Contents:
- Intro
- The Engineer and the Human Condition
- From Segregated South to NYC Diversity
- The Fear of the Unknown
- The Visceral Reaction and The Quiet Majority
- Fact vs. Fiction: Debunking the Three Great Deflections
- The System’s Current Verdict: The Past Is Present
- Conclusion: Fighting for a Better Country
Intro
I recently published a piece titled, “The American System on Trial: Slavery, Systemic Exclusion, and Reparations.” https://mytwocents.press/2025/10/26/the-american-system-on-trial-slavery-systemic-exclusion-and-reparations/ The article laid out the case for why the United States, as a system of laws and economic policies, owes a moral and material debt to the descendants of those it enslaved and excluded. The title of the post, however, was simpler and more provocative: “America on trial? A fictional case and verdict!”
My friends and family know me as someone who loves history and loves to write about it. My best subjects in high school were History, English, and Music; in college, I added Political Science, Philosophy, and African Studies. During my first two years of liberal arts coursework, I earned a 4.0 GPA. Liberal arts came naturally to me—it was a perfect match of creativity and the analysis of the human condition, and those things drive me still.
The Engineer and the Human Condition
The irony is that I am forty years into a very successful engineering profession. Some find this choice curious, considering my natural proclivity to liberal arts but it seems natural to me. I love to fix things, and to truly fix something, you must first understand how it is supposed to work to figure out where it’s broken. Today, I am an engineer, a musician, and a blogger—all roles that satisfy my need to create, analyze, and fix.
I have always found people interesting. I am definitely an observer of people; I often engage with strangers. I am that guy who asks the waiter in a restaurant their name and knows their whole life story before leaving.
From Segregated South to NYC Diversity
That curiosity naturally flows into a fascination with society. I was born in 1962 in South Carolina, then moved to New York City as a teenager. The culture shock was thick. The rural town I grew up in had a population of 500, split down the middle by railroad tracks with Black people on one side and White people on the other. The apartment building my parents moved into in New York probably housed more people than my hometown, and it contained more ethnicities than I knew existed at the time. My friends were Greek, Italian, Irish, Hispanic, and Black (both Caribbean and African American). We all played together every day. It was great—how it should always be, in my opinion. College, a local City University, was equally diverse. I think those years kept me hopeful in people and prevented me from becoming jaded in the next phase of my life as an adult.
My engineering career has not been diverse at all. I’ve often found myself as the only Black person in the room. My first engineering job in 1984 paired me with two “mentors” who often told watermelon and fried chicken jokes. They were both Polish immigrants and, like many immigrants, seemed to use denigrating Black people as their ticket into the larger “white” community.
You would think that growing up in the segregated South in the 70s would have made me used to it. After all, things were still segregated in South Carolina until I was in the third grade. I sat in the “colored only” section with my grandmother when we went to see the doctor. But this experience actually led to one of my first key observations about American society:
The Fear of the Unknown
The South was segregated until the Civil Rights Act forced integration, but White and Black people were always in close proximity. My grandmother cooked for the white schools; my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Sug, cleaned the white people’s church and kept their children. I played with those white kids at Mrs. Sug’s house. When segregation ended and I went to school with white kids for the first time in third grade, it wasn’t a big deal. We were used to one another.
The North, however, was a different story. In my work group, there was a young white woman who lived in a Long Island town with no Black residents. Her first direct experience with Black people was that job. The white people in her town only knew Black people from often-unflattering television images. In the South, White kids grew up loving their Black nannies. In the South, discrimination was based on place and roles. In the North, the resulting hate was often based on the fear of the unknown.
Some might say I am obsessed with observing race and culture. I don’t think it’s an obsession, just a strong perspective developed from the dynamic exposure of growing up in the rural South and moving to New York.
This perspective is what fuels my writing. As a 63-year-old, I have observed a vast spectrum of race in America. I’ve gone from having white men refuse to shake my hand in customer meetings to seeing Black CEOs in corporate America. I operate on the belief that much discrimination is fueled by ignorance and misinformation. I am not naive enough to think all white people are ignorant—I know some just want to preserve their advantage. But I write for the few, white and black, who may not know the data and may be open to learning the whole of American history, not just the whitewashed version. So, as I wrote my article, “The American System on Trial: Slavery, Systemic Exclusion, and Reparations,” I knew it would get a visceral reaction, especially in today’s political climate.
The Visceral Reaction and The Quiet Majority
I suspected many of the commenters wouldn’t read the full piece, and their responses confirmed it. What I received was not a debate about economic models or legal precedent, but an emotional, defensive, and often vitriolic rejection of the premise of accountability itself.
The reaction, full of comments like, “Oh look professional victims wanting a free ride,” and “Zero guilt, zero shame,” revealed something profound: the average American is equipped with a handful of historical half-truths and rhetorical deflections they use to stop the conversation before it can even start. They aren’t interested in history; they’re interested in defense.
Out of 159 comments, there was only one attempt to challenge the predominant anti-reparations view, and that commenter quickly relented after the first attack. This is the problem of our public square today: the lack of curiosity is enforced by the loudness of the most defensive voices.
This exchange wasn’t just a toxic Facebook thread; it was a perfect microcosm of how the American public avoids facing the truth of systemic exclusion.
Fact vs. Fiction: Debunking the Three Great Deflections
To engage with the historical reality of reparations, we have to clear away the most common rhetorical shields used to protect the system.
1. The Myth of Universal Slavery
The most frequent argument was historical “whataboutism”: that slavery was universal. Commenters insisted, “so did Japan, China, Russia,” arguing that American slavery was no worse.
This argument fails to acknowledge the unique legal nature of U.S. chattel slavery. While other historical systems involved debt bondage or war captives, American chattel slavery was built on three unique pillars: it was based solely on race, it was inheritable (the child followed the mother’s enslaved status), and it conferred lifetime status without rights.¹
When I pointed this out, commenters quickly shifted to the fact that a small number of Black Americans owned slaves. Yes, roughly 4,000 free Black people owned about 12,000 enslaved people around 1830. That is a moral crime. But it is meaningless when compared to the 4 million Black people held in slavery by the state-sanctioned system in 1860. The question of reparations is not a personal one about who owned whom; it is a legal and economic case against the American system that created, maintained, and profited from the vast majority of that crime.
2. The Whiteness Dividend
When pressed on systemic exclusion, some commenters raised the experience of other groups, specifically the Irish, arguing they were discriminated against and therefore “deserved reparations too.”
This line of defense is easily refuted because it ignores the “whiteness dividend.” While Irish and Italian immigrants faced severe, ugly discrimination based on class and ethnicity, they were ultimately allowed to assimilate into whiteness. This assimilation granted their descendants full, systemic access to the greatest wealth-building programs in American history.
African Americans were simultaneously and systematically excluded from these same government programs—most notably the GI Bill and FHA-backed mortgages—via redlining². Their land and labor had built the country, yet they were barred from participating in the post-WWII middle-class boom³. The discrimination against European immigrants was temporary and resolved through inclusion; the exclusion of African Americans was codified, permanent, and multigenerational.
3. The Crime and Punishment Deflection
Another common attack was the immediate pivot to individual moral failure, captured by the demand, “When are black people going to pay reparations for burning down multiple cities over a junkie career criminal?” and other references to “Black on black crime.”
This is a malicious rhetorical tactic known as deflection. It attempts to shift the blame from the systemic crime of generational theft to the devastating, yet comparatively small, issue of individual street crime.
I countered with statistics to show the hypocrisy of this argument (White-on-White crime is the majority of violent crime against White people) but the more important response is to pivot back to the system: Crime is an economic outcome. When the system systematically creates concentrated poverty, food deserts, and grossly underfunded schools (all consequences of historical redlining), it creates the conditions that predictably raise crime rates. We are holding the American system accountable for the structural inputs it created, which continue to generate negative outcomes today.
The System’s Current Verdict: The Past Is Present
The most frustrating refrain was the emotional plea to “stop crying about crap that happened in the past.” Yet, the data proves the past is not the past; it is the current economic reality for millions of Americans.
The Wealth and Housing Gaps
- The Wealth Gap: Today, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households hold only $15⁴. This isn’t a problem of personal failure; this gap exists because Black Americans were systematically excluded from the inheritance and wealth-building programs that established the American middle class.
- The Housing Gap: This legacy is clearest in homeownership. White Americans have a homeownership rate of about 73.8%, compared to only 45.9% for Black Americans—a gap of nearly 28 percentage points⁵. This is a direct, measurable consequence of redlining still active in our economy.
The Legal Caste System
- The Legal Gap: The justice system ensures the disparities continue. Black Americans make up 13% of the population but account for 37% of the total prison/jail population, and are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans.
The discussion is not about what happened 100 or 150 years ago; it is about the systemic advantages and disadvantages that were legally put in place 60 to 80 years ago, and whose effects remain measurable in every economic and social metric today.
Conclusion: Fighting for a Better Country
When I told one commenter, “Fighting for our rights is the most American thing that can be done,” I meant it. The people who oppose discussions of reparations and systemic exclusion aren’t truly defending history; they are defending a system that has benefited them, whether or not they personally agree with the underlying injustice.
The purpose of putting the American system on trial is not to assign personal guilt. It is to seek accountability for a verifiable economic and legal crime. Until the nation acknowledges that debt and begins the work of correcting the structural foundation of its economy, we will continue to suffer the consequences of division. Recognizing the debt is the only way to move past the fiction of “moving on” and move toward the reality of justice for all Americans.
