Slavery and Reparations

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.

A number of House Democrats led by Rep. Cori Bush introduced a resolution Thursday to reignite a push for federal reparations that would amount to over half the U.S. GDP.

The resolution states that the U.S. has a ‘legal and moral’ obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of black people and calls for $14 trillion to be paid – ‘at least the amount of the black white wealth gap,’ Bush told DailyMail.com during a press conference.

A leading member of San Francisco’s reparations task force has suggested taxing billionaires to fund payments of $5million for every black resident.

The Rev. Amos Brown, who has led Third Baptist Church in the Fillmore district since 1976, said he was ‘very, very cautiously optimistic’ that officials will enact some form of reparations.

‘Of all these billionaires in San Francisco, you could establish a reparations fund,’ he told The New York Times.

California’s reparations task force has said that black people should be given priority in the renting and buying market – and demanded that a state agency should have the veto power over real estate decisions to ‘lessen racial segregation.’

The task force was created to study the economic effects of slavery and discrimination in the state back in September 2020, making California the first state to embark on studying the possibility of reparations for black Americans — even though slavery was banned in California even before it joined the union.

California state senator Steven Bradford, a member of the state’s Reparations Task Force, is warning black residents that massive reparations payments are “just not happening.”

The Democratic lawmaker’s warning comes after the task force approved a detailed plan that would see the state pay up to $1.2 million in reparations to each eligible black resident, if approved by state lawmakers.

George Soros succeeds in turning black people against each other.

In 2021, the Equal Justice Institute celebrated a settlement with the University of California in which the system agreed to stop using SAT and ACT test scores, objective merit-based metrics, in college admissions, until 2025. The racialist lawsuit claimed that test scores violate the California Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause as “indicators” of race.

The “SAT is a barrier to equal opportunity”, Lisa Holder, a counsel with the Equal Opportunity Institute, claimed.

” … While the victim hierarchy is a contentious matter, as players constantly jockey for position, victimhood itself is now such a high stakes game that inventive types are seeking to have their claims backdated. The irony of non-slaves seeking to profit from ancestral slavery via those who were never slave owners is difficult to ignore.

But then, victimhood is big business—literally. In fact, it is probably easier to compile a list of brands which aren’t queuing up to extract money from professed alignment with the cause du jour, whether it be Gillette’s close shave with ‘toxic masculinity,’ Ben & Jerry’s flirtation with gay marriage, or Bud Light’s shift to transgenderism.”

This week, something called the California Reparations Task Force formally adopted a proposal that would compel the Golden State to fork over reparations to its qualifying black residents, a recommendation the organization’s name suggests was inevitable.

“Reparations are not only morally justifiable,” said Democratic California congresswoman Barbara Lee in the wake of the task force’s announcement, “but they have the potential to address long-standing racial disparities and inequalities.” Given the taxpayer-funded sum the task force wants to see allocated to individual beneficiaries — potentially up to $1.2 million per eligible resident — it’s reasonable to expect that this policy would create as many inequities as it might resolve.

California’s reparations task force has approved recommendations which could give black residents $1.2million each as compensation for slavery and discrimination.

The nine-member committee voted Saturday to approve proposals on how the state can compensate and apologize for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies.

A black resident in California who has lived in the state their whole life until the age of 71 could receive more than $1.2million in compensation, if the recommendations are forged into law.