Why Reparations For Slavery Is Ludicrous — Part 2

Alas, Haley is far from the only black author who peddled this rubbish. Two books published in the 1970s as scholarly works are worthy of mention. In 1973, Walter Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, while Chancellor Williams published the first edition of his ludicrous book The Destruction Of Black Civilization the following year. This is part of the Marxist fantasy of Europe sucking the wealth out of Africa. Here is a simple refutation. The current population of Africa is around 1.2 billion; in 1900, it was a mere 140 million. Was that massive population increase due to Western medicine or African witch doctors? Further comment would be superfluous.

Before we leave Africa, here is some comment from the explorer Samuel Baker, who wrote in 1866: “the institution of slavery…is indigenous to the soil of Africa, and…has NOT BEEN TAUGHT TO THE AFRICAN BY THE WHITE MAN, as is currently reported, but…has ever been the peculiar characteristic of African tribes…It was in vain that I attempted to reason with them against the principles of slavery: they thought it wrong when they were themselves the sufferers, but were always ready to indulge in it when the preponderance of power lay upon their side”.

So how has the current situation come about in the West? The world in which we live today is the result of a relatively few creative brains; from the anonymous inventor of the wheel to Tim Berners-Lee, father of the WorldWideWeb.

The overwhelming majority of those creative brains have belonged to white men; there have been white women too, and others have contributed significantly; for example the Arabs gave us the concept of zero in mathematics, without which we would have made little if any progress. The Chinese invented a form of printing before the Western printing press, but the reality is that modern civilisation would not have existed without the White Man. This is where the concept of White Supremacy really comes from.

Does this mean blacks should get down on their knees in front of whites as some brainwashed whites are currently doing to blacks? Of course not! All our ancestors suffered, and the privilege we all possess today is not a racial privilege but the privilege built on not only the genius of the White Man, but the industry, and the suffering of all our ancestors. This is our common cultural inheritance. Again, one humble statistical comparison will illustrate this.

Between 1700 and 1750 when Britain was arguably the most advanced nation in the world, there were 10.5 deaths per thousand of women in pregnancy. This fell to 5 deaths per thousand from 1800 to 1850.

Between 2013 and 2017, there were 72 deaths in pregnancy per hundred thousand live births in Louisiana, America’s “Least-healthy state”. That is still a lot, but it is dramatically lower than the previous figures. Who in her right mind would rather have been a pregnant white woman in 1850 than a pregnant black woman today?

While it is true there is a large and growing black underclass in the United States, many whites too have problems. These are not rooted in so-called racism, and even less in slavery, but in economics and poor social policy. Former Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang is one of a growing number of technocrats who have identified the real problem, and the solution – Universal Basic Income. American blacks need to part company with the toxic Black Lives Matter movement, which is nothing more than a front for Marxism. Tearing down the statues of Confederate slave owners is no solution to their problems, and destroying America’s great historical monuments will only make ordinary white Americans less inclined to side with them when they suffer a real injustice, like the murder of George Floyd.

Back to Part 1.