Resolved: The USFG ought to pay reparations to African Americans

Resolved: The United States Federal Government ought to pay reparations to African Americans. We affirm the resolution.We observe that American politics is centered around a flawed notion that we, as the United States, are the strongest and greatest country in the world. This idea is known as American exceptionalism.Allen Ferreri of Brockport College writes in February 2014: "... policies have created a sense of American denial. Americans are lulled into a state of trust, believing that American leaders will make the best decisions for the country, not just for themselves and their wealthy friends ... Americans are indoctrinated in the idea that they will have a job and be successful as long as they adhere to the American way of life and work hard. However, ... the next generation of Americans seems destined to not surpass the accomplishments of their parents and grandparent’s generations ... [T]his ... exuberant exceptionalist ideology created an America that through its actions is ... unremarkable at best" Thesis:In the status quo, America’s ability to deny past atrocities and not conform to standards of international law and human rights it claims to endorse is not only blatantly hypocritical, but allows the United States to continue to commit crimes against its own people and the people of the world. Although it’s impossible to deny that the US has done good things, policymakers nonetheless like to conceal the rougher parts of American history.Damon Linker of The Week magazine writes in May 2014: "American exceptionalism—is a particularly potent form of ideological patriotism. The American longing to believe in the intrinsic ... goodness of the country — its ideals, its economic system, its military power, its global example — is so strong that it easily and often warps our understanding of the nation's history, leading many white Americans to diminish, ignore, and even outright forget the very significant evils that the country has committed down through the centuries. The worst and most enduring evil is almost certainly the ... 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, 60 years of separate but equal, 35 years of state-sanctioned redlining." Pew Research finds in July 2014: "Few Americans (12%) say there are other countries in the world “that are better than the U.S.”" What Pew is finding is that 86% of Americans think that the US is the best or is tied for the best nation in the world; showing that American Exceptionalism is still a massive problem throughout the US and should be stomped out (we will explain why it should be stomped out shortly) Reparations allow us to criticize American history, setting the stage for a reimagining of the American government’s role both at home and on the international stage.Framework: Vote for the team that best criticises the notion of American exceptionalism.Impacts: The impacts of American exceptionalism can be disasterous.First, an exceptionalist mentality creates double standards. Princeton’s Michael Ignatieff writes: "The United States judges itself by standards different from those it uses to judge other countries, and judges its friends by standards different from those it uses for its enemies ... The United States criticizes other states for ignoring the reports of UN rights bodies, while refusing to accept criticism of its own domestic rights performance from the same UN bodies. This is especially the case in relation to capital punishment in general and the execution of juveniles in particular, as well as conditions of detention in U.S. prisons.Overseas, the United States condemns abuses by hostile regimes--Iran and North Korea, for example--while excusing abuses by such allies as Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Uzbekistan. It has been condemned for arming, training, and funding death squads in Latin America in the 1980s, while condemning the guerrillas as terrorists." Second, the idea of exceptionalism allows politicians to downplay pressing social issues, hindering much-needed changes in policy. Stephen Walt continues: " ... when a nation starts to think it enjoys the mandate of heaven and becomes convinced that it cannot fail or be led astrayby scoundrels or incompetents, then reality is likely to deliver a swift rebuke ... countless other countries have succumbed to this sort of hubris, and nearly always with catastrophic results. Despite America’s many successes, the country is hardly immune from setbacks, follies, and boneheaded blunders. If you have any doubts about that, just reflect on how a decade of ill-advised tax cuts, two costly and unsuccessful wars, and a financial meltdown driven mostly by greed and corruption have managed to squander the privileged position the United States enjoyed at the end of the 20th century.Given the many challenges Americans now face, from persistent unemployment to the burden of winding down two deadly wars, it’s unsurprising that they find the idea of their own exceptionalism comforting — and that their aspiring political leaders have been proclaiming it with increasing fervor. Such patriotism has its benefits, but not when it leads to a basic misunderstanding of America’s role in the world. This is exactly how bad decisions get made." Alt+Solvency: Endorse reparations as a means of rethinking American history and undermining American exceptionalism.The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in June 2014: "we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it ... Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America ... that white supremacy is ... a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely ... Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans ... What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices ... What I’m talking about is a national reckoning ... Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history" Because reparations attack American exceptionalism, we affirm. We can only see a pro ballot today, thank you.