You’re not aware of the benefit your grandfather had when arriving, because they were not apparent to him. He wasn’t aware most likely that several homestead acts gave property to whites only, excluding mostly blacks, though a small percentage benefited at times. These started before the beginning of the Civil War by other names, then continuing with the homestead act of 1862 and others afterwards, the last one being in 1986 in Alaska (that’s not a typo. The vast majority of lands granted from the federal government between 1862 and 1934, a great portion immigrants “fresh off the boat.” In total 10 percent of the land was given away, about 270,000,000 million acres in all. While black American slaves had worked the land for centuries and were barred from it, immigrants like your grandfather were entitled to it, because of skin color. Black Americans should have been first on line for that land, all the freed slaves. To see whites from Europe getting it for just arriving or after one generation must have been severely hurtful, and certainly is deeply humiliating. The land reparations were award to first and second generation whites, not the fifth or ten generation black Americans caught and bred in slavery.
Reparations denied but paid out to whites for some bizarre reason who did NOT work, til, and died bleeding on the land during “official” slavery But the methods of slavery, in not the name, continued during neoslavery that ended around 1965 when 50 percent of black Americans were still trapped on the land by “share cropping” bondage of contracts and debts, working on the same plantations slaves did, often in similarly dilapidated shacks with no running water and electricity. While homesteading ended in 1976 in the rest of the country and 1986 in Alaska, it was still a white thing. Reparations were paid—from the perspective of black Americans—to whites. That was not centuries ago but within my lifetime. The horror that we shouldn’t pay reparations to black Americans while giving to white for over one hundred years is abysmal and blind, logic that should be obvious but crushed by history books killed of facts but blazing with white confederate glory and soaked with racist tropes.
I can not blame you or your grandfather, and obviously you speak great truth of ideas. It simply is the absence of a real understanding of American history that most suffer from.
