By Eugene Gant
06/01/2018
Just when you thought the idiocy of the left had reached its apogee, it hits the booster rockets and climbs to new heights. This time, it was a âReparations Happy Hourâ at a bar in Portland, Ore.
According to Fox News, âon Monday night, a bar in Portland, Oregon hosted people of color and gave them $10 as they arrived â a symbolic gift funded primarily by white people who were asked not to attend the âReparations Happy Hour.ââ
A local activist group, Brown Hope, wanted the event to be a space for people of color in a mostly white city to meet, organize, discuss public policy and potentially plan various actionsâŚ.
The economist Robert Browne once estimated a fair value for reparations of $1.4 trillion to $4.7 trillion and wrote that reparations should ârestore the black community to the economic position it would have had if it had not been subjected to slavery and discrimination.â
[âReparations Happy Hourâ Invites White People To Pay For Drinks, by Christopher Carbone, May 27, 2018.]
Legal Insurrection has some amusing tweets and commentary.
I canât imagine why anyone in Oregon would owe any black person anything given that Oregon was not a slave state and did not enter the Union until 1859. Now, of course, like many people who didnât cotton to slavery, Oregonians also didnât cotton to blacks, didnât want them there and forced them to leave, with repeated beatings for the recalcitrant. The law strictly regulated slave owners who brought their chattel to Oregon.
I suppose one might argue that Oregonâs history of discrimination against blacks might justify reparations, but it couldnât have been that bad given that blacks werenât allowed there. Slavery canât justify them, so letâs move on to the quote from Browne, which is self-evidently ridiculous.
Reparations canât ârestore the black community to the economic position it would have had if it had not been subjected to slavery and discriminationâ for the simple reason that if blacks hadnât been slaves, most likely, they would have been in Africa. Sans slavery, blacks would have had no âeconomic positionâ in the United States. They would not have been here for whites to exploit their labor, and could not have suffered discrimination. So their âeconomic positionâ today would be light years behind what it is in the United States.
I supposed weâd get blamed for that, too, but anyway, if you want to know what their âeconomic positionâ is, after slavery, Jim Crow and the rest, consider this from Walter Williams:
As a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains â over some of the highest hurdles and in a very short span of time â of any racial group in mankindâs history. Whatâs the evidence? If one totaled up the earnings of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank among the 20 richest nations. It was a black American, Gen. Colin Powell, who once headed the worldâs mightiest military. Black Americans are among the worldâs most famous personalities, and a few are among the worldâs richest people.
[Worse Than Racists, Creators.com, April 19, 2007]
Back to the bar in Oregonian. What kind of idiot gives away $10 to a perfect stranger to pay for a past injustice for which he it not responsible? A leftist idiot thatâs what kind.