Reparations and Other Silliness | Center for Equal Opportunity

Last week there were House hearings on reparations, the first since I testified against them in 2007. In an earlier email, I had included the main text of my testimony, and this week I’m sending an imagined dialogue — which I included with that testimony at the time and which was published in the Federalist Society’s Engage magazine — between a proponent and an opponent of this (silly) idea.

In sum, reparations would be unfair, unworkable, inevitably unending and expanding, divisive (encouraging a victim mentality among blacks and resentment among everyone else), and of course unconstitutional. But aside from those small problems, I suppose they would be okay, so maybe I’m being unfair.

Before I turn to the dialogue, I also have to note how the civil-rights Left seems to get battier every day. So just this month, in addition to the call of reparations, there has been legislation introduced that would allow prison inmates to vote in the District of Columbia, and a study purporting to link the abolition of affirmative action with … more minorities teenagers smoking cigarettes. Sigh.

Here’s the reparations dialogue:

A Dialogue on Reparations
by Roger Clegg (adapted from his Engage magazine article)

A. Should African Americans be paid reparations for slavery?

B. The short answer is no, but first let’s unpack that question. Do you mean only for slavery?–because most reparations advocates also think that reparations are appropriate for post-slavery discrimination.

A. Oh, yes. That should be included, too.

B. But in that case, why limit it to blacks? Other groups have been discriminated against as well.

A. But not as much, wouldn’t you agree?

B. I suppose, although you could make a case that the treatment of American Indians has been pretty bad. And Japanese Americans were the only ones actually interned.

A. That’s true; those are the two others that are especially bad. But the existence of treaties and reservations makes it possible to consider American Indians separately, and of course the Japanese Americans who were interned already have received reparations.

B. Fair enough. You would concede that other groups have been discriminated against, too, obviously, but your point is that they didn’t suffer under an actual Jim Crow system?

A. Correct.

B. But Latino advocates would argue that there has been school and housing segregation, ethnic gerrymandering, and employment discrimination against them. So might Asian advocates. It is certainly defensible to draw a line between blacks and everyone else. But I want to make the point that if you open the door to reparations for blacks for non-slavery discrimination, then others will try to come through that door.

A. Well, what if we limit it to reparations just for slavery, then?

B. This will complicate matters considerably. For instance, it then becomes important that only those with slave ancestors be compensated. Blacks who immigrated after the 13th Amendment (December 6, 1865) cannot really claim to have been victims of slavery, nor can their descendants, nor can the descendants of black freemen.

A. But aren’t the vast majority of African Americans descendants of slaves?

B. Good question. I don’t know. You would agree that the higher the percentage who aren’t, the more problematic reparations for all African Americans is, right?

A. Yes, but you would agree that if the percentage is high enough, the assumption that all blacks qualify is a reasonable one?

B. Reasonable, yes, although not so compelling and narrowly tailored-as the lawyers put it-to pass strict scrutiny. Let me also ask you this. How will we prove who is an African American? That is, if someone claims his or her share of reparations, how will you determine if they are in fact an African American.

A. Won’t just looking at the person be good enough in most cases?

B. It depends on how honest you think people are. If you start handing out $50,000 checks for anyone who claims to be an African American, and you take everyone at his word, I predict you will have some problems with false claims. To put it mildly.

A. Let’s have a two-part test. If you can tell the person is black just by looking at them, that’s good enough. If not, then the person has to provide some additional proof.

B. So let me get this straight. You’ll have a line of people, and some government bureaucrat will size each one up. He’ll judge how dark their skin is–maybe by holding up a paper grocery bag next to it–how kinky or nappy their hair is, the shape of their noses and lips, that sort of thing? And the ones that are judged to be black will get their check?

A. I guess that’s about right.

B. Yuck. And the ones who aren’t judged to be black, even though they assert they are, will then have to prove it in some way. DNA tests? Genealogical records? Sworn affidavits?

A. Something like that.

B. Yuck again. And, as I pointed out earlier, that will be more difficult if you have to show that you are a slave’s descendant. Anyway, will the government be using a one-drop rule? That is, do you get your check even if you have only one African American ancestor, as opposed to being, say, at least half African American?

A. I don’t see any alternative. And probably a person and his or her ancestors will have suffered a fair amount of discrimination under the one-drop rule.

B. All right. I agree that it would be an even bigger mess if you had to trace back not just to one ancestor but to several. By the way, how are you going to define African American?

A. Someone whose ancestors came from Africa.

B. But it can’t be just anywhere in Africa, right? I mean, white South Africans won’t do, nor would North African Arabs, right? Back to my line example, suppose one of the people standing in line admits that he doesn’t “look black,” but says that’s just because his African ancestors were Afrikaner or Egyptian or Moroccan. And what if he can prove it?

A. Well, I can see that it would be a problem if we had to prove immigration from a specific country. Maybe the DNA people can help us out.

B. Maybe. But there’s a certain irony here, since generally those supporting reparations also believe that race is a social construct without any true basis in biological science.

A. Look, I see your point, but many reparations advocates make clear that they aren’t proposing that individual checks be cut. Instead, they want social programs put in place as the reparations. So you aren’t going to have this problem of whites claiming to be blacks.

B. Granted, there will be less fraud if what you’re offering in a place in a special school or job training facility rather than a $50,000 check.

A. A lot less. The payoff is less, and the whites who might otherwise be interested are going to be poor or working class, and they aren’t going to want to label themselves black before the whole world. Their friends will see them going to the school or whatever, and will say, “Oh, I see you’ve got some plantation blood.” They won’t like that.

B. Maybe, although you’re doing some stereotyping yourself here. Plus, it’s a fair question why a poor or working class white-whose ancestors probably suffered some, too, one way or another-shouldn’t be eligible for the programs anyhow. But that brings us to the basic question: Should society pay reparations to all blacks, and only to blacks?

A. The discrimination suffered by African Americans was especially cruel, and so special compensation is required.

B. Well, that doesn’t make sense. The special cruelty isn’t present now, and wasn’t suffered by most blacks living now. The median age of African Americans is about 30, which means a birth-date after the end of the Jim Crow era. So it can’t be the special cruelty. It must be that the economic impact was especially severe and long-lasting.

A. Whatever.

B. But if it’s the economic impact that matters, why does it matter what its origins were? I mean, you have one child whose grandfather was lynched, and another child whose grandparents were drowned when their boat sank in the South China Sea. Both live in poverty. Why do we make some programs available to one but not to the other?

A. America didn’t sink the boat. But it did the lynching. Remember it is reparations we are talking about. Reparations are paid by the wrongdoer to the victim. America is responsible for slavery and Jim Crow discrimination in a way it is not responsible for other calamities that some people have suffered. We owe something to blacks, in a way we don’t to anyone else.

B. What do you mean “we”? The American people now-its taxpayers, voters, officials, and so forth-are in no way responsible for slavery or Jim Crow discrimination. Even if you say that it was the fault of American federal and state governments and corporations and other non-human entities that were around then and are around now, the reparations are going to have to come out of the pockets of those who don’t owe African Americans for exploitation, because they weren’t around when the exploitation happened.

A. But they still enjoy the profits from that exploitation.

B. Let’s talk about that. If you mean that America as a whole was built on the backs of slave labor-an exaggeration, but I’ll concede that certainly slave labor was one kind of labor that helped build America-it is true that we still enjoy the results of slave labor, but then that is no less true for blacks than for whites. That is, slaves may have cleared the farmland that now feeds us, but it feeds us black and white alike.

A. But whites profited more from it than blacks did.

B. Certainly slaveowners profited from it more than slaves did. But you’re assuming that the class of 19th century slaveowners and slaves is the same as the class of 21st century whites (really, nonblacks) and blacks. The groups are completely different.

A. You haven’t made the argument that slavery actually benefited blacks, because the 21stcentury descendants of slaves are better off than 21stcentury blacks still living in Africa.

B. I actually think that’s a legitimate argument, if we start playing the game of what Thomas Sowell calls “cosmic justice.” That’s where the government tries to ascertain how much wealth a person would have if nothing unfair happened to any of one’s ancestors. The problem with the game, of course, is that it is impossible to untangle the past. There’s no doubt that slavery and discrimination have, in the aggregate, diminished the wealth of African Americans. But so have disproportionately high rates of illegitimacy, and substance abuse, and crime, and a failure to take advantage of the educational, employment, and business opportunities that were available. To be sure, these bad life-decisions were often a result of discrimination, but that only confirms how impossible it is to say that group X has less wealth than group non-X, and that Y percent of this gap is because of bad things that group non-X did and 100 minus Y percent is due to bad things that X themselves did. It can’t be done. But if you do decide to play this game then, yes, I think it is legitimate to point out that, but for slavery, group X would actually have much less wealth than they do now.

Let me also point out that most of the wealth that the nonblacks have was acquired after slavery. Lots of nonblacks–not just Asians and Latinos, but the Irish and Italians, for instance–didn’t arrive here until after slavery. And lots of people who did have some wealth in the early 20th century saw it wiped out in the Great Depression. So telling the descendants of these people that they have to pay out a chunk of their wealth in reparations for slavery doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Conversely, the blacks who are paid reparations will include many who actually have more money than the average nonblack, and many who are not descendants of slaves–whose ancestors actually immigrated to the United States quite recently–as well as many whose lack of wealth is more their own fault than that of some slaveowner in the distant past.

A. Enough! This is all logic chopping. The fact of the matter is that slavery and Jim Crow discrimination were uniquely grievous wrongs, that they did result in present blacks having less money than they would have if they had been treated decently, and that it is only fair that they be compensated for these wrongs.

B. I think the points I’ve raised are more fundamental and more valid than mere logic chopping. But even if you think that, after weighing my arguments against yours, there remain some potential benefits to reparations, you also have to weigh the costs.

A. Such as?

B. Reparations will be absolutely poisonous to race relations. They will increase white resentment, and they will increase blacks’ victim mentality. Those are the last things we need. As discussed, there are also serious practical problems in deciding who is eligible for the program; other groups will soon demand reparations, too; and I will guarantee you that, once the program is begun, it will never end, and the demands for more and more reparations will only increase over time, and never diminish.

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