There is a proposed bill in the New Jersey state legislature that authorizes the creation of a commission to study reparations for past injustices. In Reparations, and the dark Jersey history Trenton is scared to discuss, NJ Star-Ledger editorial page editor Tom Moran has some thoughts on the bill and the subject.
“Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter,” reports Moran, “has been pushing a bill [in the NJ Legislature] that would establish a task force to study this state’s dark history on race, and to offer recommendations on reparations.” Reading this article, it strikes me that the commission’s mandate is biased in favor of reparations of some kind, leaving the debate over whether or not reparations are appropriate off the table.
Moran starts with a brief revue of New Jersey’s history in slavery. He then moves on to the Jim Crow era, the severity of which he rightfully and squarely pins primarily on government’s laws, not private action (cleverly avoiding the fact that legally-enforced segregation was the project of the liberal/progressive wing of American politics).
Next, he gives a fairly accurate description, albeit incomplete, of the pro-and-con arguments. Here is a sampling:
The reason Sumter has been unable to get traction in the Legislature is because the idea of reparations is toxic to white Americans, with only 28 percent supporting cash payments to descendants of slaves, the purest form of reparations. (That compares to 86 percent among African-Americans.)
The main reason? Most white people feel that Black people alive today don’t deserve compensation for the suffering of their ancestors.
“All Americans can trace some difficulties their forefathers and mothers faced,” says Tatishe Ntete, an associate professor at University of Massachusetts, who has polled extensively on the issue. “The attitude is that it’s up to the individual in the present day to deal with the consequences. Get over it, work hard, and you can enjoy the benefits of American society.”
To his credit, Moran doesn’t ridicule or minimize that argument, as he often does other valid arguments against positions he holds. He goes on:
I get that. My people came to Boston from Ireland after the 1848 famine with nothing, and my great-grandfather fought for the Union in the Civil War. He was disabled by a gunshot through the hand and worked as a janitor for most of his adult life, at a time when the Irish were dismissed as drunken Papists.
But Moran cites a difference in degree.“But please, folks,” counters Moran, “No one in my line was sold or lynched.”
But, so what? True, enslavement and lynching are orders of magnitude worse that being denied a mortgage or business loan because of one’s race or ethnicity. But how does the magnitude of the evil make a moral difference in the argument over whether descendants should be victimized or rewarded for ancestral evils? It doesn’t. It makes no difference to an innocent whether she’s unjustly forced to compensate today’s non-victims because they’re descendants of Irish “drunken Papists” or because they’re descendants of people sold or lynched because of the color of their skin. Targeting innocents for past wrongdoings of others is unjust on any level.
Moran’s recounting of the history of NJ’s role in slavery early in this nation’s history will make your blood boil.* Interestingly, though, Moran never gives a genuine moral argument in favor of reparations for descendants of slavery. Rather, he vaguely asserts that slavery, racism, and legally enforced segregation has had “lingering effects”—he mentions, not surprisingly for a Leftist, wealth disparaites as a lingering effect, as if differences in wealth and incomes among individuals is somehow wrong. (One thing you can almost always count on Leftists to do is to find a way to inject economic inequality and/or climate change into the subject. But, hey, at least he didn’t blame climate change on slavery.) He seems to be depending on the emotional response to the horrors of slavery long gone to sway us into supporting reparations.
That won’t cut it. By all means, let's have a discussion on reparations. But let it be objective. If you start from the premise that people should be "compensated" (read, rewarded) for the injustice perpetrated against ancestors, your starting from a biased premise.
The debate really boils down to individualism versus collectivism. Collectivism holds that we are all mere parts of, and subordinate to, some group. Thus, the premise pimples, we have responsibility for, and must be judged by, all of the actions and characters, for better or for worse, of all ancestral members of "our" group, in perpetuity. Individualism holds that we are all independent individuals born morally tabula rasa, and are responsible only for our own ideas, actions, and choices, and not born with any preexisting victimhood or grievances or unearned guilt or moral claims on other people's lives, liberties, or wealth. Collectivism is the ancient philosophy of savages. Individualism is the progressive philosophy of civilization.
I am a radical for individualism. Progress toward civilization is synonymous with the advancement of individualism. I am for individualism and civilization, which means, in a word, justice—the real thing, which means individual justice, not "social" justice or racial justice or collectivized justice or collective justice of any kind. Yes, reparations should be paid to real living victims, by real living perpetrators. And there are valid claims to reparatory justice by actual victims. Consider the still living Cordelia Clark, an actual victim of Jim Crow who was forced to run her Evanston, Illinois restaurant “out of her kitchen and parked cabs for her taxi company in her backyard because Black residents were effectively barred from owning or renting storefronts in town,” according to a Reuters story. It should never be paid to non-victims by innocents, which is why claims to reparations should be decided in the courts, where objective facts and proper legal process, rather than politics, reign.
The focus on racial reparations is a focus on the past. It fosters manufactured grievances and manufactured victimhood and manufactured unearned guilt. Slavery ended 147 years ago. Jim Crow laws ended 58 years ago. Opportunities for all Americans have never been greater. Racism in the culture has never been more marginalized. My advice to any “victim” of the supposed lingering effects of slavery or Jim Crow is -- stop looking back. Turn around, and look forward. No one will stop you, unless you let them. No one can, regardless of any lingering racism that exists at the fringes of society. “We Have Overcome,” as Jason D. Hill puts it. Just follow the inspiring example of Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee.
Facts matter. I do not believe there are objectively identifyable lingering effects of slavery. Too much time has passed. Too many other influences have intervened. As to lingering effects of past legally enforced racism and segregation, which is much more recent, they are more likely to exist. But the answer is not more forced redistribution of wealth or hand wringing over wealth disparities, a red herring if there ever was one. Useful steps can include ending the War on Drugs, reigning in local zoning powers, rolling back business regulations (which favor established businesses over entrepreneurial newcomers), reforming and reducing occupational licensing laws, and above all defunding the public schools through universal school choice, funding the students individually rather than funding schools and districts, thus transferring power from the criminal monopoly we call the teachers union and their political/intellectual elite allies to the parents and educational entrepreneurs. In other words, more individual freedom, not more legalized grand larceny.
Part of the Revolutionary greatness of America is that it liberated individuals from corruption of blood—the idea that you are responsible for wrongs committed by ancestors or family members (a bar to corruption of blood even appears in the U.S. Constitution). This principle can easily be widened beyond blood to cover American citizenship: Why should innocent citizens (and even non-citizens) of today be made financially responsible for injustices perpetrated by prior Americans against slaves generations ago? Call it corruption of citizenship. No one has ever given an answer to that question. The same principle has a flip side: Why should any descendant of slaves separated by generations benefit from the suffering of their ancestors? **
History is settled. It's done. It can't be changed. Past injustice can't be righted by new injustice or by revenge discrimination and racism. North African nations raided, captured, and enslaved Europeans, especially Italians, for decades. Do I, an Italian American, deserve reparations from today's Nigerian immigrants to America? Tribalism, with its perpetual cycles of revenge, is not the answer. Collectivism can not, will not, correct racial injustice past or present, because racism is collectivism. Individualism, the foundational premise of America's Founding, is the only answer.
* [New Jersey legally abolished slavery in 1804, the last Northern state to do so. But it shamefully had grandfather features that allowed some slavery to linger within its borders right up until the Civil War. Nonetheless, anti-slavery political forces did score a partial victory. Politics is messy and slow, making major change hard. You take what you can get, when you can get it. NJ’s partial abolition laws enabled many African-Americans, albeit not all, to finally live free.)
** [It would be different if slaves were only recently emancipated. We are all responsible for the current government we have. If New Jersey outlawed slavery yesterday, the state government’s culpability would demand, justly, reparations, which obviously must be financed by its taxpayers, who lived under the government that allowed and protected slaveholders. But should today’s taxpayers be held responsible for a government they didn’t live under two centuries ago? On what principle of justice and morality could anyone answer yes? Of course, the people who would be most responsible for reparations would be the slaveholders, slave breeders, and slave traders. Of course, they, along with the slaves, are long dead. There should be no corruption of blood, or of citizenship.]
Related Reading:
The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism
Booker’s Racism Charge Against Trump’s ‘Go Back’ Rant is Rich
Slavery, Racism and Collectivism... and New Jersey's Folly
America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism?
America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism? - - 2
My thoughts on the inspiring life philosophy of Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.
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