The Democratic Party never stops talking about accountability. But when it comes to its own history of supporting slavery and enforcing Jim Crow, the silence is deafening.
For all its moral posturing, the Democratic Party has never issued a formal apology for its direct role in some of the darkest chapters of American history. That’s not a small detail. It’s a glaring double standard.
When the notion of race-based reparations was first advanced, I didn’t take it seriously. Surely, something so costly and unhelpful would never gain traction with the American public, so why worry about it?
But on further reflection, it seems several ideas have graduated from the unthinkable to reality over the last few years in today’s America. The idea that reputable physicians would actively encourage even pre-adolescents to retard their sexual development and permanently mutilate their bodies, based on nothing more than a probably transient feeling of gender dysphoria, would have seemed absolutely bizarre not long ago.
So would the idea that the schoolchildren should learn to reject the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and instead be taught that there were irreconcilable inborn racial differences that warranted further discrimination? Spending trillions of dollars we don’t have on unnecessary programs. Allowing immigrants by the millions to illegally breach our border. Even allowing a top government official to walk after intentionally destroying thousands of evidentiary emails during an active investigation. We can no longer count on rational thought to prevail.
Ricochet Editor-in-Chief Jon Gabriel is in for Jim today. Jon and Greg think Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is playing it smart by laughing off the regular insults from Donald Trump instead of trying to respond in kind. They also groan as a police detective who was on scene at last year’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, says law enforcement took more than an hour to confront the shooter in part because he had a more powerful weapon than that first thought. Finally, they walk through the absurd reparations proposals under serious consideration by officials in San Francisco.
A minister from my denomination has been researching the history of her congregation and has found that some members owned slaves back in the day. She says the history is buried as no one wants to admit the truth and asks: “Is it the church’s responsibly to give reparations? Should the families from the original slave owners be the ones to make amends?”
To which I say: What an excellent question!
Protesters take part in the Walk for Your Future climate march ahead of COP27 in Brussels, Belgium, on Oct. 23.
A while back, there was a news alert on my phone that the Committee finally decided to release its preliminary report. As expected, reparations are to be extraordinarily broad and far-reaching, impacting multiple industries rather than just the personal items of descendants of slaves.
No one should be surprised by this.
What I was surprised by is how quickly this alert and topic dropped off of my phone with nary a trace. I had to do an internet search to find further information (including recent news articles about it) and to see what the actual recommendations are.
With Assembly Bill 3121, passed in 2020, the California state legislature created a task force whose purpose is to “study and develop reparation programs for African-Americans.” On June 1, 2022, that task force issued its lengthy interim report, with an executive summary, which together will divide rather than inform the highly fraught public at large. What is desperately needed today are programs of market liberalization that will raise the welfare of all groups, without seeking to play one off against the other.
But the task force has no such general recommendations. Instead, it chooses to examine complex historical events that took place from the onset of slavery in the United States until the present day. That untidy inquiry should mix together developments of both cruelty and heroism. Had the task force proceeded in a more responsible manner, it would have started with the proposition that many groups—racial and otherwise—have been mistreated and can make, and have made, claims for reparations. And it also should have explicitly acknowledged that at no point in our nation’s history have any such expansive reparations programs been enacted.
Misunderstanding Korematsu
I love my home state of Oklahoma. It is home to wonderful people; family, friends, excellent schools, a terrific and diverse culture, and some remarkable history.
Attending public schools during my formative years, from kindergarten in Guymon to college in Chickasha, I took my share of Oklahoma history classes and remember much of it today. In college, my Oklahoma history class taught me about President Andrew Jackson’s forced relocation of Indian tribes from the southeast to Oklahoma Indian Territory — the “Trail of Tears.” Thousands died.
Yesterday in The Atlantic, an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School argued that America needs to enact a “Third Reconstruction.” From his perspective, the first two attempts to solve the problem were too short and largely unsuccessful with respect to manufacturing black success and parity. What follows is a partial insight into the framework of this Third Reconstruction:
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Instead of canceling people and institutions on seemingly random and arbitrary bases, I propose a single set of actions to resolve both “canceling” of those responsible for “institutional racism” and providing reparations to its supposed victims. [This is applicable only in the United States.]
The most prominent common factor in “institutional racism” in the United States is the Democratic Party. Therefore the Democratic Party and its supporters are to be cancelled, and the Democratic Party and its supporters are to provide the funding for reparations to Black Americans who claim to have suffered under such “institutional racism” perpetuated by the Democratic Party.
The Democrats are at it again. It’s election campaign time, and Kamala Harris, for one, is demanding reparations, 150 years after the Civil War, for black Americans who probably know as little about that war as most other Americans:
I think there has to be some form of reparations. We can discuss what that is, but look, we’re looking at more than 200 years of slavery. We’re looking at almost a hundred years of Jim Crow. We’re looking at legalized segregation and, in fact, segregation on so many levels that exists today, based on race. And there has not been any kind of intervention done understanding the harm and the damage that occurred to correct course, and so we are seeing the effects of all of those years play out still today.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D–Texas) earlier this year introduced H.R. 40 which is intended to address “the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposals for reparations for the institution of slavery.” Since that time, many Democratic presidential hopefuls have endorsed her proposal. Senator Elizabeth Warren has stated that she is in favor of government reparations “to black Americans who were economically affected by slavery.” Senator Warren also urges us to “confront . . . the [nation’s] dark history of government-sanctioned discrimination,” an odd qualification given that national and state policy for over 50 years has vigorously enforced civil rights laws in areas like employment, education, housing, and health. Other presidential candidates such as Senator Cory Booker and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke have added their support to Jackson’s proposal.
A national apology for slavery may well be overdue. But the real battle will be over reparations, which any Congressional Commission is likely endorse. There is presently no formulation in the current legislation indicating the size of the financial burden of this program or how reparations should be distributed. Noticeably absent is any effort to reconcile the policy with other proposed new entitlements, including the Green New Deal, free college tuition, and Medicare for All.
How then to approach this particular claim on public resources? The initial premise of the black reparations movement is one that everyone of all political persuasions should accept: there is no place for slavery in any civilized society. But the issue here is not whether slavery is immoral. It is what should be done about that problem over 150 years after slavery was ended, often with the blood of white abolitionists and soldiers whose descendants are asked to be held account for the wrongs that they bitterly fought against. As I have long argued, one particularly troublesome aspect of the black reparations movement is its strained relationship to generally-accepted theories of individual or collective responsibility.
Last week, in his Wall Street Journal “Best of the Web” newsletter, James Freeman discussed Elizabeth Warren’s call for a “thorough national conversation on Reparations.” Here is what he said:
The basic idea is that the federal government will apportion among the citizens living now the historical guilt for heinous acts committed by people long dead against other people long dead. Then money would flow from people who have not been convicted of any crime to people who have not been found by any court to have been victimized by a crime.
“Make them own it” was a call to hold the Democratic Party and the left fully accountable for its past and present misdeeds. Continuing to honor Woodrow Wilson, through the Woodrow Wilson Center and places named for him, has become incongruous with claims of justice and righting past wrongs. Indeed, controversy over Wilson’s name on a school in the District of Columbia raises an additional issue of past injustice and present claims for social justice.
Celebrated to this day as a founder of modern progressive government, Woodrow Wilson created the environment within which the Klu Klux Klan reemerged with a vengeance.
After seeing the film, an enthusiastic Wilson reportedly remarked: “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” African-American audiences openly wept at the film’s malicious portrayal of blacks, while Northern white audiences cheered. The film swept the nation. Riots broke out in major cities (Boston and Philadelphia, among others), and it was denied release in many other places (Chicago, Ohio, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis). Gangs of whites roamed city streets attacking blacks. In Lafayette, Indiana, a white man killed a black teenager after seeing the movie. Thomas Dixon reveled in its triumph. “The real purpose of my film,” he confessed gleefully, “was to revolutionize Northern audiences that would transform every man into a Southern partisan for life.”
Daughter,
Soon you will be heading off to your first year at college, a school which has already given you an assignment for summer reading: the non-fiction, epistolary cri de coeur titled Between The World And Me, by author Ta-Nehisi Coates. I gather that the idea is for you and other incoming freshman to have a common cultural experience to discuss right away, inside and outside the classroom – a new-student book club of sorts.
On this week’s installment of the Libertarian podcast, I lead Richard through an in-depth discussion of the reparations debate touched by off Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent cover story in the Atlantic. Among the questions we discuss: are reparations reconcilable with the principles of classical liberalism? Why is this issue gaining newfound currency now? And what would constitute the single biggest improvement to race relations in modern America? Take a listen below:
There are certain times when windows open, allowing previously marginal ideas to flourish and the unthinkable to become possible. Gay marriage started out in the early ’90s as the pipe dream of a few cranky law professors; soon, it is going to be the law of the land throughout the country. The movement to have the US pay out reparations for slavery is in its early stages; it’s easy enough for us to write it off now, but expect this to be pushed with some urgency over the next 10 to 20 years. The reason is that this is one social movement that comes with a time limit.
The window for reparations is slowly closing because of demographic changes in this country. Any such scheme will depend on rich, white Baby Boomers who are receptive to appeals based on guilt. As those people die off over the next 20 years, they will be replaced by two main groups.
The first is white Gen Xers, who will be a less-than-optimal target for extraction. Productive people about my age (38) will be squeezed for as much tax revenue as possible as we move into our peak earning years — and our peak earning years will not be nearly as productive as our Boomer parents’ were. They came of age when America was still on an upward trajectory.
