QUORA: ‘I’m black and I wonder when white people will pay us reparation. Why not?’

 QUORA: ‘I’m black and I wonder when white people will pay us reparation. Why not?’ [alternate link]

I posted this answer (pending as of 1/29/24):

The collectivist premise of your question indicates what you are up to. 

When someone collectivizes their argument, they’re usually up to no good.

When someone collectivizes their argument, it ‘s because they have no case.

Let me give you a clue: There is no “us” in any fundamental, real sense. You can only rightfully speak for yourself. Reparatory justice is only valid when you have an actual victim[s] and an actual perpetrator[s] provable by direct evidence of wrongdoing.  In what way are you entitled to reparations? Who harmed you? How? That’s a question for a court of law. 

The idea that you are entitled to be paid off because someone of your dark skin color was harmed in some distant past is textbook racism, the lowest form of collectivism. Racism is the idea that a person’s thoughts, values, character, and moral standing are inherited through one’s body chemistry (genes, bloodline, skin pigmentation, and the like). Your question indicates that you believe that attributes like victimhood and guilt are passed down to future generations of non-victims and innocents through skin pigmentation. The gross injustice is obvious to any morally upright person. The idea that someone else of a lighter skin color owes you because someone of light skin color harmed someone of your darker skin color in some distant past is textbook racism, the lowest form of collectivism. That tribal mindset is not the perspective of an enlightened person. 

To be sure, reparations should have been paid to freed slaves. In fact, the process of reparatory justice was begun in earnest in 1865 by order of General William T. Sherman. Sherman, acting with the sanction of the Republican Lincoln administration, ordered land seized from former slave owners be given to former slaves in 40 acre parcels. Tragically, Lincoln’s assaination lead to Andrew Johnson becoming president. In one of the most shameful presidential acts in American history, Johnson, a Democrat (no surprise there), immediately rescinded the reparations, and kicked the former slaves off of their rightfully awarded land. 

So I am not unsympathetic to the justice of slave reparations. But at some point, time changes things. It’s been generations since slavery ended. Paying “reparations” today is itself an act of injustice.

My advice to the questioner is to stop living in the past, and start looking forward to making your own life the best it could be by your own efforts. I’m sure you are capable without begging for handouts dressed up as reparations. You are not a victim. The people from whom you want to seize money from are not perpetrators. The only person standing in the way of your economic success is you.

Related Reading:

Should Reparations Include White Victims of Anti-Black Racism?

On New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations

SUPPLEMENTAL TO ‘New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations’: The ‘Slavery is Good Economics’ Argument

‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism

The Dem's Jim Crow 2.0

Should Reparations Include White Victims of Anti-Black Racism?

In Racism harms everyone, the New Jersey Star-Ledger Editorial Board’s Tom Moran interviewed with Heather McGhee, the author of a new book on race in America, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.”

One question stuck out:

 

Q. How do you expect that to play out?

A. Reparations shouldn’t be seen through a zero sum lens. It’s not taking money from white people. The government did the enslaving, the excluding, the racist policies. We all pay into government today. This should be seen as seed capital for the America we deserve, where the past does not haunt our children today.'

It’s true that the government spearheaded slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation. But actual victims proven by evidence, not mere skin color or genetic lineage, should be the standard. Just as a person wrongfully incarcerated for a crime he didn't commit (or his family) can sue for damages from the government, so reparations must be tied to direct harm. If our own government did the injustice, it should pay--meaning the taxpayers foot the bill. 

McGhee is wrong on many counts, but she implies a valid argument for how reparations could play out. The debate would have to be over who gets the reparations. For example, should private businesses, regardless of owners' skin color, be able to collect for loss of business due to segregation laws (See Sowell)? Reparations should not become a grab bag of handouts, nor focussed only on blacks. McGhee should agree, since her whole premise is that we all suffer from racism and segregation. She brings up New Deal housing racism that excluded blacks. True enough. But weren't home builders victims, in the form of lost sales to black families? Weren’t  whites who lost access to community pools victims? Weren’t whites who lost housing options in integrated neighborhoods victims. If we're all victims, shouldn’t reparations go to all victims?

Of course, justice demands that reparations go to still-living victims. Why should people generations removed from the injustice be able to cash in on the dead victims’ suffering?

Another complication arises with time. McGhee flippantly asserts, “We all pay into government today.” Yes. But it was yesterday’s government that committed the crimes. I did not pay into the governments that legally enforced slavery, or segregated America ( I was only 15 when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed.) When both the victims of government-enforced racist policies and the people responsible for that government are long dead, who can justly and logically be entitled to reparations, or be stuck with the bill?

And what about the political villains? The Democratic Party is the party of slavery, racism, lynching, and Jim Crow. Being the prime political mover of all of the very government that McGhee acknowledges did the enslaving, the excluding, the racist policies, should the Democratic Party be liable for the damages. But then the same question arises: Why should Democrats who weren’t around during the era of a pro-slavery Democratic Party be liable? Maybe they shouldn’t be. But in another sense they should be, because being a Democrat is a choice. To be a Democrat today, don’t you accept moral responsibility for the entire history of your party, especially since in some respects the party really hasn’t changed its stripes?

Aside from these arguments, McGhee urges us to see reparations as “seed capital for America. That sounds a lot like industrial central planning and another attempt to sneak in socialism through the back door.

You can go on and on dealing with complications and contradictions once you drift away from normal rules of evidence and proof and individual responsibility. Yes, the government did it. But no, that fact does not justify an open-ended, never ending flow of reparations to non-victim descendents.

Related Reading:

On New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations

SUPPLEMENTAL TO ‘New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations’: The ‘Slavery is Good Economics’ Argument

‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism

Why It’s So Important to Understand What Actually ‘Made America Great’ in the First Place

The Dem's Jim Crow 2.0

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

SUPPLEMENTAL TO ‘New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations’: The ‘Slavery is Good Economics’ Argument

As a followup to yesterday’s post about New Jersey’s flirtation with racial reparations, there is one more thing in the article I want to comment on. It is an argument advanced to bolster the case for reparations that deserves to be separately called out because it is so egregious and is pregnant with horrific implications. From Reparations, and the dark Jersey history Trenton is scared to discuss:

“[New Jersey] was a very sympathetic state to Southern slavery,” says Stephanie Wilson, executive director of the state’s Amistad Commission, which advises schools on curriculum. “Slavery was in almost every town and enclave. It’s a hidden and unspoken piece of our history that was central to building our economy.” [My emphasis]

The idea that  “Slavery . . . was central to building our economy.” is one of the vilest, and false, statements ever uttered. It implies that slavery is good economically. This is a version of one of the old Confederate arguments in defense of slavery, King Cotton, a false theory which held that the American and world economies were built on cotton slave plantations and would collapse if the North won the Civil War and abolished slavery.

Prosperous economies are built by free people working, innovating, and trading voluntarily, each in pursuit of his own self-interest. Slavery has existed throughout history on every continent among every people. Yet The Great Enrichment of the past 250 years only happened under the rise of Enlightenment-spawned Capitalism, the social system of universal, equal, inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Why? Because prosperity happens only to the extent that the common person was liberated under the rights-protecting constitutional republican government to speak, believe, associate, trade, and innovate. 

Slaves enjoy none of those freedoms. They are, by definition, not self-owning and self-governing. They therefore cannot live freely by their own judgment to participate and contribute to the free market economy. George Washington Carver, the great agricultural innovator, achieved his success as a free man, not as a slave. The period of greatest economic progress in America was The Inventive Period between the end of the Civil War, when slaves were freed, until World War I—the freeist period in world history. There would have been no George Washington Carver, or other great black innovators who flourished as free people, if African-Americans had remained enslaved. Indeed, America’s great black innovators and entrepreneurs flourished under Capitalistic freedom, not communistic slavery. How many would-be highly productive black people—how many George Washington Carvers—were held back in slavery, robbed of their freedom to think, learn, and act, thus diminishing, not building, our economy by robbing us of their entrepreneurial benefits? 

America is worse off, not better off, because of slavery. Slaves were forbidden from attaining even a minimal education. Was America’s economic might built on ignorance, or intelligence—by muscles or minds? Are we are to believe that the minimal contribution of muscular slave labor “was central to building our economy?” Free minds and free markets, to the extent people were free to enjoy them, had nothing to do with it?

Slavery “central to building our economy?” BULLSHIT On steroids!! If that were true, human history would have been one long economic boom, because slavery had existed on every continent but Antarctica, among all people and races, prior to The Enlightenment and America. The Great Enrichment didn’t start in 1619, when the first slaves arrived in the colonies by British slave traders. It began at the end of 18th Century, when the Declaration of Independence was signed and America was born. It is Capitalistic individual freedom that is central to our, or any, flourishing economy. Slavery is central only to economic stagnation, as the history of the world clearly demonstrates. 

It’s absolutely disgusting that there are still people pushing the false neo-Confederate argument that slavery is good for the economy. That an educator who “advises schools on curriculum” is behind this argument is just another example of the ideological corruption that permeates American schools. Are reparations advocates so desperate to justify their cause as to actually advance the idea that slavery builds vibrant economies? Disgraceful.

But is that the whole story? Is reparations the ultimate goal of this theory of economic power? Given that the “slavery is good economics” argument is easily refuted as an economic fairy tail, could there be some deeper motive? One must ask, what social system gains the most intellectual backing from the claim? Certainly not Capitalism, the manifestation of a free society and individual rights. Confederate slavocrats certainly knew. They hated Capitalism, explicitly and unequivocally. Anti-Calitalist, pro-slavery intellectual George Fitzhugh explicitly proclaimed “The Failure Of A Free Society” in 1854.

It’s an argument that only socialists, and slaveholders, could love. And that’s what I meant by “pregnant with horrific implications.” Fitzhugh gushed that “Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.” Those “cares” include concerns about food, clothing, shelter, medical care, a job, and so on. Those cares were, in theory, relieved by their masters. Isn’t this what socialism, including Bernie Sanders style “democratic socialism”, promises to everyone, with the state in place of the plantation master? How else does one set America up to become one big socialist slave plantation, if not by claiming that slavery is the foundation of the economy? We’d all be equally better off as slaves under socialist masters, whether their names are Bernie Sanders or Nicolás Maduro.

There, in a nutshell, is the motive behind anyone who claims that slavery is “central to building our economy,” or any economy. Reparations is a cover. To promote slavery is to promote socialism. The socialists will never admit it. But that is the real motive of these moral deviants.

Related Reading:

‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism

Why It’s So Important to Understand What Actually ‘Made America Great’ in the First Place

Was America 'made possible by stealing Indian land and the labor of slaves?'

The Southern Slave Economy Was Anti-Capitalistic

America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism?

America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism? - - 2

Slavery, Racism and Collectivism... and New Jersey's Folly

On New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations

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 Dem's Jim Crow 2.0

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.

Will Biden Acknowledge His Own Party’s ‘Central Role’ in Segregating America?

From AP News, 1/27/21:

President Joe Biden on Tuesday ordered the Department of Justice to end its reliance on private prisons and acknowledge the central role government has played in implementing discriminatory housing policies.

In remarks before signing the orders, Biden said the U.S. government needs to change “its whole approach” on the issue of racial equity. He added that the nation is less prosperous and secure because of the scourge of systemic racism. 

My emphasis. I wonder if Biden will acknowledge the “central role” of his own Party’s deliberate, decades-long, systemic design to legally segregate America. It’s all laid out in Richard Rothstein’s book “The Color of Law”. Segregation was the project of the liberal/progressive/Democratic Party agenda. Rothstein writes:

“Racial segregation in housing was not merely a project of southerners in the former slaveholding Confederacy. It was a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders” including Franklin D. Roosevelt. [p. X - XII, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America] 

I always knew that legalized segregation existed in America even though, as Rothstein observes, “segregation was always unconstitutional.” But I never knew the extent, or who was primarily to blame, until I read this shocking book. Will Biden acknowledge the whole truth, especially since the very same liberals intend to push reparations? Will he place blame where it belongs, with his own Party? Or will he blame “white supremacy” or some other such bullshit excuse?

Related Reading:

NJ: Focus on Educational Freedom, Not ‘Desegregation’

A Newark, NJ Mother Demonstrates the Educational Power of Parental School Choice

Title 2: Government vs. Private Action

How to Overcome Bigotry in a Free Society

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. 

My Facebook post

‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism

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.]

Related Reading:

Obama's Collectivist Manifesto-Part 1...the "Original Sin" gambit

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

Black Innovators and Entrepreneurs under Capitalism—Andrew Bernstein