What would reparations look like?

Seeing this cartoon on Salon made me laugh.



The OPC had a scathing comment on the apology -- he is a militant pro-reparationist.

It's obvious to me that reparations as a pure cash payout are a stupid idea, starting with the fact of who will get the money? If there's someone you don't like, you can give them the job of parsing down bloodlines and deciding how much 'slave' each Bermudian has in them.

Then there's the problem of who will pay? We already know that Bermuda's tax system is (generally )regressive, so the poorer Bermudians would be disproportionately burdened with supporting the reparation payments. Since statistics show that poor Bermudians are also disproportionately black, cash reparation payments would be a wealth transfer from poor blacks to rich blacks!

That is obviously a stupid idea. A better idea would be for the Government to invest in social programs to help the needy and disadvantaged, who, as we already know, are disproportionately black: education, health, education, social services, education,...

Oh, wait, that's what the Government had been doing since the UBP came to power in 1968, starting with: desegregating schools, increasing school leaving age, the Bermuda Small Business Development Corporation, introducing land tax, hospital insurance, building public housing, the Bermuda Housing Corporation, the Bermuda College and Stonington, etc. ("History of the UBP", from here).

The UBP isn't and wasn't perfect, and made a lot of mistakes leading up to 1998's loss. But they aren't and weren't racists, and they worked hard and achieved significant progress for our country. And that's not revisionist history, that's fact.