Reparations

The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley is a frequent home run hitter on the subject of race in America, and he "goes yard" in a recent column on reparations. He begins with some lines from the movie "Barbershop", a comedy about a black barbershop owner and the people in his orbit.

Riley quotes one character who says, “We don’t need reparations. We need restraint. Don’t go out and buy a Range Rover when you livin’ with your momma. And pay your momma some rent.” He adds,

Those lines come from Ricky, a character in the hit 2002 comedy “Barbershop.” The movie has a nearly all-black cast and is set mostly in a clip joint on the South Side of Chicago, where Ricky and his fellow barbers engage in free-wheeling nonstop banter with customers. Ricky was responding to a small-time crook who had said that ancestral slavery “ruined my whole life” and to another customer who suggested that black people demand reparations from the government.

Another barber, an old-timer named Eddie, sides with Ricky. “We’ve had welfare and affirmative action. Is that not reparations?” When another customer says that he thinks each black American is entitled to at least $100,000, Eddie responds, “What do you think that’s gonna do? That ain’t gonna do nothing but make Cadillac the No. 1 dealership in the country.”

Twenty-one years ago, as I watched the movie in a Brooklyn theater full of other black people, these exchanges brought howls of laughter from the audience. What also struck me was that a couple of minutes of film dialogue had produced a more honest conversation about racial preferences than book-length treatments of the subject from some of the nation’s most celebrated black intellectuals.

That's certainly true. Eddie is irreverent and criticizes everybody from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, but he can get away with it because he's funny and he's black.

Riley continues:

More than 20 years later, we’re still debating the topic. Last week New York voted to follow California down the slavery-reparations rabbit hole. Nutty ideas that originate in the Golden State often spread to other parts of the country over time, so the development isn’t too surprising, and more states are sure to follow. But it is another indication that the progressive left isn’t interested in getting past race, and that social justice in practice amounts to little more than a power grab.

New York state lawmakers concluded the legislative session on Thursday by creating a commission to study the lingering effects of slavery. California set up a reparations task force in 2020, and last month the state Legislature voted to make direct cash payments to black descendants of slaves that could amount to $1.2 million per person.

Neither Kathy Hochul nor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governors of New York and California, respectively, has committed to signing off on this nonsense, yet it’s notable that proponents have moved the ball this far.

This shows how far our society has descended into absurdity. No one living in California or New York today ever owned slaves or was enslaved. Most people paying taxes in these states are either themselves immigrants or are descended from immigrants who came here well after slavery had been abolished. Many of the blacks living in these states are descended from people who were never enslaved or were released from bondage long before the American Revolution.

Riley agrees:

California was never a slave state, and New York outlawed slavery in 1827, but the absurdities of these proposals don’t end there. Slavery was an atrocity, but all the slaves and all the slaveholders are long gone. Furthermore, the vast majority of whites living in the antebellum period, even in the South, never owned slaves.

Most white Americans alive today are descendants of people who came to the U.S. after the Civil War. Proponents of reparations want people who aren’t even descendants of slaveowners in the U.S. to compensate black people who were never slaves.

So how is it just to squeeze taxpayers who had nothing to do with slavery to give a huge handout to people who've never been slaves?

Progressives insist that there is a direct link between the past mistreatment of blacks and black outcomes today, but that claim is undermined by the experience of other groups. Chinese- and Japanese-Americans were also mistreated in the U.S. They were lynched, placed in internment camps, forced to attend segregated schools and denied property rights.

Yet today both Asian groups outperform white Americans academically and economically and have done so for decades.

Conversely, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report, median black weekly earnings are slightly higher than those of Hispanics, yet no one would argue that Hispanics have experienced more discrimination in the U.S. than blacks.

Riley argues that it's not slavery that's responsible for black poverty and/or under-performance today:

Those who want to blame the legacy of slavery for outcomes today are overlooking the legacy of the welfare state, which grew dramatically beginning in the late 1960s. The Great Society programs implemented under President Lyndon B. Johnson subsidized counterproductive behavior that took a huge toll on the black family.

Subsequently, many of the positive trends among blacks in the first two-thirds of the 20th century—from declining crime rates to educational and economic gains that were narrowing the gap with whites—either stalled or reversed course.

Indeed, the black family was in much better shape in the years following WWII than it's been in the years since the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s.

In his excellent study of the black experience in America from the 17th century through Emancipation titled African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, David Hackett Fischer notes that in Pennsylvania as early as the late 18th century those blacks who had been freed from slavery were forming stable families, becoming prosperous, raising educated children, forming churches and benevolent societies, etc.

They accomplished this despite racial tension and antipathy, the lack of any social safety net and despite in some cases having only recently been enslaved. To argue that blacks today can't do likewise and therefore need to be given a massive handout is an enormous slander against black ability.

Riley concludes that,

Reparations can’t solve these problems, as Ricky and Eddie pointed out, because they are mainly cultural deficiencies. Another government-imposed wealth-redistribution scheme won’t do the trick, but it will almost certainly make race relations worse and encourage blacks to continue seeing themselves primarily as victims who have no control over their lives.

Compensating blacks today for the suffering of their ancestors wouldn’t be just. It would be corrupt. “When you trade on the past victimization of your own people, you trade honor for dollars,” Shelby Steele writes. “And this trading is only uglier when you are a mere descendant of those who suffered but nevertheless prevailed.”

Despite it's often off-color allusions, I commend the movie "Barbershop". It's politically incorrect and funny, but it conveys several very important messages.

For those inclined toward a more scholarly look at the black experience I can't recommend Fischer's book highly enough. It's 749 pages long, but it's fascinating and an excellent counterpoint to the views of Hannah Nicole-Jones' 1619 Project.