In her latest column at the Washington Post Megan McArdle puts in her two cents about “reparations”:
There are a lot of objections that can be raised to reparations, starting with the price tag, which would run into the trillions. Slavery was a great moral wrong, but its primary victims are now dead and cannot be given recompense. Their descendants still live, of course, but how do you justify taking money to pay them from the descendants of immigrants who arrived long after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery? And how do you identify who exactly is entitled to payment, especially given the later influx of immigration from Africa and the Caribbean?
Yet these objections are addressable — not perfectly, but well enough. The biggest problem is the sociological one: How do we pay reparations and still call ourselves “one nation�
Let’s talk about the injustice point for a second. How do you justify forcing the concert violinist Sarah Chang to pay reparations to Kamala Harris? Ms. Chang’s parent are immigrants and any notion that she has received advantages as a consequence of slavery is absurd. It’s equally absurd that Kamala Harris, most likely less than one half of sub-Saharan African descent and whose parents were immigrants from Jamaica and Pakistan was penalized by U. S. slavery.
On the other hand over the last 30 years we’ve had four presidents whose families were involved with slavery in various different fashions. The Bushes were indirectly involved with the slave trade, Bill Clinton’s ancestors fought for the Confederacy, i.e. to preserve slavery, and Barack Obama had ancestors who held slaves. Contrast that with my own situation. None of my ancestors owned slaves or were involved with slavery in any fashion. My ancestors were abolitionists and fought in the Civil War to abolish slavery. Two of my great-great-grandfathers died of the privations they experienced during the war, blighting their families for generations after. I think I’ve paid in full.
Where would reparations stop? Believing that only blacks have been the victims of historic wrongs is a misreading of history. American Indians. Consider the Irish and the Jews. Consider Catholics.
And then there’s the pesky problem that reparations are arguably illegal, cf. Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 and Amendment 5.
Longfellow’s poem says it well:
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,–act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Let’s address today’s problems today and provide a hand up to those who need it rather than calling for payments to people who don’t need help by virtue of their presumed membership in a group, some of whom can, indeed, use help in the imagined resolution of ancient wrongs. One crime does not cancel out another.
Along the same lines, how can it be justified to tax the childfree among us to subsidize the efforts to combat global warming while at the same time granting the breeders ever-increasing tax deductions and child credits? Especially since it’s the progeny of the breeders who will exclusively benefit from combating future climate change?
Dave, your white privilege is showing and that’s why you need to pay reparations.
My Irish grandmother grew up in a houseboat permanently docked on the Mississippi—the cheapest place in town to live. It didn’t have any plumbing or running water. The only job my great-grandmother, the sole support of the family, could get was as a servant. One of her siblings died of starvation. Two others died of tuberculosis. Only my grandmother, the eldest child, and my mom’s uncle, the youngest, survived. They were virtually destitute—worse off than all but the very poorest blacks in St. Louis. I refuse to believe that they benefited from white privilege.
Given all that, and Rush Limbaugh’s oft repeated opinion that Democratic strategy is to splinter Americans into categories hostile to one another and gain and maintain office pretending to favor them all.
Is he wrong?
BTW, I grew up w/o running water, and it would have been my boyhood dream to live on a houseboat on the mighty Mississippi.
It was a single room, the only heat provided by a wood stove. The river was smelly, dirty, and full of disease from the sewage dumped into it. Not something anyone would have longed for.
“with a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NNlUeLnnks
“I refuse to believe that they benefited from white privilege.”
This isn’t about them, though, this is about you and your privilege, which is obvious because you refuse to accept the harm your overt stance against justified compensation. And your comments also failed to address the reality of how lighter skin color conferred, and continues to confer, social and economic advantages. You haven’t thought about how much worse your ancestors would have had it had they been of color instead of white. Your lack of respect for that reality, the defense of your white privilege and your refusal to acknowledge it demonstrates that you’re part of the problem and deserve to pay even more when it comes to reparations.
Of course, I’m being facetious here. But these are exactly the kinds of arguments the pro-reparations faction makes (I lifted and reworded them from other places).
Your individual circumstances don’t matter Dave, neither does your family history. It’s your group identity defined by your skin color, your economic status and your political views.
In my own case, I was adopted and know nothing of my birth lineage except what genetic testing tells me. I have, however, traced my adopted family back to 1650, when the first of them arrived in North America on an Oliver Cromwell prison ship. Future generations moved south and likely owned slaves (though I haven’t been able to definitely prove this). Several fought for the south in the Civil War in a Mississippi regiment before reaching Colorado by way of Texas in the late 1800’s.
Maybe once I learn by birth heritage I will be doubly responsible.
Point is, the reparations advocates don’t care about individual responsibility – they view it as a collective price that must be paid.
And my point is that bundling all people of primarily European descent together is as logically flawed as bundling all people of sub-Saharan African descent. There are subgroups with different experiences. I’m not just a member of one group. I belong to many groups. Everybody does.
And when you add people of Asian or Hispanic ancestry into the mix it become genuinely absurd. Basically, what could almost have been a reasonable argument 50 years ago has been made absurd by events.
I cannot imagine a program or policy that would be more effective in creating overt, in-your-face racial hatred and racial violence. Reparations would destroy this country. No one would be safe from violence. But that is probably the goal.
I appreciate the effort to make various arguments, serious and tongue in cheek. But the reparations notion is simply ludicrous on its face, and transparently just pandering for votes no matter the practicalities or the stress on the social fabric.
The proponents should receive the scorn of thinking Americans, and Democrats in particular. its a litmus test.
“pandering for votes”
Black votes. What must politicians think of Blacks to believe they can buy their votes with a non-starter like reparations?
Reparations right after the slaves were freed would have made sense. Dont know how it can be done now.
“What must politicians think of Blacks to believe they can buy their votes with a non-starter like reparations?”
White people put a lying crook in office and all they got were some red hats. They must think black voters cost way too much in comparison.
Steve
I already pay reparations in the form that makes the most sense. It’s called “the graduated income tax”.
Wait a minute, I never did get a red hat.