Originally posted by David Lewis Schaefer on AMAC
New York has just become the third state, following California and Illinois, to investigate the possibility of issuing “reparations” for “the legacy of racial injustice.”
Last week, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul signed a controversial bill creating a commission “to study not only the history of slavery, but also its subsequent effects on housing discrimination, biased policing, income inequality, and mass incarceration of African Americans.” In signing the bill, Hochul “challenge[d] New Yorkers to be patriots and rebuke – and not excuse – our role in benefiting from the institution of slavery.”
While Hochul acknowledged having initially had “concerns” about the bill, she concluded that standing against racism today required “more than giving people a simple apology 150 years later.” Unsurprisingly, her announcement earned the thanks of professional race-baiter Al Sharpton (who once incited a crowd that burned down a white-owned clothing store in Harlem at the cost of six lives, and earned further infamy in the Tawana Brawley case, where he defended a black teenager’s fraudulent charges of rape, and ended up having to pay damages after he accused Brawley’s prosecutor of having been the rapist).
To note the holes in the argument for reparations really is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. But sometimes, the shooting is worth the effort – since the city of Evanston, Illinois has already issued $1 million so far in reparations in the form of “housing grants” of $25,000, while Illinois’s reparations commission is continuing its work through public hearings. Meanwhile, in May, California’s reparations commission approved a report calling for payments of over $1.2 million per beneficiary, a proposal that would cost the state billions at a time when its budget already faces an $88 billion shortfall.
In contrast to the normal law of torts, there is no way of identifying slavery (some 168 years after abolition) as the cause of damage to any presently living individual. For that matter, there is no way to demonstrate that slavery has been the cause of such evils cited by Hochul as “housing discrimination, biased policing, inequality, and mass incarceration.”
Laws have long existed, and been enforced, against housing discrimination. How much “biased policing” occurs will always be in dispute, and since black people are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than members of any other races, it is by no means evident that the system of policing as a whole, let alone incarceration, has caused them more harm than good, since it serves to deter crime and keep criminals, especially violent ones, off the streets. (Prior to the “Defund the Police” movement, members of the black community have sometimes complained that cities were discriminating against them by devoting insufficient police resources to their communities.)
As African-American social scientist Thomas Sowell points out in Social Justice Fallacies (2023), following the Supreme Court’s invention during the 1960s of a series of “rights” that made it harder to convict criminals, the subsequent upsurge in homicide “was especially severe in black communities,” with the absolute number of black murder victims sometimes exceeding that for whites, even though the black population was far smaller than the white one.
Finally, what can it mean to say that slavery was the cause of present-day racial “inequalities,” presumably in income and wealth?
Looking at another of Hochul’s claims, a considerable proportion of America’s present-day black population are descended from immigrants (especially from Africa and Haiti) who arrived here long after slavery’s end. If arriving in America meant being deprived of the opportunity to advance, what would have lured those immigrants here in the first place? And how would Hochul account for the large economic inequalities that now exist within America’s black population, with literally millions of millionaires alongside the middle class and the poor? (Of course, those millionaires’ wealth greatly exceeds that of a majority of white people.)
Turn, then, to the population that is to be taxed, following Hochul’s and Sharpton’s demands, to distribute reparations to black people.
Needless to say, no living American, nor his great-grandparents, owned slaves. A large percentage of America’s non-black population is also descended from immigrants – typically poor (like the present author’s own father and grandparents) – who arrived in this country long after slavery’s end. In their effort to work their way up from poverty, how could they have benefited from slavery’s legacy?
Large portions of immigrants – Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, and East Asians – themselves suffered from serious ethnic and religious discrimination in the past. In fact, the group that suffers most nowadays from efforts to limit merit-based admission to selective public and private schools and colleges, in the ostensible name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” are students of Chinese and Japanese ancestry – just as Jews suffered from admissions quotas at Harvard and other Ivy League schools starting in the 1920s.
As New York’s Republican Senate minority leader Robert Ortt observed in response to Hochul’s plan, the state had already paid its “debt” for slavery with the blood of the Union soldiers who died fighting against the perpetuation of that evil institution during the Civil War. Should their descendants now be taxed again to compensate for their ancestors’ alleged injustices?
But aside from its effect in promoting racial resentment and division – the only beneficiaries of which will be the professional demagogues like Sharpton – the worst consequence of a reparations policy will be the damage it inflicts on black people themselves. When any person is told that the deficiencies he may suffer from in his life – lack of education, family instability, unemployment, low wages, drugs – is not his fault and is outside of his control to remedy, he is far less likely to make an effort to take on responsibility for his situation and work to improve it, whatever his initial handicaps. Making him dependent on handouts will deprive him of the pride that comes from individual accomplishment.
In contrast to the reparations model, the best example one could provide as worthy of emulation by those seeking to improve the lot of black people (along with other low-income Americans) today would be the that of Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave/abolitionist/adviser to Lincoln/post-Civil War diplomat.
Even before slavery’s end, for which he advocated incessantly, Douglass published an essay in his newspaper The North Star scolding some free blacks for not making more of an effort at self-improvement and wasting their time and money in the pursuit of fripperies and social status.
Beyond abolition, what “the colored people” needed to develop, Douglass argued, was “character,” something that “nobody can give us” but which “we must get for ourselves.”
“Industry, sobriety, honesty, combined with intelligence and a due self-respect,” he argued, would always “be looked up to” and would visibly refute the “sophisms” of slavery’s advocates like John Calhoun regarding blacks’ supposed inherent inferiority.
As early as 1865, when emancipation arrived, in a speech titled “What the Black Man Wants,” Douglass responded by asking white people to simply “let him alone,” elsewhere arguing only that blacks be given “fair play” to make of their talents and industry what they could. Douglass frequently gave a speech on that theme under the title “Self-Made Men” – such as he considered himself to be. (For a contemporary application of Douglass’s position, see New York Post columnist Adam B. Coleman’s semi-autobiographical 2021 book Black Victim to Black Victor: Identifying the Ideologies, Behavioral Patterns, and Cultural Norms that Encourage a Victimhood Complex.)
While demanding Federal enforcement of blacks’ civil rights, lamenting the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the postwar Civil Rights Act, and calling for blacks to be given educational opportunities equal to those of whites, Douglass still maintained that the fate of black people, like that of their fellow citizens, depended in the end on their own efforts and self-discipline. Modern liberals and reparations advocates could learn a thing or two from this philosophy.
David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.
