Posted on 02/26/2019 11:11:09 AM PST by reaganaut1
There is a strange political conversation under way as the 2020 Democratic presidential primary gets under way, and it goes like this: One group of Democrats proposes something daffy, vague, and impractical, and another group of Democrats says, “Of course that’s daffy, vague, and impractical — but at least they started a conversation!” This is said in the tone kindergarten teachers use with toddlers who test the maxim that there is no such thing as a dumb question. It’s something to see: a political party condescending to itself.
None of the Democratic 2020 contenders currently talking up reparations for slavery is serious about the project. Those of them who are serious about anything are serious only about winning the party’s nomination and the role that flattering a small but influential congregation of left-wing intellectuals might play in that.
Call it the Ta-Nehisi Coates primary.
It’s an unserious proposal, but we’ll do its authors the courtesy of offering a serious answer, anyway.
Paying reparations for slavery is a terrible idea because there is no one to pay reparations and no one to pay them to. There are not any slave-owners left among us and haven’t been for some time. There aren’t any liberated slaves, either. Slavery was a terrible crime and, like all such enormities, it was carried out by real people who inflicted unconscionable suffering on real people — specific people, individuals.
Our progressive friends like to talk about their high regard for “diversity,” but they are blind to the real thing: Neither the white population of the United States nor the black one is homogenous; relatively few living white Americans are the heirs, however distant, of slave owners, and a significant and growing population of black Americans has no link to antebellum slavery at all. Some of them, like Barack Obama, are the offspring of more recent African immigrants; others are immigrants from the Caribbean and elsewhere who may have family links to slavery but not to American slavery. The question of what it means to be an “African American” grows more complex by the day.
Such considerations are significant if we are to avoid sinking into the morass of willful racism as a public-policy criterion, insisting upon collective racial culpability and collective racial entitlement. These ideas are alien to the fundamental American creed of individual rights and individual liberties — indeed, we have been at our very worst on racial issues when we as a nation have failed to live up to those ideals, as unfortunately has been the case all too often in our history.
None of this diminishes the unique evil that was American slavery, or the ways in which African Americans have been — and, in some cases, remain — systematically disadvantaged both by formal policy and by ordinary private prejudice. And it is not the case that all of these disadvantages are the result of poverty and hence easily addressed by policies that take no account of race, racism, or the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. But neither is it the case that these persistent problems are likely to be solved by a series of cash transfers administered by self-seeking political entrepreneurs.
To insist that our public policies do not entrench collectivist racial politics is not the same as naively pretending that the world takes no notice of race or that it does not matter. And we should be willing to consider uncomfortable questions related to that: Why is it that black students are comparatively ill-served by our public schools even where per-student spending matches or exceeds that in largely white schools? Why is it that local authorities in cities such as Philadelphia and Los Angeles tolerate so much more public disorder and dysfunction in black neighborhoods? Talking about reparations is, in part, a way to avoid talking about that, because it’s of no help in the Ta-Nehisi Coates primary
The whole reparations issue is an excuse to transfer wealth. Progressives see ‘inequality’ as the central issue in America so they want to take from those who have wealth and give wealth to those who don’t. Everything else is just window dressing.
I’m all for it... if FIRST we deduct all the billions spent in aid of ‘minorities’ over the last 50+ years.
:)
No reparations without repatriations.
Very catchy. I like it!
Thats trillions, not billions.
And the places of greatest inequality are the big blue cities.
For sure
I think it is worth a debate, once the Democrats can produce a single slave from the 1860’s to give us their take on the issue.
According to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, since the Johnson Administration, almost $15 trillion has been spent on welfare, with poverty rates being about the same as during the Johnson Administration. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
Reparations paid and squandered, a million times over.
I have a better idea for Indians: eliminate the bureau of Indian affairs and give tribes the ability to own their property. This will do more than any amount of reparations.
Kamala Harris’s father has publicly criticized her for what she said about her Jamaican heritage of smoking pot and that they were descended from OWNERS OF SLAVES and were NOT slaves. Thus I wonder if Kamala will now offer to personally pay reparations to the descendants of the slaves that her ancestors owned?
They probably will be using the latest DNA ancestry analysis as part of the ‘evidence’
It cant prove who came here after slavery ended
I say : Well, after they all have to payback (have subtracted) all the welfare they’ve collected, then they will OWE the US taxpayer much more money.
I recall when this was proposed decades ago, and the same problems were mentioned about how to identify the actual decendents of slaves, that leftard race-baiter tace-pimp Jessie Jackson piped up and said it should ALL be given to HIM to hand out.
“First we must have reparations to the Neanderthals, and with compound interest there wont be anything left”
I am a descendant of both slave owners and black slaves. So I owe my reparations to myself.
As for the rest of the article, it seems to overlook the elephant in the room: that it is not anti-black racism but constant harping on racism and reading racism into literally every issue that accounts for much of the supposed racism holding people back. (If you believe that the system is against you, why bother trying?) Furthermore, there is a culture that denigrates any kind of success or adopting attitudes of successful people as "being too white." In other words, it is the subculture of the ghetto that is the problem, not the larger society. And until that subculture is countered, the ghetto situation is not going to change.
Trillions, not billions. And let’s not forget the hidden costs of losing our freedom. Most of the murders that are committed in the US are between members of a certain group that votes almost entirely Democrat. If it wasn’t for that statistic, there would be NO case for gun control whatsoever. Combine that with their persistent voting for the REAL fascist party (again, Democrats), and we’ve paid an incredibly high price, over and over and over again for the sins of a bunch of greedy racists that died hundreds of years ago.
Don't take a check.
“None of this diminishes the unique evil that was American slavery, or the ways in which African Americans have been — and, in some cases, remain — systematically disadvantaged both by formal policy and by ordinary private prejudice.”
Horse puckey, American slavery was NOT unique, there was plenty of slavery in other places at the time and there is plenty of slavery still going on in the world today and black people are certainly NOT systematically disadvantaged by formal policy in America today. Any existing preferences now go to NONwhites. As for ordinary private prejudice, that cannot be changed by government edict and in any case it is more commonly seen as prejudice against whites now rather than prejudice against blacks.
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