Thanks for getting back with me, and it's great to meet a fellow Aspie!

Sorry, don't see any way to PM folks here on Medium. I think there is, and there should be, but I just don't see it. So I'll ask the Medium admin about it, and meanwhile I'll just continue this discussion here and apologize in advance if anyone is harmed or offended.

I hear you about not generalizing people, I don't like to do this either. Just that there are certain canonical rules for engagement that I've figured out the hard way, and one of them is don't say "but not me." I've gotten some serious tongue-lashings for that, which triggers my white fragility (more on this next paragraph) and puts me out of commission for a little while. And right now we need all hands on deck, we can't afford for anyone to get put out of commission.

Re white fragility: I don't like to use that term, I just used it in the above paragraph because it's canon. I believe that what's referred to as white fragility is really a form of legitimate grief. True, it's not as deep or urgent as the grief Black folks are feeling, but it's grief all the same. Grief over the loss of innocence and illusions, grief over one's unwitting participation in racism, grief over the immense and universal damage done to human lives. indeed, to all life on this planet. And, since it is grief, we should support each other (preferably in private) as we work through it, rather than shame each other as "fragile."

I've been around a while, that's how I know about canon. My first protests were as a child in the 60's, against the racism in my own family. We're white-passing Louisiana Creoles and, as many people can tell you, some of the worst most active and vocal racists are the white-passing folks. It's like we've got something to prove! In fact, right now there's a kerfluffle in white nationalist spaces, as some of their folks get DNA tests and find out that they're not as white as they thought. They're going thru all sorts of interesting mental gymnastics trying to deal with it. I know it's not cool to laugh at other people's pain but I can't help but give that a chuckle.

So yeah, there's canon, like the canon one finds in old established religions, or even that found in fan spaces, and it derives from the Marxist influence on the left. I think Marx had some great ideas in his critique of capitalism. Unfortunately, the remedy he proposed has failed in practice, many times, at great human cost.

Yet this does not stop some people from continuing their attempts to implement his remedy. In these attempts, they feel that it is necessary to discipline their thoughts words and actions with a sort of pseudo-scientific precision. (As a math nerd, I want to shake my head and go uh-uh at any notions that verbal models -- of anything -- can ever approach the precision or predictive abilities of the math-based models of the "hard" sciences. but I digress...) This attempt at pseud-scientific precision leads to the shaming and shunning and and wrecking and splitting that has plagued the movement for over a century. It compromises our effectiveness in real life, and gives our opponents plenty of rhetorical ammo to use against us. Once after I got a public shaming for expressing my grief / fragility, I walked away thinking, "with comrades like this, who needs Cointelpro?"

So if Marx's solutions don't work, what would work? I think that what's needed is full Reparations. Yeah, I know that's a tough sell of an idea, with people raising all sorts of objections, yet it needs to be on the table.

One objection is, how to pay for it. I've done some rough calculations and concluded that a capital gains tax on the top 1% -- on par with the income taxes that the rest of us pay -- would cover a lot. This would be justice, because the top 1% are the ones who benefit the most from the system as it is, and many of the old-time capital gainers -- banks and so forth -- have centuries-old roots directly in profits from slavery. Add to this funds diverted from the military industrial and prison industries and we could do it for sure. This would also be justice because these industries are the ones most directly involved in oppression.

Another objection is, who would get it. Some people want the obvious solution, based on phenotype, but not all descendants of USA slavery are Black, and not all Black people in the USA are descended from slavery. Some people have suggested DNA tests or old-fashioned records-based genealogical research but that's not always feasible. So my idea is, make reparations community based rather than individual based, addressing needs as identified by the communities and administered by established and respected members of the communities.

These are just my ideas, there are many others. There are many things that would need to be worked out in discussions at high levels with all parties involved; the passage of HR40 would start this process.

Thanks for getting back with me and many more thanks if you've read all this. Again, it's great to meet a fellow Aspie! If you'd like to continue this discussion, please contact me on Yahoo, where my user name is yenknipinoj spelled backwards.

Best Regards -- Justin Olhipi