ENTITLEMENT FOR ALL

Claire Fernanda
4 min readJan 5, 2021

THAT UGLY “E” WORD

Are Black Americans long overdue for reparations? Or should we put that on the back burner for now? What if the answer is yes to both. What if it comes down to acceptable definitions of reparations and entitlements? Aren’t we all “entitled” to something? The average American is entitled to the benefits he accumulated over 50-plus years of working. And the rich are entitled to call those bennies entitlements. The rich are are also entitled to deny entitlements to the poor. Disconcerting, isn’t it? That’s partly because the system as it now stands, is a giant and deliberate ball of confusion.

The word “entitlement” sounds like the screech of bad brakes for Americans who worked hard for decades to earn that money. The word “reparations” for Black Americans and Native Americans (see Our Past Is Our Present at www.braineryclub.com) will surely be vilified since any attempt to make a centuries-old blunder (I am being kind) will most likely be perceived as favoritism for Black Americans with slave roots and the indigenous peoples who were here long before the colonists.

After all, what are Black Americans really asking for? The modern day equivalent of forty acres and a mule can be interpreted in at least a dozen ways. Forty acres where? ANY number of acres in the deep South would not be acceptable for most Blacks living in the North. And forget about the value of a mule in today’s currency. That would have to be retrofitted to a BMW at the low end and a Jaguar on the high side.

Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Bill into law on August 14, 1935, only 14 months after sending a special message to Congress on June 8, 1934, that promised a plan for social insurance as a safeguard “against the hazards and vicissitudes of life.”

THE HAZARDS AND VICISSITUDES OF LIFE

Entitlement has become tantamount to the archaic “dole” used to describe welfare benefits. The word carries a stigma that causes the recipient’s adrenalin to boil. Yet FDR himself described social security as a safeguard against the “hazards and vicissitudes of life.”

In 2011, Mitt Romney gave his famous underground speech in which he stated “There are 47 percent of the people who pay no income tax… and who will vote for the president (Barack Obama) no matter what.

“… they are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to…

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Claire Fernanda

Corrector of the Overlooked. Grammarian , writer and proofreader. I hope to be rewarded posthumously, and by deductive reasoning, that’s not very far away.