In this article at The Conversation Darrick Hamilton and Trevor Logan make an interesting case for reparations on the grounds that a major source of the tremendous lag between white and black wealth is historic government interventions, from the Land Act of 1785 to the GI Bill:
Rather than education leading to wealth, it is wealth that facilitates the acquisition of an expensive education. The essential value of wealth is its functional role; the financial security to take risks and the financial agency that wealth affords is transformative.
In our view, education alone cannot address the centuries-long exclusion of blacks from the benefits of wealth-generating policies and the extraction of whatever wealth they may have. The most just approach would be a comprehensive reparation program that acknowledges these grievances and offers compensatory restitution, including ownership of land and other means of production.
Check out the very interesting graph in the article depicting the differences between median and mean white and black household wealth. Mostly it illustrates the tremendous increase in the wealth of the wealthiest but it’s interesting nonetheless. Unmentioned in the article: savings by whites exceeds savings by blacks at everything income level.
As I’ve said before I think we would be much better off as well as more just concentrating on need rather than race. A good start would be rolling back the enormous subsidies presently being given to the wealthy and the upper middle class.
Not buying it.
“Rather than education leading to wealth, it is wealth that facilitates the acquisition of an expensive education.â€
I graduated from Chicago with $7k in debt on a credit card. Not exactly wealthy. And I had about zip earlier in life. I parlayed Chicago, relevant experience and risk tolerance into what I guess amounts to the much talked about .5%.
More importantly, almost all metrics concerning blacks, such as relative employment, earnings, family cohesion etc, back in the early 60s was improving and relatively better than today. Then came the do gooders and their social spending and so on, and it’s become a mess. Handouts to slave descendants will be no different. This is nothing more than grist for politicians and the black grievance industry.
I can’t imagine reparations ever taking the form of “handouts to slave descendants”. It would more likely take the form of handouts to people performing services for inner city black people regardless of the wealth, income, or percentage black ancestry of the notional beneficiaries, or whether their ancestors were U. S. slaves. It would all be rationalized using some corporate guilt pretext.
“I graduated from Chicago with $7k in debt on a credit card. Not exactly wealthy.”
Thought you said your father was a doctor (surgeon)?
Steve
I don’t think you have the least idea of how utterly incendiary reparations would be. You would incite open race war, with all sorts of killings and atrocities. It woud be impossible for this country to have any vestige of democracyor rule of law. The government would become a Stalinist totalitarian despotism, compete with death camps.
Reparations are not open to civilized debate.
This is false and deceptive:
“The U.S. government has a long history of facilitating wealth for white Americans. From at least the Land Act of 1785, Congress sought to transfer wealth to citizens on terms that were quite favorable. In some instances, land could be attained by the luck of the draw – but only if you were a white man.”
The Land Act of 1785 simply authorized the sale of undeveloped federal lands in the West to raise revenue. There was no racial qualification.
The last sentence refers to a lottery, by the State of Georgia of Cherokee lands. I’ve not found any racial qualification other than U.S. citizenship, which would have barred Indians living in tribal communities from participating, which would make sense given Indians are being dispossessed. All that said, the link here goes to a study that largely concludes no intergenerational advantage was received through the lottery:
“Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of nonwinners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than nonwinners’ grandchildren.”
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/131/3/1455/2461173?redirectedFrom=fulltext
How does that run completely counter to their thesis?
Keep in mind that I oppose reparations. I just find it interesting that the idea is able to survive politically as a dog whistle or rallying cry.
It may even be that its primary purpose is trolling.
Should be read after reading Moynihan’s report (annotated copy with historian’s comments at The Atlantic).
Dog whistle to be sure, after all any true blue democrat worthy of your primary vote, would be happy to support it. In practice, I foresee a gaggle of patronage jobs and attention rapidly shifting elsewhere, infrastructure, climate change, world peace adjective adverb food served at White House dinners, etc.
What the author’s link really shows is that lottery tickets for Georgia gold-mining land are just as likely to be assets wasted through land speculation. Real broad-based intergenerational wealth through the 18th century came from community institutions that developed in the North (schools, churches, institutions, strong legal court systems, sound land-surveying).
And why isn’t Mike Tyson rich? Would reparations make him better off?