

The task force has recommended potential payments of up to $1.2 million for qualifying black Californians.

However, these payments are… pic.twitter.com/3DdY0sVm4W

— IV Times (@iv_times) June 30, 2023

#California #Reparations Task Force Chair @KamilahMooreEsq lights up the room with her impassioned final remarks. Here is how she concluded— I wish I had my phone recording for her full whole remarks, but my news camera captured them for my @ABC10 story later today. pic.twitter.com/DIDbviSMfL

— Becca Habegger (@BeccaReports) June 29, 2023

I am the most redpilled one of all. I was the only person in public life defending Harvey Weinstein.

And yet, redpilled as I am, I still feel shocked by certain things, continually.

I am still shocked by the ungratefulness of the blacks.

New York Post:

Several attendees at the California Department of Justice’s final Reparations Task Force meeting created a scene during the public comment section of the event Thursday, demanding reparations from the board.

Several excited California residents took advantage of their opportunity to address the board directly, yelling into the mic that the time for reparations is “now!” 

One encouraged the crowd to raise their fists and chant their desires for restitution, while another stood up and screamed for a “divorce” settlement between Black Americans and the rest of the country.

The Reparations Task Force meeting this week represented the final one in a series of public events facilitating discussions between California residents and state officials about establishing potential restitution for perceived inequality between African Americans and the rest of America stemming from slavery and centuries of discrimination.

The final meeting occurred just over a month after the nine-member panel officially recommended that California state legislators allocate funds to pay African American residents of the state, according to historical discrimination.

According to the task force’s recommendation, certain qualifying Black Californians could receive up to $1.2 million in reparations.

The task force’s final meeting in Sacramento on Thursday began with a raucous atmosphere as the public comment section — the first portion of the meeting — featured yelling from animated public commenters, one of whom got the crowd into a frenzy.

…

The meeting sparked with the second speaker, a Black man named Reggie Romaine, who claimed that what the board had recommended in payments is not enough.

He suggested that African Americans get half the country after divorcing from the rest of America.

He began by saying, “This reparations task force, I appreciate y’all. But you all opened up a whole can of worms. I’m going to tell you this. Reparations is about repair. To me, I qualify. I’m going to tell you how you repair this.”

“First of all America, from the evidence that they gave us, you’re guilty,” he said. “In 1619 we were eating fool food! You kidnapped us! Put a hate crime on us! That’s the first one. Now you came here with all the other atrocities. When you brought us here, you raped our men, women, and kids. So, therefore, you married us!”

“Don’t treat us like no cheap piece of meat!” he exclaimed, before pushing for a national divorce. “So, therefore, our last name’s ‘American!’ So now’s the time for a divorce! What do you get in divorce? You get half the money, half the land, alimony, child support, attorney fees, and everything else! So that’s what we want!”

Black people are so emotional, and they will just believe anything at all.

This is the Jewish narrative – that we all owe them, even though only a fraction of whites ever owned slaves, and even though none of us owned slaves, and even though none of them were slaves. It’s stupid to even have to talk about how stupid this all is.

In another universe, you could just as easily get black people to thank you for slavery:

“Yeah, so you be saying, over there in Africa, they poor as a muthafuka. And we over here, we American, we got money, and we can be out there hustling and get more money, cuz we was slaves. So you kinda, really, be doing us a favor.”

After you explained that to them, they would start coming up with their own train of thought:

“So I mean, really, if you been bought us off them people in Africa, they be the ones who enslaved us, gnomesane? So they be, over there in Africa, they be enslaven black folks, and you done bought us, then take us over here, and you gave us freedom. Like yo, them people in Africa ain’t gave us nothin’, they just be selling us, you know, they get theirs. But you bring us here, make us so we can have freedom and a good life in America, you white folks really did a lot for the brothas.”

That isn’t inconceivable. Anyone who has been around black people knows that sometimes they get really emotional, and then fly off the handle, but when they’re calm, they’re fine, you can say just about anything to them. But the emotions never really make any sense.

The other issue, of course, is the fact that black men don’t have dads. This makes them all whiny babies. This is why there is so much violence. You can talk all you want about genetics being responsible for black violence, but they didn’t used to commit 62% of murders. They didn’t used to whine like this. Something happened to change their behavior, and it was:

• The Jew media feeding them emotional gibberish bait, and
• The collapse of the black family

It’s difficult to get angry at them.

Personally, I try not to ever get angry, but with the blacks, it is literally like “forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”

But that doesn’t really have any bearing on the facts, and the facts are that the blacks have decided, collectively, that they do not want to be a part of America anymore. There is no easy solution to that problem.

A significant step towards restorative justice has been taken: The California Reparations Task Force Final Report can be fully read at https://t.co/XF0qJhUGMk pic.twitter.com/ntrlqezTdY

— Assemblymember Mia Bonta (@AsmMiaBonta) June 30, 2023

@tracegallagher @foxnewsnight thank you for discussing California’s disastrous, illegal, impossible-to-implement reparations proposal.

Part 1 of 2: pic.twitter.com/hYcwQmcTL0

— Roxanne Hoge (@RoxanneHoge) June 30, 2023

We need to punish people for things their ancestors did hundreds of years ago.

We should start by punishing blacks for enslaving other blacks, and also for cannibalism.

Reuters:

Achiseled block of sandstone in the U.S. Capitol’s visitor center serves as a reminder that the home of the nation’s Congress was built in part by enslaved Black people. A bronze plaque says the stone, originally part of the building’s exterior, “commemorates their important role in building the Capitol.”

Many lawmakers need look no further than their own family histories to find a much more personal connection to slavery in America, a brutal system of oppression that resulted in the deadliest conflict in U.S. history.

In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.

Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder.

Those lawmakers from the 117th session of Congress are Democrats and Republicans alike. They include some of the most influential politicians in America: Republican senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton and James Lankford, and Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan.

In addition, President Joe Biden and every living former U.S. president – except Donald Trump – are direct descendants of slaveholders: Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and – through his white mother’s side – Barack Obama. Trump’s ancestors came to America after slavery was abolished.

Two of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices – Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – also have direct ancestors who enslaved people.

And in 2022, the governors of 11 of the 50 U.S. states were descendants of slaveholders, Reuters found. They include eight chief executives of the 11 states that formed the Confederate States of America, which seceded and waged war to preserve slavery. Two are seeking the Republican nomination for president: Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, and Doug Burgum of North Dakota.

South Carolina, where the Civil War began, illustrates the familial ties between the American political elite and the nation’s history of slavery. Every member of the state’s nine-person delegation to the last Congress has an ancestral link. The state’s two Black members of Congress – Senator and Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott and Representative James Clyburn, a powerful Democrat – have forebears who were enslaved. Each of the seven white lawmakers who served in the 117th Congress is a direct descendant of a slaveholder, Reuters found. So too is the state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster.

Reuters found that at least 8% of Democrats in the last Congress and 28% of Republicans have such ancestors. The preponderance of Republicans reflects the party’s strength in the South, where slavery was concentrated. Although white people enslaved Black people across Northern states in early America, by the eve of the Civil War, slavery was almost entirely a Southern enterprise.

The Reuters examination reveals how intimately tied America remains to the institution of slavery, including through the “people who make the laws that govern our country,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr, a professor at Harvard University who focuses on African and African American research and hosts the popular television genealogy show Finding Your Roots on PBS.

Henry Louis Gates Jr

Gates said identifying those familial connections to slaveholders is “not another chapter in the blame game. We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions.”

“It’s just to say: Look at how closely linked we are to the institution of slavery, and how it informed the lives of the ancestors of people who represent us in the United States Congress today,” Gates said. “This is a learning opportunity for each individual. It is also a learning opportunity for their constituency … and for the American people as a whole.”

In addition to the political leaders Reuters identified, “there are millions of Americans who are descendants of enslavers as well,” said Tony Burroughs, a genealogist who specializes in helping Black Americans trace their ancestries.

What’s unclear is how the proportion of leaders who descend from slaveholders compares to that of all Americans. Among scholars, there is no agreement on precisely how many Americans today have a forebear who enslaved people.

Ancestral ties to slaveholders have been documented previously for a handful of leaders, including Biden, Obama and McConnell. Scholars and journalists have also extensively examined slavery and its legacy, including how the North profited from the institution, and the role slavery played in decisions of past political leaders during the formation of America and after emancipation.

The Reuters examination is different. It focuses on the most powerful U.S. officeholders of today, many of whom have staked key positions on policies related to race. It reveals for the first time, in breadth and in detail, the extent of those leaders’ ancestral connections to what’s commonly called America’s “original sin.” And it explores what it may mean for them to learn – in personal, specific and sometimes graphic ways – the facts behind their own kin’s part in slavery.

Few were willing to discuss the subject: Only a quarter of those identified as having slaveholding ancestors offered any comment to Reuters. Among the silent are politicians who previously have spoken publicly, sometimes eloquently, about the legacy of slavery and the need for racial healing. The reticence underscores the enduring sensitivity of slavery as a political issue, an unease that genealogist Burroughs suggests is greatly amplified for many people when one’s own kin are linked to the brutal institution.

“You probably have a lot of people who are struggling” to process the information about their families, said Burroughs. He said the granular detail Reuters provided the leaders – names, places and circumstances linking their families to slavery – makes the information especially powerful. “But it’s hard for them to be in denial when they have the specific facts in front of them.”

To trace the lineages of the political elite, Reuters journalists assembled tens of thousands of pieces of information contained in thousands of pages of documents. They analyzed U.S. census records, including antebellum tallies of enslaved people known as “slave schedules,” as well as tax documents, estate records, family Bibles, newspaper accounts, and birth and death certificates. The records – in some cases, family wills that show enslaved human beings bequeathed along with feather beds and farm animals – provide a visceral link between today’s decision makers and slavery. In doing so, they expand upon the antiseptic story conveyed by the sandstone monument in the Capitol’s visitor center.

The Reuters research was then vetted by board-certified genealogists, who reviewed each case that linked a contemporary leader to a slaveholding ancestor. Among the examples of lawmakers and their ancestors’ ties to slavery:

The new insights into the political elite’s ancestral links to slavery come at a time of renewed and intense debate about the meaning of the institution’s legacy and what, if anything, lawmakers should do about it.

…

A Reuters/Ipsos poll for this report suggests that a politician’s links to slavery might sway some voters. In a national survey, almost a quarter of respondents – 23% – said knowing that a candidate’s ancestors enslaved people would make them less likely to vote for that candidate. That number rose to 31% among respondents who identified as Democrats, and 35% among Black respondents. What’s unclear is how significant the topic is compared to race relations more broadly or other hot-button issues such as abortion.

White respondents who said they’re aware of having a slaveholding ancestor were more likely than other white people to support paying reparations: 42% backed the idea, compared to 24% who said their ancestors did not enslave people. The same held true for the idea of having Congress create a commission to formally apologize for slavery: 53% of white people who said they knew of an ancestral tie to slaveholding supported it, versus 39% of those who said their families had not enslaved people.

Some historians and genealogists say there is a valuable reason for white leaders – and other white Americans – to explore their links to slavery.

Many white families may have records that are not in the public domain – documents that could help Black Americans trace their own ancestries to before 1870, when the formerly enslaved were first recorded by name in the U.S. census. Before emancipation, the historical record bears scant detailed traces of individual Black Americans. Not so for white people: Old letters, family Bibles, or other records left behind by white Americans hold the potential to unlock mysteries for the descendants of the 3.9 million Black Americans who were enslaved at the start of the Civil War.

You know.

Jews were responsible for the slave trade.

Actually.

California Reparations Task Force Hearing #15 is live, y’all! pic.twitter.com/pdMzSJvGtI

— Black Voltron Reloaded (@BlkVoltronRlded) May 6, 2023

New reparations proposal at the California Assembly Task Force:

$200 million to every black person pic.twitter.com/nGKPr6GO4h

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 7, 2023

If I were black, I would be getting my ass out to California, immediately.

These California reparations are basically Bitcoin for black people.

The assumption by the California government is that most blacks who hear they could get hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars by simply showing up in California are going to take the attitude of “ain’t nobody got time for that.”

Personally, I hope every black in America floods the state.

I would like to see a mass exodus where every black in the country permanently relocates to California.

New York Post:

California’s reparations task force voted in favor of multiple recommendations Saturday that could cut a minimum of $360,000 in checks to its eligible black residents.

The nine-member committee gave final approval at a meeting in Oakland to a hefty list of proposals aimed at rectifying racial inequalities across the state.

“Reparations are not only morally justifiable, but they have the potential to address long standing racial disparities and inequalities,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said during the meeting.

The panel’s first vote approved a detailed account of historical discrimination against Black Californians in areas such as voting, housing, education, disproportionate policing and incarceration and others.

The group recommended that the state create a new agency that could provide services to descendants of enslaved people to calculate what the state owes them.

Though the task force didn’t specify what compensation would look like, it approved a section of the draft report stating reparations should include “cash or its equivalent.”

Earlier iterations of the reparations package suggested paying out $360,000 to each eligible black Californian.

Some economists estimate that the project could cost the state upwards of $800 billion — more than 2.5 times its annual budget.

We should maybe start some kind of leafleting campaign to inform blacks that literally all they have to do is physically be present in California to get this very serious amount of money?

I mean, some of them probably haven’t heard about it, or think it is a trick or something. So leafleting could help inform and motivate.

Of course, if you’re doing leafleting in Florida, you have to be very careful. Meatball Ron has passed some very serious and very unconstitutional laws about what you’re allowed to say in leaflets. In fact, the law is so vague, I would probably just skip California.

While in Israel, DeSantis signed a law that would combat antisemitism by increasing penalties for threats or intimidation on the basis of religious or ethnic heritagehttps://t.co/ePzxSAcOGw

— Florida’s Voice (@FLVoiceNews) May 1, 2023

The law is about the Jews, but it also says “racial hate.”

Is telling blacks they should move to California to get hundreds of thousands of dollars for free “racial hate”? It sounds like racial love to me, quite frankly. But who the hell knows what Ron DeSantis thinks about these things.

The more I think about it, I want to do a leafleting campaign telling blacks that Ron DeSantis is doing reparations and so they should flood Florida.

But no, no.

This is all about helping the blacks get their reparations. It’s not about destroying Florida by flooding it with tens of millions of blacks demanding free money from Ron DeSantis.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, and that would be a very hot revenge.

Really, the response to the DeSantis leafleting law is for someone to get charged with it, and then crowdfund a legal defense to get it to the Supreme Court. This law is so aggressively against the First Amendment that the SCOTUS would have to hear it, and the timeframe might line up with the 2024 election.

“Ron DeSantis’ law against free speech in Florida was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court” is not a good headline in an election year.