'Reparations' Website Exploits Guilt-Ridden White to Provide 'Free' Services to Black Americans

Blazing Cat Fur has the story, "Website Invites the Liberal-Guilted to Give Free Stuff In Exchange for 'White Privilege Offsets'."

I think it's despicable.

I saw this at the Los Angeles Times yesterday, "Artist launches Reparations website and 'social experiment' on white privilege":

As an interior designer relatively new to the business, Christy Lynn Abram lacked the connections that could make her start-up a success. Then a friend recommended Reparations, a new Internet site that allows ethnic minorities to request help or services from a white person who would fulfill them free of charge.

"I was kind of drawn to it," said Abram, who is black. "My thought wasn't that someone owed me anything. It was more about opening myself up to having someone help me."

Launched as a modest project on Facebook in mid-July but soon expanded to a standalone website, Reparations is starting to draw international attention for its brazen approach to race relations. It is provoking strong reaction, including condemnation from those who see it as a racially divisive tool that exploits white liberal guilt.

But Seattle-based conceptual artist Natasha Marin, who created the project, defended her site as a social experiment intended to explore "white privilege."

"There are people across the political spectrum who don't understand that they have privilege,” she said. “So in many ways the site lets you cash in your whiteness to help other people."

The site has drawn more than 1,000 visitors per day since launching, estimated Marin, who said that her site analytics shut down because traffic exceeded capacity. She said the project has received more than 1,000 requests and offerings.

In a modern news era when social media reaction can amplify a relatively small number of voices into a national or even global conversation, Reparations has spurred coverage by outlets including the Washington Post and the Guardian, as well as several conservative sites such as the Daily Caller and Breitbart, which have taken a more critical approach to the project.

As word of the site has spread, offers and requests have come in from all over the U.S. as well as countries including Britain, New Zealand and Zambia — including one offer of a night’s shelter and a meal to a person of color traveling near Paparoa, New Zealand.

Marin, 37, is black and hails from Trinidad. She said that she has received a barrage of negative online feedback, including death threats, racial slurs and messages calling her a "whore."

She said she was surprised by some of the vitriol.

"You can tell the whole world that I was that naive," she said. "I don't feel like I deserve the hatred I've been getting out of this."

The artist said that requests are moderated and that she tries to facilitate exchanges.

Abram, the interior designer, said she received several responses that were helpful, including one from a man in Montreal who gave her career advice via Skype. But she also received "nasty” messages, including one that said white people didn't owe her anything and another that called her a "bloodsucker."

The concept of reparations has been controversial, especially when referring to the notion that black individuals in the U.S. should be compensated for the legacy of slavery.

On Monday leaders affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement published a political platform calling for slavery reparations.

"The government, responsible corporations and other institutions that have profited off of the harm they have inflicted on black people — from colonialism to slavery through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance — must repair the harm done," said the Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella group that includes Black Lives Matter...

Black leftists have created a recipe for mutual hatred and recrimination. No wonder race relations are worse today than they've been in decades.

Keep reading.