Slavery and Reparations

Trying to kick up a political storm about educational materials on slavery, the Left just makes things up.

Among all the instances of elite projection and cynical opportunism over the past few years—the censoring Left sees fascism everywhere; the concept of systemic racism offers a blessed distraction from the purges of #MeToo; the agenda-driven media deplores Donald Trump’s bending of the truth—Joe Biden’s demagoguery has got to be the most glaring. It’s bad enough that the self-appointed savior of indebted students is the same man who, as a U.S. senator from Delaware, was instrumental in passing legislation that made it impossible for students to discharge student debt through bankruptcy; Delaware, after all, is where the credit-card empires have their headquarters. Now we have Biden decrying the country’s “divisions,” even as he multiplies them himself. He has gone from disdainful opponent of busing—Biden in 1975: “I oppose busing, it’s an asinine concept”—to bold defier of “Jim Crow 2.0.”

Marxists in California must have missed CNN (Confederate Network News) on January 1, 1863, when Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all the slaves from Democrat southern states. Following the Union victory over the Confederacy at the Battle of Antietam, the executive order declared that any enslaved person in Confederate states would be set free.

Reuters’ investigation of the bloodlines of U.S. political figures jars in ways unanticipated by its authors.

The Reuters investigation of the bloodlines of U.S. political figures jars in ways unanticipated by its authors.

The study found that the ancestors of all living U.S. presidents save Donald Trump; Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch; and such notable Capitol Hill figures as Sens. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Tammy Duckworth owned other human beings as slaves. In terms of numbers, Reuters traced slaveowners in the ancestry of at least 11 governors, 28 senators, and more than 100 House members.

Based on a formula created by California Reparations Task Force, a nine-member panel appointed by Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, the total amount owed to black California residents victimized by the War on Drugs since 1970 amounts to over $225 billion.

The California Reparations Task Force is asking the Democrat-controlled state legislature to eliminate interest on past-due child support, as well as any back child support debt for black residents of the state.

In its final report released last week, the group claimed “discriminatory” laws “have torn African American families apart,” and that one effect of that is the “harms” caused by “the disproportionate amount of African Americans who are burdened with child support debt.”

Everything is now officially racist in sunny California.

Alvin Taylor and his sister, Pearl, were kids when the City of Palm Springs, California began burning down their neighbours’ homes. But they still remember the smell of the smoke.

“We would come home, and a neighbour’s house would be gone – just burned rubble,” Pearl Taylor Devers said.

In 1965, the City of Palm Springs began razing the Taylor’s predominately black neighbourhood to make way for commercial development near the city centre. Their father, a carpenter, had built their modest home from the foundation up. Their mother, a house cleaner, worked for celebrities like Lucille Ball and Amelia Earnhardt and took the children to church every Sunday

Black Americans tragically turned our focus from rights and laws to identity politics and victimization.

If simple logic were the only measure of truth in matters of race, reparations for black Americans would make perfect sense. We have endured four centuries of an especially mean and degrading persecution. Slavery, and the regime of segregation that followed it, was dawn-to-dusk, cradle-to-grave oppression. The only argument against reparations would be that no contemporary offer of reparation could ever be sufficient compensation.

But since the 1960s, we blacks have been all but overwhelmed with social programs and policies that seek to reparate us. Didn’t the 1964 Civil Rights Act launch an era of reparation in America?

The decline in the urban black community is due to institutional white guilt, not institutional white racism.

On June 7, I was one of five panelists, two of us white, to participate in an American Public Square discussion on the subject of reparations for African Americans. The discussion will air multiple times on the Kansas City PBS station KCPT.

The producers chose me because I have a book coming out on a related subject, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight From America’s Cities. They figured my self-interest would overcome my sense of self-preservation. Finding a second panelist to challenge reparations in an era as fraught as our own took a good deal more effort.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York would create a commission to consider reparations to address the lingering, negative effects of slavery under a bill passed by the state Legislature on Thursday.

“We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies,” said state Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages before the floor debate. “This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward.”

Welcome to a primitive notion of “justice”.

Calls for reparations payments for the descendants of slaves and colonized peoples, the “latest obsession of the radical left,” as The Hill puts it, are currently growing, as is the tab. For example, San Francisco is proposing paying $5 million to each black resident, along with a guaranteed income of $97,000 for 250 years, and a home for a dollar. California is proposing cash payments of up to $1.2 million at a cost of $800 billion–three times the state’s annual budget. Not to be left out of the bidding, the Feds are asking for $14 trillion. But sponsor Rep. Cori Bush claims that is nowhere near the $97 trillion owed to blacks for slavery and Jim Crow.

Is Rep. Cori Bush really worse off in America?

Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, wants to give away all your money. Well, most of it, anyway. She has proposed paying out $14 trillion in reparations. That’s more than half of America’s annual GDP. Alas, giving her half your income almost certainly would only be the start.

In the United States, calls for reparations are, once again, heating up. A Duke University professor recently called for $14 trillion in reparations for the descendants of American slavery (roughly $350,000 per recipient).

The professor, William Darity, isn’t the only one calling for reparations. The mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has established a task force that will explore compensation for black citizens. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has signaled his support for the idea. Detroit’s Reparations Task Force is currently exploring forms of compensation for the city’s black residents. Similar events are taking place in St. Louis. In early May, California’s reparations task force approved recommendations that could see some black residents receive $1.2 million each as compensation for slavery and racial discrimination.