New Jersey Senator Cory
Booker demands study on reparations for slavery, decries ‘hideous legacy’
during historic House hearing. So headlined a 6/19/19
article in the New Jersey Star-Ledger by Jonathan D. Salant | NJ
Advance Media for NJ.com. “This idea that [reparations is] just about
writing a check from one American to another falls far short of the importance
of this conversation,” said Booker. Yes, it sure does. Read on:
“As a nation, we have yet to truly acknowledge and grapple with
the racism and white supremacy that tainted this country’s founding and
continues to cause persistent and deep racial disparities and inequality,”
Booker said in his prepared testimony.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., put the kibosh on
Booker’s bill a day before the hearing.
I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years
ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,"
he said on Capitol Hill.
On Sirius XM Wednesday, Booker lashed back at McConnell, saying
his statement contained a “tremendous amount of ignorance."
Booker said in the radio
interview that the debate was about obtaining “equality of opportunity, a
leveling of our economic playing fields, health playing fields, housing playing
fields" and "addressing those past consciously racial harms and
wounds.”
At the hearing, Booker said
in his prepared testimony that long after slavery ended, blacks were excluded
from the programs that helped lead whites out of poverty .
“Many of our bedrock domestic
policies that have ushered millions of Americans into the middle class,
stimulating generational wealth and opportunity, like the GI bill, and Social
Security, were intentionally designed to exclude blacks.”
The article concluded with a quote from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who
said “Slavery is the original sin.” By which she
means, America’s Original Sin--a term that was first introduced (as far as I know) by presidential candidate Barack Obama in
2008. I knew then that Obama was laying the philosophical groundwork for future
assault on Americanism.
I posted these comments, edited for clarity *:
I agree with McConnell. I
also agree with Booker that there’s more to the story than writing a check.
Government policies like Jim Crow and Separate but Equal did oppress blacks.
Local zoning powers and government schools suppress economic opportunities
today.
But it is not socialist
government policies like SS and the GI Bill that “lead whites out of poverty”. It was the individualism of capitalism that
liberated productive people to earn their way to middle class prosperity (and
in turn fund those programs). The basic historical problem is that capitalist
freedom was not at first extended to all Americans.
The thing is, given freedom,
an individual can make an end run around legacies and pursue and achieve success. I think MLK
had it right in his Dream speech when he urged America to simply live up to its
“promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed
the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Nobody
needs nor deserves equality in any sense but one: Give people equality of
rights under law, and who could stop them?
Yet building on the absurd
assertion that white socialism, rather than individual initiative, lifted white
people, Booker wants socialism for black people as “reparations.” Like “climate
change,” “reparations” is being seized on as a path to power for the Democrats
to replace Americanism with socialism. But socialism is antithetical to
Americanism.
True, King’s politics drifted
toward socialism. But he had it right the first time. People need freedom, not
handouts of opportunity, income, health, housing, and whatever life challenges
that socialist tyrants might conjure up. Slavery is not some “Original Sin,” a
collective guilt that can only be cleansed by perpetual socialist tyranny.
Slavery is a form of restriction on freedom, of which only Americanism is the
antidote.
Slavery is a stain on the United States of
America in the sense that it violated the very principles of
Americanism--individualism and equality of political freedom. But slavery is no
Original Sin of America. The real story of slavery is America’s original virtue
and one of Americanism’s proudest successes--the abolition of slavery.
That--Abolition--is the true American legacy. It is the legacy that allows
Booker and his ilk the freedom to spin their lies regarding the fundamental
goodness of American history.
* [Note: My comments were subsequently blocked
by the Star-Ledger under the heading “content disabled.” I have no idea why.]
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