As you know, I go back and forth on the question of affirmative action for college and professional-school admissions, and even after I thought I’d settled on a view (i.e., give some preference to minorities among those equally qualified for admission), it still keeps changing. After I read the long New York Times piece below by the notorious Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s changed a bit more, making me wonder if the Supreme Court, in banning race-based admissions, didn’t go a bit too far.
Although I’m not a huge fan of Ms. Hannah-Jones (I, along with many historians, thought the 1619 Project was based on a dubious thesis and was historically distorted, almost propagandistic), I have to say that I found the piece readable, engaging, and making some thoughtful points. It’s also a good run-through of the history of black civil rights and attempts to secure equality since the Civil War: Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Bakke v. California, all the way through the recent Harvard case.
I have not gone all the way over to Hannah-Jones’s views, set out below, but it’s clear that the question of affirmative action bears more thinking, at least for me. I’ve always thought that some form of reparations are due those who still suffer historically from oppression. My only question is what those reparations should be. It can’t be money, and in the end true reparations mean giving everyone, especially members of once-oppressed groups, equal opportunities from birth. That will of course take forever, so what do we do in the interim? Affirmative action has been the answer, and is still the answer for Hannah-Jones, but the Supreme Court has pretty much killed it.
At any rate, I’d read Hannah-Jones’s piece if you have time (click headline to read; I haven’t found it archived):
The topic is whether we should have a “colorblind” society, as was supposedly limned by Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream” speech. Hannah-Jones’s answer is no. To achieve full equality in America, we must explicitly be aware of race, taking it into account when making employment or admissions decisions. Clearly, she thinks that all the civil rights laws enacted since 1964 have done little to fix the problem of inequality.
Here are the main points I think she makes, as well as a few of my own comments. Her quotes are in quotation marks.
1.) Descendants of American slaves have suffered a continual disadvantage since slavery was abolished, being segregated, denied equal rights, and in general subject to pervasive discrimination. The historical residuum of this discrimination is still with us, and I don’t think people can deny that.
2.) This problem needs to be made right by some form of reparations. A color-blind society cannot make things right; we must have some form of affirmative action: preferential treatment of the descendants of slaves.
3.) A problem here: she wants only the descendants of slaves to get these advantages. Other blacks, like recent “immigrants and children of immigrants” from Africa and other places, are not entitled to these reparations.
4.) Other minority groups who have been subject to affirmative action, like Hispanics, aren’t dealt with in her article; in fact, the word “Hispanic” isn’t even given. It is slavery, and slavery alone, that must be considered in affirmative action, which must apply only to those who can show they are descended from slaves. Yet other blacks and minorities also suffer, perhaps not for historical reasons but from race-based oppression itself. One has to consider the moral weight of this argument.
5.) Reparations cannot be based on socioeconomic status or “condition”; it must be based on ancestry tracing back to those who were enslaved, i.e., the “condition” of being a descendant of slaves.
6.) Increasing “diversity” is of little consequence. What Hannah-Jones wants is to increase the representation of descendants of slaves in American life through affirmative action. That must involve some kinds of quotas, not just a subjective method for increasing the proportion of black and brown faces in schools. Her stand thus explicitly opposes the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision, which ruled that there can be affirmative action so long as it increases diversity—seen as an innate good—but not if it involves quotas. Hannah-Smith doesn’t explicitly mention a need for quotas, but I think it’s inherent in her argument.
7.) Despite the “colorblindness” touted in King’s famous speech, he also made statements that could be interpreted as favoriting affirmative action (see below).
I’ll give some of her quotes that, to be sure, make points worth considering. Please comment below on the issue, the quotes, or the points above. I do recommend your reading her article. Even though it’s long, it’s well written.
The ramifications of the recent affirmative-action decision are clear — and they are not something so inconsequential as the complexion of elite colleges and the number of students of color who attend them: We are in the midst of a radical abandonment of a compact that the civil rights movement forged, a shared understanding that racial inequality is harmful to democracy.
. . . Race, we now believe, should not be used to harm or to advantage people, whether they are Black or white. But the belief in colorblindness in a society constructed on the codification of racial difference has always been aspirational. And so achieving it requires what can seem like a paradoxical approach: a demand that our nation pay attention to race in order, at some future point, to attain a just society. As Justice Thurgood Marshall said in a 1987 speech, “The ultimate goal is the creation of a colorblind society,” but “given the position from which America began, we still have a very long way to go.”
After Brown v. Board of Education (1954):
Civil rights activists were finally seeing their decades-long struggle paying off. But the architects and maintenance crew of racial caste understood a fundamental truth about the society they had built: Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them. Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction, it would inevitably self-replicate.
And the Bakke vs. Board of Regents of the University of California case (1978), which rejected UC Davis’s use of racial quotas in its medical school, but allowed race to be used as one factor in admissions. Note how Hannah-Jones is concerned here exclusively with the descendants of slaves:
Thus, the first time the court took up the issue of affirmative action, it took away the policy’s power. The court determined that affirmative action could not be used to redress the legacy of racial discrimination that Black Americans experienced, or the current systemic inequality that they were still experiencing. Instead, it allowed that some consideration of a student’s racial background could stand for one reason only: to achieve desired “diversity” of the student body. Powell referred to Harvard’s affirmative-action program, which he said had expanded to include students from other disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those from low-income families. He quoted an example from the plan, which said: “The race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor, just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”
But, of course, a (white) farm boy from Idaho did not descend from people who were enslaved, because they were farmers from Idaho. There were not two centuries of case law arguing over the inherent humanity and rights of farm boys from Idaho. There was no sector of the law, no constitutional provision, that enshrined farm boys from Idaho as property who could be bought and sold. Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.
In Bakke, the court was legally — and ideologically — severing the link between race and condition. Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition. With a few strokes of his pen, Powell wiped this context away, and just like that, the experience of 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow was relegated to one thing: another box to check.
According to Hannah-Jones, Martin Luther King Jr. floated ideas similar to affirmative action (Reagan campaigned on a covertly racist platform):
Reagan, who had secretly called Black people monkeys and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Yet in the first commemoration of that holiday in 1986, he trotted out King’s words to condemn racial-justice policy. “We’re committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas,” he said. “We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
This passage from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech has become a go-to for conservatives seeking to discredit efforts to address the pervasive disadvantages that Black Americans face. And it works so effectively because few Americans have read the entire speech, and even fewer have read any of the other speeches or writings in which King explicitly makes clear that colorblindness was a goal that could be reached only through race-conscious policy. Four years after giving his “Dream” speech, King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” And during a 1968 sermon given less than a week before his assassination, King said that those who opposed programs to specifically help Black Americans overcome their disadvantage “never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the Black man’s color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.”
And, to finish, Hannah-Jones’s indication that we’re not where we want to be:
Today we have a society where constitutional colorblindness dictates that school segregation is unconstitutional, yet most Black students have never attended a majority-white school or had access to the same educational resources as white children. A society with a law prohibiting discrimination in housing and lending, and yet descendants of slavery remain the most residentially, educationally and economically segregated people in the country. A society where employment discrimination is illegal, and yet Black Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans, even when they hold college degrees.
Now one could argue that equity should not be the goal if different groups have different abilities and preferences; instead he true goal should be equality of opportunity. And I agree that we should aim for equality of opportunity rather than equality of representation. But the former will be nearly impossible to achieve given the resources needed. Perhaps one might hope that instead of trying to create equality of opportunity to ensure equity, we should do the opposite: creating a bit more equity as a way of paving the way for equality of opportunity.
Weigh in below!
The problem with the reparations arguments are, first of all, that they generalize about the experience of the target group. It is not clear that “Descendants of American slaves have suffered a continual disadvantage since slavery was abolished. . .” is true and certainly not true that the experience has been equal for all the descendants. If there are people today who are suffering unfairly, the remedy is through the courts, where they can sue and must actually show that they have suffered or are suffering harm. I think we should have done more for Freedmen, but they are beyond help now. I am particularly suspicious of reparations arguments when people talk about numbers like $800k per. That’s not reparations, that’s turning our society upside down. I get the impression that that is the actual goal of most champions of reparations.
As I said, I don’t think reparations should involve issuing checks!
I hear that, but if the quantity of value demanded is $800,000 (or more) per person, what non-cash benefit could a reparation scheme provide that would delight the recipients as much as a sheaf of cheques large enough to enable the recipients never to have to work again in their lives? Preferential admission to medical school and black quotas for construction and assembly-line factory jobs (the latter as MLK proposed) don’t have the same wow factor.
Two thoughts. First, I think it might be worthwhile listening to the words of an actual ex-slave, rather than the descendants several generations removed. Frederick Douglass’s famous 1865 address:
Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot box, let him alone, don’t disturb him! [Applause.] If you see him going into a workshop, just let him alone—your interference is doing him a positive injury. General Banks’ “preparation” is of a piece with this attempt to prop up the Negro.8 Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the Negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice, so beautifully pictured to you in the illustration used by Mr. Phillips, the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the Negro, and established that line for his government. [Applause.] Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live. He will work as readily for himself as the white man.
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/what-the-black-man-wants-2/
Excellent! Thanks for sharing.
People can and do deny that (including serious intellectuals like Glenn Loury and Thomas Sowell). The suggestion that black Americans born in the 2000s are disadvantaged by the residual effects of past racism needs to be argued, not just asserted. To address the issue we need a clear and evidenced account of the factors acting in the lives of today’s youths that are claimed to disadvantage them.
Just for example (and contrary to popular supposition), current spend per capita on education/schools is higher for black Americans than for non-black Americans, and has been throughout the lifetime of today’s youth.
The problem there is that, just about the only plausible mechanism by which today’s black-American youths could be being disadvantaged by the current effects of past racism is through socioeconomic status. So rejecting the relevance of SES undercuts the entire case.
Even then, whether SES is indeed a big factor in inequalities in outcomes between races can be argued. SES distributions only diverge hugely between races right at the top end. The bottom half of the distributions are fairly similar; that is, there are a lot of less-well-off people in other races also, and SES does little to explain race gaps.
I’m not seeing how “current spend per capita on education/schools is higher for black Americans than for non-black Americans, and has been throughout the lifetime of today’s youth,” shows or even implies that “The historical residuum of this discrimination is still with us,” is not true. All it shows is that an effort has been made to address that issue, but it says nothing about whether or not the issue has been successfully addressed.
You imply that people have only ever offered assertions that “The historical residuum of this discrimination is still with us,” but have not demonstrated that it is true. Do you really believe that there are not many evidence based arguments that have been made in support of that claim? You mentioned Glen Loury has argued against that claim. Have you ever read or listened to his friend John McWhorter argue for that claim?
The school-spend issue was just one example (I’ve heard it claimed that one reason for lower academic performance is underfunded and poor schools in majority-black areas; that may have been true in the 1950s, but it’s not been true in the lifetime of today’s college-age youths.)
And yes, I do indeed consider that the claims that today’s black youths are suffering from the residual effects of past racism are not that well supported by evidence. At least, the evidence is not there that “residual effects of past racism” is the biggest cause of the large racial disparities in things like educational achievement and crime rate today (which are the big issues).
You’re welcome to point me at evidence of such things (and yes, I’ve listened to John McWhorter a lot and greatly respect his opinions. Has he argued that current gaps in educational achievement and crime rate are caused by the residual effects of past racism?).
Yes, he has.
So you don’t think that past racism, which was very prominent in the US even in my lifetime and though less still exists, has not been a significant influence in shaping black culture in the US? I’ve seen far more convincing arguments for that claim than against it. Can you explain how it could not have been? It seems implausible to you that after more than 300 years of oppression, most of that time severe, that 60ish years of attempting to fix the negative effects of it hasn’t been entirely successful?
And again, your reasoning doesn’t seem sound. Using money as a proxy for results isn’t sound reasoning.
The most persuasive thing I’ve ever read on reparations is this fine essay by John McWhorter, from 2001, in opposition: http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps108/6%20Reparations/McWhorter%202001-%20Against%20Reparations.pdf
Just say No is my advice. Don’t agree to give any people who hate you free stuff that they personally didn’t earn. Let them try to take it from you if they think they deserve it that much. Remember they won’t be satisfied with what you give them and they will come back for more to exploit your initial and now further weakness. A No can always be changed to a Yes, at the point of a gun if necessary, but a Yes can never, ever be changed to a No….unless you have more guns.
Canada has passed the point, I think, where we can start saying No to a much smaller aggrieved minority. Don’t go there with a group that is three times as large, proportionally.
Colour-blind anti-poverty measures – yes. Reparations for the descendants of slaves – no.
Have these people (Nikole Hannah-Jones and her ilk) come to destroy the Democratic Party (and hand high political offfices to the Republicans)? The plurality of the poor in America are white. Let me repeat this: in the USA, there are more poor white people than there are poor black people. This holds even though the black poverty rate is higher than the white poverty rate. It holds because, while about 61% of Americans are white, only about 13% of Americans are black.
A few lines from:
Ruy Teixeira & John B. Judis: Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2023
Slavery was an injustice. I would like someone to explain to me why its descendants need a special program while other sources of injustice remain unaddressed. How is this disparate treatment going to work electorally? I do not expect an answer from the proponents of reparations for slavery. And this lack of an answer will say it all, in my opinion.
+1
Agreed. My own definition of reparations is “Grifters scamming people who are not guilty into giving money to people who are not suffering.”
Doing the best you can to support equality of opportunity is fine and works for everyone. Reparations are either some collective scam of lazily throwing money at some group, or they take you down the road of individual reparations based on heritage – which means you have to assess the worthiness of each individual, something that would be more divisive and create greater social tension. And more and more difficult going further back in time.
Plus the cynic in me believes that money raised for reparations might be heavily reduced passing through the hand of the bureaucracy before it ever reached the intended destination..
Or as Clint Eastwood is supposed to have said, “I never owned any slaves, and you never picked any cotton. I don’t owe you shit.”
An issue that NHJ does not address but is directly related to her argument that only the descendants of slaves deserve reparations:
Should the reparations be paid only by the descendants of slave owners? Many Americans are descended from immigrants who came to the US long after the end of slavery, and had no hand in the horrors that NHJ wants to address.
And in both cases the identity is not a category but a quantitative variable. I guess a vanishingly small proportion of black Americans are descended only from slaves [edit to add: I don’t know this proportion, and would be willing to believe it’s high if someone knows this from data]; and a similar tiny proportion of non-black Americans are descended only from slave owners. Many others are only partly descended from either group. How much ancestry is needed for a person to qualify to receive (or be obliged to pay) reparations? Should the amounts be paid in proportion to that quantitative ancestry? [edit: FX Kober also raised this @9] Who would decide? What database would be used as a reference? How would disputes be resolved? I agree with AC that the biggest winners would be the lawyers as usual.
Your argument is the perfect logical counterweight to NHJ’s insistence on limiting benefits to descendants of slaves. I shudder to think of the arithmetics that would have to go into calculating bloodline apportionments.
What’s the appropriate degree of scrutiny for descendants that look “white”?
I read some of the comments on her NYT article. The readers tend to be pretty left-leaning but they were not impressed. They felt that the decades of affirmative action were a form of reparations. Her rant about the (white) Idaho farm boy didn’t go over well. Several comments said they were tired of hearing about “white privilege.”
I also thought the article was far too long and needed an editor.
The “Idaho farm boy” didn’t go over well with me, either. I don’t think she did herself any favors with this article.
Well said!
Dialecticians believe the only true knowledge is from their own “scientific” gnosis of History – that is, their own special consciousness of how clashes between dialectical opposites resolve – proceeding from the past, present, and out to End of History, which they know and nobody else or they will get criticized. Kant made a great change to dialectic, and Hegel then developed it much more.
Dialectic takes truth – here, the past slavery and abuse in the United States of imported Africans and their descendants, the apparent privilege of the “Farm Boy”, etc. – and manipulates thought in order to reify some thing that needs to be true to bring History closer to Heaven-on-Earth at the End of History – reparations. With no proof of what it will do, by the way, or any other explanations.
Study of the copious Critical Race Theory – that is, Race Marxism – literature will show this. They write and write and write, and it gets intense. It can be quite eloquent, in fact. It has also been shown to be a grift.
Faith in dialectic is the core belief of a religious cult.
And I’m not sure if Hannah-Jones mentions “reparations” by name, but I’ll suggest :
Reparations is the fraud of a religious cult.
“And so the dialectic continues.”
-Delgado and Stefancic
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction, p.66, 3rd Ed., 2017
White Cargo – The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America
Don Jordan and Michael Walsh
New York University Press
2007
For further depth as to why dialecticians need race to be a “social construct”:
The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice, Haney-López, I., Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, v. 29, p.1-62, 1994
[ add http stuff here] lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1115043?ln=en&v=pdf
Missed edit deadline:
Indeed, I could not find “reparations” in the article.
The first “reparations” in my comment then would need to be perhaps Hannah-Jones’ “[…] race-based counteraction […]”… goodness, what in the world would that be… what could that be??
But the second “reparations” is my own thought.
Edit 2: what I called “intense” would be better characterized as “punishing”, and I mean that in the religious reading sense – to morally punish the reader.
A colour blind society is the only fair way to go. Merit should be the only criteria for hiring, or admittance to schools, etc… Reparations are a joke. No one who was a slave is alive now in the western world. The idea that people living today have poor outcomes because of laws repealed 50 years ago needs some serious evidence. Many groups who faced vile racism in the past are now succeeding. If you want to help slaves, help the current salves in India and Africa.
1. I deny it. There is little to no evidence of this. The success of other minorities refutes this statement.
2, 3 and 4 see 1
5. You go back far enough, and everyone are descendants of slaves. See 1.
6. The only fair way to increase “diversity” – which is NOT an obvious good on its own, is to provide equal opportunity to everyone. For example, fund schools at the state level using a simple formula based on number of students. If schools are funded locally, then only rich regions have good schools.
7. The time for reverse discrimination is over. Keep an eye out for obvious racism and bigotry. Give children a good education. Affirmative action is just throwing people who never had a swimming lesson into the deep end sometimes.
I don’t see how MORE discrimination can make a society more just.
Alexander, you make many good arguments. I give Hannah-Jones a little credit for admitting that affirmative action, as it has been practiced recently, is a sham because so many of its beneficiaries, while black, are not descendants of slaves.
Cord Jefferson: Ivy League Fooled: How America’s Top Colleges Avoid Real Diversity. Good, 2 September 2011 https://www.good.is/articles/ivy-league-fooled-how-america-s-top-colleges-avoid-real-diversity
Eghosa Asemota: When Affirmative Action Becomes Diversity Only. Cornell Policy Review, 14 January 2018
https://web.archive.org/web/20201111212437/http://www.cornellpolicyreview.com/affirmative-action-becomes-diversity/
The differences in outcomes for black children of recent immigrants and descendants of American slaves raises questions that I would like to see her answer. What exactly is the nature of what hobbles one group and not the other? Apparently it is not discrimination based on skin color. What is it?
One fair criticism of that comparison I’ve read is that recent black immigrants skew toward wealthy professionals and entrepreneurs from Nigeria and other African countries (not to say that none of them are poor Haitians too). So the comparison of their children to the offspring of ADOS is not quite fair or simple.
But I agree the comparison does suggest that ongoing discrimination & bigotry against the children of either group seems unlikely to explain much of the differences in their fortunes.
My Right-Wing Case for Reparations to African Americans
African Americans have suffered tremendous harm inflicted by the US government, both from the (continued) legalization of slavery when this country was founded in 1789 and the actions of left-wing politicians and parties to harass and oppress African Americans after passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
As this harm continues into the present, all African American citizens should be entitled to reparations whether or not they can demonstrate they or their family have ever been enslaved. Eligibility for reparations should be determined by whether the individual is a US citizen and whether the individual is perceived by others as African American.
Should newly naturalized African Americans receive reparations? Yes, as the harm is on-going. Will this cause more people of African descent to seek to become US citizens? Yes, but I don’t see any problem with that.
The intent of the original amount proposed for reparations, “forty acres and a mule”, was based on what it was assumed would be needed by a freed slave to become financially self-sufficient. Therefore, the dollar amount should not be based on the current market value of those commodities (about $150k). Rather it should be based on how much individuals would need to get to a point where they can provide for themselves. This is variable depending on each person’s starting point, but I suggest $500k as a reasonable amount. This can be increased if needed to achieve consensus.
Simply depositing this amount into a bank account for each African American would be to ignore the nature of the harm inflicted upon African Americans by our government, which has impeded the creation of intergenerational wealth. What is needed by the recipients is not just money, but the knowledge and the habits to continue to earn money beyond the amount provided. Unfortunately, our government is incompetent in many ways but is especially incompetent in education. Our government delivers lower educational outcomes for African Americans (as compared as a group against the average for all students) despite spending significantly more on a per pupil basis for African American students. The only group that African Americans can rely on to provide the knowledge needed to receive the full intended benefit of reparations is themselves.
I propose the best way to convey reparations is as a tax credit. Most individuals would fully utilize the $500k, assuming 50 years of working and an average yearly tax liability of $10k on an average $50k income. About 10% would burn through the tax credit in less than 10 years. By making the rate at which reparations are delivered to individuals variable, it allows the individual to adapt to the increased income as it is earned. It also incentivizes work as well as investment and entrepreneurism.
The obvious objection is that this forces the individual to earn a reparation which is already owed. This is a valid point, but I can’t see any other way to overcome the deficiencies of our government and the racism of the Left.
Doing this one-time would not have the needed impact, so reparations should be available to all living African Americans as well as all those born or naturalized in the 100 years after adoption of this policy.
Some may question how our government could possibly afford this. However, the government is not handing out payments but just simply not collecting as much in taxes (which results in much lower overhead). Also, as has been demonstrated repeatedly (and most recently by the Trump administration) tax cuts pay for themselves so there is no long term cost incurred by these reparations. Instead, tax revenues will increase as those who receive reparations become more and more better off and eventually pay taxes on higher incomes.
As an added benefit, reparations will significantly reduce dependency in the US on government benefits, reducing the cost of those programs. These programs will of course continue despite reparations since most individuals dependent on these programs are white.
Matthew you write:
I think you missed the obvious problem with your proposed plan. See my comment on comment # 5 by Leslie MacMillan (above).
I see your point but would argue that reparations do not have to be or be seen as an anti-poverty program. Instead, I would say yes to color-blind anti-poverty measures AND yes to reparations for all African Americans.
Of course, I hope that a proper reparations plan would help alleviate some poverty, but it is more important that it addresses the ongoing injustice.
As an aside, about 76% of the US is white since about 90% of Hispanics are white. The lower number you cited is for white, non-Hispanic.
Forgoing tax collection saves net money by reducing collection overhead? Did you really say that? I don’t deny that tax cuts can be self-financing because of the extra economic activity they stimulate but it’s not from reducing overhead at the tax office. I’ll leave the question of whether injustice is still ‘on-going’ for others. I’ll just note that your whole argument rests on white people accepting the premise that it is.
Not only do you make black people work for the reparation you say they are already owed, but you presumably claw back welfare and Medicaid benefits they receive now, as the wage income the tax credit will incentivize them to earn elevates them out of welfare-dependent semi-poverty, indolence, and crime. In short, your right-wing version of reparations sounds too much like work. Maybe that’s the point? 😉
Unless you abolish cash welfare first, I don’t see where the incentive to participate in the Reparations program would come from. For black people already working in tax-paying jobs, your proposal would essentially award them a 100% tax cut, which would not go unnoticed by the Bangladeshi clerk at the next wicket in the Dept. of Motor Vehicles. Removing large numbers of people from the tax rolls who can afford to pay taxes but still letting them vote is unhealthy for democracy, (as is cash welfare. Both make recipients inclined to vote for tax increases on people who earn $1 more than they do.) It would also be inflationary if the extra spending power went to bid up the price of already scarce goods whose supply can’t be ramped up easily to meet demand, such as houses. A similar objection applies to cash reparations.
Finally the track record for tax exemptions for wage income in getting people off the welfare rolls and into paid work is not encouraging. Status Indians in Canada pay no tax on any income earned on a Crown Reserve but most Reserves still produce nothing of economic value except tobacco and cannabis and remain utterly dependent on cash welfare from the Canadian government.
If you want to convince people you need to supply evidence for claims like this.
OK, but most non-black Americans *also* haven’t benefited from intergenerational wealth. Only a rather small fraction of Americans inherit wealth that goes back multiple generations.
And that’s everything to do with government incompetence and mendacity, and nothing at all to do with black people, black culture and black abilities?
How can you call this a “right wing” case when you blame everything on the government? It’s actually a hyper-left-wing case in which people are blank-slate pawns and everything is the fault of the government.
Please can you outline which aspects of government incompetence and mendacity are responsible for the fact that, in terms of educational achievement, one minority group (Asian Americans) do better on average than whites, while another (blacks) do worse? Please be explicit. (You’ve already admitted that they spend more on blacks, per pupil.)
If it were the case that whites did best, and all non-white groups did poorly, then you might just about be able to make a case that this is the fault of traditionally white governments. But the fact that Asians do better than whites torpedoes this from the start.
It is very interesting, that she refocuses on being a descendant from slaves. Those and only those (how many % of your ancestors need to have been slaves?) are entitled to compensation in the form of affirmative action.
Does that mean, that in that affirmative action, they are only treated preferentially against those and only those, who are descendants of slave owners?
Reparations are warranted in the way compensatory action in general is warranted. You have to show, that you were damaged and by whom in order to receive restitution. How much damage can be demonstrated after half a century of equality before the law? I don’t think much. Black America is slowly catching up to the rest, impeded from what I can see by a heavy bias of the American society against the poor.
Thus the remedy to speed up the process is to help the poor in general, since that combats the cause that slows down the regression to the mean.
A comment in a recent piece by Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath (University of Toronto):
From (access is free):
Joseph Heath: The paradox of American multiculturalism, Sept 28, 2023
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-american-multiculturalism
Point 1. We are all descended from slaves.
Point 2. Many groups were discriminated against in U.S. history. Do they all deserve reparations?
https://greekreporter.com/2020/05/31/during-a-weekend-of-racial-unrest-greek-americans-recall-their-own-struggles-with-racism/
As is so often the case, the commentariat at NYT is not nearly as progressive as its writers. From the top-rated comments:
“Should [a wealthy black student] benefit from affirmative action over a white student from Appalachia?”
“I’d like to see the NYT publish counterarguments to this essay by a leading black thinker such as Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Thomas Sowell, or the NYT’s own John McWhorter.”
“Treating people differently based on the color of their skin is wrong, always and everywhere.”
“Using race as a consideration in hiring, firing or admissions to university is racist…Read the room Ms. Hannah-Jones.”
“All of Hannah-Jones arguments are set in ancient history.”
The SCOTUS was right to end racial preferences because there’s no answer to the question, “What indicators will we use to know when we’ve successfully overcome the 350 years of crimes to Blacks?” Not being able to answer that means racial quotas continue forever. Racism persists. End them now and find other ways to achieve effective reparations.
Humans are adapted to instinctively encode physical differences so we can distinguish out-group members, and treat them more suspiciously. Thing is, skin color was the same during the environment over which this adaptation evolved. Research from Tooby and Cosmides showed that skin color as out group marker is easy to erase (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&q=toobe+and+cosmides+erasing+race&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1710882690256&u=%23p%3DMjhWZWH4UJsJ).
Thus, end all indicators of skin color as having any meaning. If not now, then never.
There are indirect ways to alter the measurement of a Black’s merit, such that the effect is increasing Black promotions and slowly achieving reparations while not perpetuating racism.
I continue to believe that the whole modern reparations issue is designed to rekindle racial resentment and cause chaos.
The biggest issue from my perspective is that a large part of this seems to be expected compensation for opportunity offered but not taken, or poor choices made.
That 70% of Black kids are born into single parent households is a huge factor, and seems to be one of the things for which the parents are solely responsible. And that is not just an issue of poverty, but also raises the likelihood of exposure to domestic violence, with short-term boyfriends in and out of the picture.
Reading to one’s children is a choice.
I think we can probably agree that for many years now, being Black is an advantage when it comes to college admittance. Yet once they arrive, there is every likelihood that they will choose to major in Health Administration, Community Organizing, or Social Services. Bull Conner is not standing in front of the Admissions office to keep them from studying Medicine or Chemical Engineering. Quite the opposite, actually.
Spending three times as much to educate an inner-city Chicago kid vs your Idaho farm boys seems like a form of reparations to me. But it does not seem to be working.
Absolutely. As a Marxist theory is behind the dialectical political warfare of reparations and all the unspoken particulars it entails as you note, it would make sense for a soviet to the control those things.
That is, such problematics would justify the state to claim power over private property such as you note, family dynamics, reading to children, .. so many other things.. etc.
Writings that would support such a counterhegemony are from Engels (family as private property) and Gramsci (hegemony).
First, though, the strategy is just get the society to take the gnostic temptation of the magical reparations program – once that is in the lawbooks, then we “all” will see the absolute power required to make it work – in a Communist state.
I see two forms of “color blindness”. The first is a denial of the history and ongoing reality of racism. The second is not evaluating people based on the color of their skin (i.e. not engaging in racial stereotypes), but rather treating them as individuals (“judging them by the content of their character”).
Very few people who adhere to the laudable form of color blindness in the second definition would make the mistake of believing the first definition.
Opponents of color blindness have, intentionally IMO, conflated the second with the first, in order to eliminate the second definition. They don’t like the second definition because it prevents them from making blanket negative statements about white people, which is a foundational pillar in their woke ideology. This is also the same poisonous cognitive well that produces “people of color can’t be racist”.
I don’t know Jeff. Given the commentors here as a sampling, it might be a bit more than “very few.”
Specific examples please.
My own thoughts
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/reviewing-nicole-hannah-jones-essay
One other “reparations” issue that NH-J fails to consider. Benefiting the descendants of slaves would surely pass constitutional muster, since it does not mention race at all; but it would lead to some strange paradoxes. The (white) actor Ty Burrell could claim reparations, since he had a great-great grandmother who was a slave (this was revealed on Henry Louis Gates’ show “Finding Your Roots”); but numerous well-known Black Americans, including (e.g.) Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Colin Powell, Sidney Poitier, or Harry Belafonte, could not, as they were not descended from American slaves.
And some additional comments on the article 🙂
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/more-comments-on-nh-js-article-the
Interesting topic. After my previous comment, I pondered it some more. Another aspect that came to me is that one of the key suppositions of the argument for is that the lingering damages of slavery are self evident.
Not just that, but severe enough to disrupt the lives of people many generations later, leading them to poverty and crime.
Yet we apparently need complex genealogical research and even DNA analysis to tell them from their neighbors descended of free Blacks.
I can envision some sort of official testing system where an individual submits a birth certificate and a DNA swab, and waits for the results. Those results would reveal if the person has been kept down through the magic of generational trauma, or if it is just due to laziness and lack of motivation.
More, the Constitution addresses “Corruption of Blood” in regards to treason, but I think the principal is sort of fundamental to our concept of justice. It is a can of worms, and an issue that was designed to be unresolvable. Certainly people who think it will make them rich will support the idea, but I cannot see the majority of Americans accepting personal responsibility for for the deeds of others, who they have never met, who did not consult them before committing those deeds, and when the perpetrators and victims were all long dead before any of us were born.
Wilfred Reilly :
“Crime causes poverty.
Reverse directionally, and you see staggering, significant results”
x.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1738382659410178084?s=46
… make of it what you will – I haven’t gotten a literature base for that important idea yet.
Sorry for adding a third comment — but I just came across this tweet that I thought would be of interest in this context — claiming that NH-J has basically appropriated the ideas of others without attribution:
https://twitter.com/BlissfulBeauty/status/1769548212212248619
After reading the ADOS tweet, I was led down a bit of a rabbit hole, reading about the ADOS group. This is what I learned:
Quick summary: It’s a pretty controversial group, and I found no clear evidence that NH-J based her article on their scholarship. Some links are included in my longer discussion of the topic:
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/did-nikole-hannah-jones-unethically
Perhaps we should require Black people to pay reparations for the wildly disproportionate number of crimes for which they are responsible. /s
As someone wrote the ‘lingering effects of slavery’. Why do we suppose only this group bears the lingering effects of oppression? I am by no means minimizing slavery but, by Hannah-Jones’ depiction of what a black American descendant of slaves faces as opposed to a poor man from Idaho, there is nothing that could not be said for women as a group:
“Farm boys from Idaho had no need to engage in a decades-long movement to gain basic rights of citizenship, including the fundamental right to vote. Farm boys from Idaho had not, until just a decade earlier, been denied housing, jobs, the ability to sit on juries and access to the ballot. Farm boys from Idaho had not been forced to sue for the right to attend public schools and universities.”
Hidden in plain sight in Hannah-Jones’s argument are some assumptions she clearly regards as obvious, but which are highly questionable:
1. If the discrimination still faced by black Americans is all-pervasive, then it would affect recent black immigrants from Africa and their children as well, so her assertion that only those with provable ancestry among American slaves are eligible for the putative reparations is an arbitrary distinction.
2. The question of who must pay for the reparations is equally subject to arbitrary distinctions. If recipients are limited to descendants of slaves, then by the same logic payers should be limited to the descendants of slave holders — who were a small minority even in the antebellum South. Is it tax-payers generally? — in which case recipients of reparations would also be paying them. Is it everyone who isn’t a descendant of a slave? — in which case most of those paying would be people whose ancestors immigrated to the US long after slavery was abolished and have no responsibility for it having existed. Would credits be available for those whose ancestors died in the war that ended slavery? And even having established which group, arbitrarily, is said to be responsible, does individual responsibility for payment depend on what proportion of one’s ancestry comes from the identified group? Creating a policy that enforces an obsession with bloodlines is deeply regressive.
3. The black middle class established from the 1960s onwards has been growing ever since, and does well in every field. Are they also entitled to reparations because, despite being materially comfortable and not subject in their everyday lives to any overt racism? Are they still subject to some mystical sense of harm because of their ancestry? This is the implication, but evidence is not offered.
Unfortunately the American habit of viewing all its social problems through the historical lens of race tends to make many people blind to what, in other countries, would seem much more obvious solutions to ongoing disadvantage: systems of financial support that are based on need, not race, and which aim for a high level of provision for all — in housing, education, and healthcare — rather than a patchy and minimalist provision split between different levels of government and inconsistently applied.