Some Key Quotes on Reparations

There is a strong case to be made against reparations:

In a recent interview with Black radio host Charlamagne tha God, Kamala Harris argued for reparations. She said this: “On the point of reparations, it has to be studied. There’s no question about that. And I’ve been very clear about that position.”

Of course she also said that there should be fully forgivable loans of up to $20,000 to Black entrepreneurs, and that marijuana use should be decriminalised. Yep, all that will really help Black Americans. But this call for reparations is often heard from the radical leftists.

As such I provide here a small sample of quotes – some newer, some a bit older – by various experts on the topic. And lest it seem that I am just another redneck racist, the first four authors quoted are Black Americans, followed by quotes from three White American authors.

Larry Elder

“Who would’ve thought that in the year 2019, just what, a few years after the departure of the first Black president who got elected in 2008, re-elected in 2012 despite a tepid recovery and an unpopular Obamacare, who would’ve thought we would be having a serious discussion about reparations? Who would’ve thought that? Are you kidding me?? You got to be kidding me! Reparations!! There are a few problems. There are no living slaves. There are no living slave owners. That’s the biggest problem. Reparations is a scheme to extract money from people who were never slave owners and give it to people who were never slaves! What about the role that Africa played in the slave trade? Without the capture and enslavement of Blacks and the selling of these slaves, by Black/African chieftains, the slave trade never could have occurred! What about the Muslim role in the slave trade? The Muslim slave trade in Africa preceded the European slave trade by hundreds of years, continued well after! And more slaves were taken out of Africa by Arab slavers and transported to the Middle East and to South America and to the Caribbean than were slaves taken out of Africa and sent to North America by European slavers. So how are you gonna factor that in?? And of course if you know anything at all about the history of slavery, slavery unfortunately has been a part of human history from the very beginning. Caucasians enslaved Caucasians, Africans enslaves Africans, Asians enslaved Asians, Native Americans enslaved Native Americans, we go on and on and on!”

Shelby Steele

“Today we can see what we couldn’t in the ’60s: that this vast array of government programs has failed to lift black Americans to anything like parity with whites. By almost every important measure educational achievement, out-of-wedlock births, homeownership, divorce rates blacks are on the losing end of racial disparities. The reparational model of reform, in which governments and institutions try to uplift the formerly oppressed, has failed.

But why such immense failure in a post-’60s America that has only grown more repentant of its racist past? The answer, I think, is that the Great Society was profoundly disingenuous. It was a collection of reparational reforms meant to show an America finally delivered from the tarnish of its long indulgence in racism. The Great Society was a gigantic virtue signal. It was moral advertising when the times called for the hard work of adapting a long-oppressed people to the demands of the modern world….

To accommodate, we shifted the overriding focus of racial protest in America from rights and laws to identity. Today racial preferences are used everywhere in American life. Identity is celebrated almost as profusely as freedom once was.

It all follows a simple formula: Add a history of victimization to the identity of any group, and you will have created entitlement. Today’s black identity is a victim-focused identity designed to entitle blacks in American life. By the terms of this identity, we blacks might be called ‘citizen-victims’ or ‘citizens with privileges.’

The obvious problem with this is that it baits us into a life of chasing down privileges like affirmative action. In broader America, this only makes us sufferers for want of privileges. Reparation can never be more than a dream of privilege.”

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Preferential Policies: An International Perspective by Sowell, Thomas (Author) Amazon logo

Thomas Sowell

“Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?”

“Blacks already have been the first victims of the campaign to get reparations for slavery. The longer this futile campaign goes on, the more additional blacks will be victimized.”

“Slavery was one of the longest living, most universal of all human institutions. Now that says something about human nature. So if you had reparations for slavery, virtually everybody on the planet would have had an ancestor somewhere who was enslaved. The number of whites who were enslaved in North Africa was larger than the number of blacks who were enslaved in the United States.”

“The wrongs of history have been invoked by many groups in many countries as a moral claim for contemporary compensation. Much emotional fervor goes into such claims but the question here is about their logic or morality. Assuming for the sake of argument that the historical claims are factually correct, which may not be the case in all countries, to transfer benefits between two groups of living contemporaries because of what happened between two sets of dead people is to raise the question whether any sufferer is in fact being compensated. Only where both wrongs and compensation are viewed as collectivized and inheritable does redressing the wrongs of history have a moral, or even a logical basis.

The biological continuity of the generations lends plausibility to the notion of group compensation—but only if guilt can be inherited. Otherwise there are simply windfall gains and windfall losses among contemporaries, according to the accident of their antecedents. Moreover, few people would accept this as a general principle to be applied consistently, however much they may advocate it out of compassion (or guilt) over the fate of particular unfortunates. No one would advocate that today’s Jews are morally entitled to put today’s Germans in concentration camps, in compensation for the Nazi Holocaust. Most people would not only be horrified at any such suggestion but would also regard it as a second act of gross immorality, in no way compensating for the first, but simply adding to the sum total of human sins.”

Walter Williams

“Punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is not what reparations advocates want. They want government to compensate today’s blacks for the bondage suffered by our ancestors. But there’s a problem. Government has no resources of its very own. The only way for government to give one American a dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American. Therefore, if anybody cares, a moral question arises. What moral principle justifies punishing a white of today to compensate a black of today for what a white of yesterday did to a black of yesterday?”

Richard Epstein

“We can see in the movement for reparations more of a political than a financial cause. It is an effort to reinvigorate the old struggle for civil rights by appealing to an issue on which it is possible once again to assert a profound moral unity. But this campaign to relive the present through the past will surely fail. We do not face slavery or segregation. There is no support anywhere in this nation for a return to either practice. The effort to place reparations front and center ignores that time has shifted the locus of our current concerns to a new set of issues that will not be resolved by reliving the horrors of an early generation in some collective or official capacity. We have to live life going forward. We cannot make collective amends for all the wrong in the past. But we can create new and unnecessary hurts by trying to remedy past wrongs. A divisive campaign for reparations will undercut the efforts that we all want to make a stronger, more vital, more productive and more caring nation.”

Victor Davis Hanson on “California’s Illogical Reparations Bill”

“Four points:

One, California was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state. Its moral insistence 170 years ago that slavery be outlawed precipitated a crisis — and almost sparked the Civil War ten years before it actually began. Despite the efforts of some slave-owning arrivals into California, there was never legal slavery in the state.

Two, about 27 percent of California residents were not born in the United States. Most of the naturalized citizens and undocumented immigrants arrived in the state after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. How, then, do California residents from Asia, Latin America, or Europe owe reparations to the current 6.5 percent of the state’s population that is African American?

Are we to establish a precedent that those who never owned slaves in a society that has no memory of slavery are to redistribute billions of their dollars to those whose grandparents were never slaves?

Three, in a multiethnic, multiracial California — where those identifying as white are a minority, and those of mixed ancestries number in the millions — how does the state adjudicate who owes what to whom?

Is an arriving Mexican immigrant a victim of institutionalized racism in Mexico, or was he part of a Mexican establishment notorious for its racism? In a multiracial state, will we adopt ancient “one drop” Confederate race laws to determine whose DNA qualifies someone for state money?

Should the state pay reparations to the descendants of Jews who fled the Holocaust, of Cambodians who fled Pol Pot’s reign of death, of Armenians who escaped Ottoman barbarity, or of Irish and Chinese who were worked to death on the Transcontinental Railroad?

Four, how will borrowing money to pay some 2 million to 3 million of the state’s 40 million residents make things easier for the African-American population? And are multimillionaire state residents such as LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West, Jay-Z and Beyoncé eligible?

Did it mean nothing that trillions of dollars have been spent over the last half-century on anti-poverty programs, state entitlements, and diversity and inclusion programs?

If per capita economic parity for the black population is truly the state’s concern, then why not allow more charter schools in California’s inner cities? Or deregulate the state’s cumbersome bureaucracy to give small businesses more opportunity and reduce resistance to building low-income housing?”

George Will

“If reparations are owed to the descendants of all members of minority groups that experienced protracted discrimination, the Irish can apply, citing the widespread practice of employers posting admonitions that “Irish need not apply.” Italians, too: An 1895 advertisement seeking labor to build a New York reservoir said whites would be paid $1.30 to $1.50 per day, “colored” workers $1.25 to $1.40, and Italians $1.15 to $1.25. Asians on the West Coast were subject to severe discrimination and violence. And Jews were restricted from acquiring the momentum that elite universities impart on the path to wealth.

Native Americans and African Americans experienced uniquely severe injustices. However, there must be some statute of limitations to close the books on attempts to assign guilt across many generations to many categories of offenders (racial, ethnic, class). How does one compute the compensation that can justly be extracted from persons who, although they participate today in the national prosperity to which slaves involuntarily made substantial contributions, had no participation in the injustices inflicted?

It is also true that the nation as a whole was injured by the exclusion of African Americans’ talents from American dynamism, both before and after hundreds of thousands of white Union soldiers were killed or maimed — should their descendants be exempted from paying reparations? — in the Civil War that ended slavery. But, then, semi-slavery survived for almost a century in Jim Crow laws after the end of Reconstruction.

If, however, you doubt that American discord can become much worse, try launching a scramble among racial and ethnic constituencies to assign varying degrees of guilt to others for varying degrees of injuries. Should reparations be means-tested, making affluent African Americans ineligible? To avoid using moral micrometers to measure guilt and injuries, should lump sums (taken from whom? by what mechanism?) be awarded to groups? Does it matter that 3.1 million African Americans identify themselves as of mixed race? Or that in the 2010 census, 1.8 million people self-identified as both white and black? Who would administer reparations? And at what cost to social harmony? Racial preferences (“affirmative action”) remain broadly unpopular after more than 50 years (the Philadelphia Plan to integrate building construction unions began in 1967).

And which African Americans shall count when counting for purposes of reparations? In 2005, the New York Times reported that since 1990, the average annual flow of immigrants from Africa — about 50,000 — had been more than came in chains in any of the peak years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

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5 Replies to “Some Key Quotes on Reparations”

  1. The absurdity of most historical reparation claims should be apparent. Should white US citizens require reparations from black Amercans because their ancestors fought and died to free African slaves?

    Should European Australians require reparations from Aboriginal Australians because they gave them literacy, millennia of science, technology, democracy, freedom and a developed justice system all for free?

    People really need to chill and it would be much more appropriate for institutions such as the SBS and ABC to acknowledge the technological and scientific gift of European heritage that enables them to exist rather than the ground they are on which, at the time, was pretty worthless.

    The fact is that, pretty much, all cultures have contributed to Australia and to privilege one race’s contribution over others is intrinsically racist.

    I am thankful for the Aboriginal people’s contribution just like I am thankful for the many contributions from many cultures but to privilege one race over other races is wrong and unsustainable and in direct opposition to the basic concept of equality.

  2. Shelby Steele has an excellent book entitled “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era” that lays out many facts most don’t know about. Truly excellent book.

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