Rachel Slajda reports that Rep. Steve King, who will soon be running the House Immigration Subcommittee, is on to Barack Obama's efforts to take white folks' hard-earned money:
"Figure this out, Madame Speaker: We have a very, very urban Senator, Barack Obama, who has decided he's going to run for president, and what does he do?" King said. "He introduces legislation to create a whole new Pigford claim."
He then said the claims -- which stem from discrimination against black farmers in the 1980s and 1990s -- are "slavery reparations."
"We've got to stand up at some point and say, 'We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress,'" he said. "That war's been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there's no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one's filing that claim.
While the Pigford settlement involves the USDA systematically denying billions in loans and aid to black farmers in the 1980s and 1990s, such practices were basically standard for much of the 20th century. It's an old story: Even as whites were calling for blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and characterizing a failure to do so as reflective of cultural pathology, the government was buying white people fancy new pairs of boots.
King's perspective is actually more coherent than it may sound. In King's view, any effort to rectify racial injustice done to black people by white people, regardless of context, is a form of slavery reparations and is therefore wrong. This is because whites, through the civil war, are the real victims of slavery, while blacks have simply been the idle beneficiaries of that blood and labor, passive recipients of an American bounty that they bear no role in producing. Any kind of systemic discrimination that followed pales in comparison to what whites have had to sacrifice on behalf of black people, so it would be wrong for whites to give more than they already have. This is a worldview dominated by a twisted sense of white racial victimhood, but it's consistent in its own ugly way.
It should go without saying that it's laughable for anyone with such a white, ethnocentric worldview to be anything but projecting when he accuses anyone else of having a "default mechanism that favors the black person."
