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We should absolutely be pushing for reparations! [1]

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Date: 2023-06-19

This is a response to the following article written earlier this morning: I don't want to live in a fascist dictatorship. Now is not the time to push for reparations.

I don’t want to live in a fascist dictatorship either. But I know history better than many, and so I know that the best way to avoid that horrible fate is to push back directly against it, not to allow ourselves to be swayed by the thought we can take the safe route and succeed. Because the safe route isn’t safe. It’s the route that lets those who want a fascist dictatorship continue to push us towards one with impunity.

I don’t have much in the way of personal experience of the aftereffects of slavery and the various kinds of discrimination that have existed in this country. What I have is a lot of time spent reading historical works which didn’t pull punches on how awful things actually were. That’s exactly why I think this is the time to be pushing for it — because people will never understand why this needs to be addressed as long as we allow tactical concerns such as “we can’t afford to do this before the next election because it’ll turn voters off and we can’t afford to lose” convince us to ignore the larger picture.

Here’s a news flash for anyone thinking that way. There will always be a next election! There will always be people who will get agitated if certain subjects are brought up. We cannot afford to let the possibility of failure convince us that we should just not talk about it until it’s safe to do so, because it will never be safe enough to do so without risking losing voters, and we will end up delaying next time, and the time after that, and the time after that, until someone who isn’t willing to brook further delay comes along and does what we should have done in the first place, at a much greater cost than it ever would have been if we had just not delayed in the first place.

People wrongly believed that the steps we took during the Civil Rights Era were enough, when in fact they were little more than the bare beginnings of what we had to do. And so they, as a society, left this project to be completed by people of the future. And it didn’t get done. Nobody stepped up to make sure that we kept pushing, and so we’ve backslid to the point where even those first few steps are under grave threat of being overturned.

As I said at the start, I don’t want to live in a fascist dictatorship either. But if we allow them to effectively control what we are willing to talk about out of fear of the possible consequences, we’re dancing to their tune. Because the safe route isn’t actually safe; those who are unwilling to talk about subjects they fear are unpopular will only cede the ground to those who are. And those are the fascists trying to catapult us back into the 1930s when they were ascendant. To “make America great again”.

If we allow them to convince us not to talk about certain things because it’s politically risky to, they’re already on the path to victory. We can’t win as long as we let them decide what’s safe and not safe to talk about.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/19/2176325/-We-should-absolutely-be-pushing-for-reparations

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