The meme title references the concept of white people paying a price for racism.
Some people might find that distasteful. “Ending racism isn’t a zero-sum game,” they may say. “You don’t have to knock white people down to lift black people up.”
Well, yes and no.
Yes, it’d be great if 100% of white Americans lived up to the spirit of equality in their daily interactions with black people, and in the way they talk about black people amongst each other. Discrimination doesn’t thrive wherever bigotry does not live in the heart. So that would certainly go a long way toward helping reach true equity.
But no — the unpaid wages of slavery are an economically quantifiable thing; a debt that has never been paid to this day. Somebody has to pay it, and the only group of people with that much wealth in our society are white people. (Technically it would be paid through general taxpayer funds, with every race group including blacks themselves footing the bill, but the bulk of taxes are paid by white people and so the bulk of reparations money would necessarily come from white people.)
There was talk after the Civil War of “40 acres and a mule” to get recently-freed black people a start in life.
Unfortunately, that never happened, and it gave way to a Jim Crow apartheid regime across much of the country which reintroduced the disenfranchisement and dehumanizing dynamics of slavery in all but name.
The debt is still owed. Time won’t erase it.
It won’t go away until it’s paid in full, with interest.
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