Slavery Reparations for Blacks are Deserved
a better idea is economic justice for everyone
David Horowitz wrote an opinion piece titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea– and Racist Too." He tried to buy ad space for it in some college newspapers with several failures, several successes, a few gold mines: papers that mistakenly printed the ad it and then apologized. Horowitz, who worries deeply about blacks’ "crippling sense of victimhood," now has a full-time job accusing students of persecuting him and suppressing his point of view. One reprehensible debate-stifling strategy used against him, Horowitz says, is crying racism. The use of smear tactics to try to shut down dissent should be abhorred, but remember that Horowitz started it. He didn’t say ‘I’m against reparations’ and get shouted down as a racist. He said ‘Reparations are racist.’ Many people responded to the ad by calling Horowitz’s ideas racist— no one I’ve read applied the epithet to the person. Ironically, Horowitz’s definition of racism seems to indict his own statements. He says of the subtitle of Randall Robinson’s book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, "If this is not racism, what is?" Several paragraphs later he asks "What About the Debt Blacks Owe To America?" But arguing over what’s racist and what isn’t doesn’t decide anything— it doesn’t even move a debate forward. So I bring you Horowitz’s ten reasons why giving blacks reparations for slavery is a bad idea, with a few thoughts of my own.
1. "There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery," 2. "There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively From Its Fruits," and 3. "Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them." Advocates of reparations take at least two tacks. First, they hold the United States government responsible for accepting that human beings with black skin can be property. In this case descendants of slaves would contribute taxes toward reparations along with everyone else. Second, they advocate searching out illicit slavery-related profits in the pasts of corporations and in the inherited fortunes of people alive today. I have never seen a claim that all whites owe a debt to all blacks.
4. "America Today Is A Multi-Ethnic Nation and Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct or Indirect) To Slavery." Horowitz contradicts an earlier claim from reason Two that "If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well." Immigrants and former slaves have one connection to slavery in common: they both ‘benefited’ from the honor of working for rich people who did benefit from slavery— except that immigrants faced less employment discrimination.
5. "The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury." It’s understandable that Horowitz is confused, because the injury was based on race, but black reparation seekers like Robinson don’t want a cent to go to people like him, with his academically-gifted daughter enrolled in an expensive private school. In fact – like reparations for interned Japanese-Americans, Holocaust survivors, or Native Americans – the reparations claim is based on injury, as Horowitz sort of acknowledges with his point six…
6. "The Reparations Argument Is Based On the Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination" and 7. "The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community." The crucial reparations argument is that almost all descendents of slaves suffer from the economic consequences of slavery and discrimination. This argument is especially important for reparations advocates to make because – as Horowitz worries that blacks will suffer if they identify as victims – they worry of damage to blacks and society from not understanding the source of black poverty. Blacks, Robinson wrote, "are not at the bottom because they are black individually but rather because of what they and their forebears have collectively had to endure because they were black. This important distinction, however, appears lost on many contemporary commentators who, being content to cite black failure without examining the causes, do more harm than good." Horowitz, does not appear to share this worry. He calls reparations "an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can’t seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others." Horowitz’s fundamental argument against reparations is that "economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character."
Horowitz proposes no magic mechanism that would make the wealth and income of one’s parents irrelevent to economic success. This is not to say that personal initiative has an insignificant effect on economic outcome, although the few long-term studies of families in the United States show less social mobility than Americans assume. Rather, the argument that the past affects the future is based on the fact that socioeconomic status affects opportunities. Even without discrimination, the great inequality means that blacks as a group can achieve socioeconomic parity with whites as a group only by having "individual character" far superior to that of whites. These differences in opportunity don’t have anything to do with race in and of itself. As Robinson wrote, "Give a black or white child the tools (nurture, nutrition, material necessities, a home/school milieu of intellectual stimulation, high expectation, pride of self) that a child needs to learn and the child will learn. Race, at least in this regard, is irrelevant."
8. "Reparations To African Americans Have Arleady Been Paid." The taxing and spending of the government does not on balance redistribute from rich to poor, nor from white to black. Racial preferences, now being forbidden by the government, do not make up for poverty and may not even have overcome, on balance, the contemporary discrimination.
9. "What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?" Horowitz demands the gratitude of black America for the "gifts" of ending slavery, high standards of living, and protected individual rights. It’s nice to be freed after enslavement, and one can even be grateful, but it hardly makes up for being enslaved. The fact is that blacks have received a disproportionately small share of the United States’ freedom, prosperity, you name it, and the reparations movement is about claiming blacks’ fair share. Horowitz also credits white Christians (and white Christians alone) for creating the first anti-slavery movement after thousands of years of slavery, neglecting to mention that when white Christians began transporting boatloads of Africans to American plantations they created a fundamentally different form of slavery: besides the immense scale, slavery became race-based for the first time and the victims were no longer absorbed into the kidnapping society.
10. "The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom." In his ad Horowitz tells a story about America that assigns blacks an extremely passive role, but here he tells the black community not to "isolate itself even further from America." Historically it is quite rare for a minority group to isolate "itself," but apparently blacks in Horowitz’ neighborhood have been marching out of the suburbs and into the inner cities because they don’t want to live with him. In fact, blacks have in general always been fighting to get into, not isolate themselves from, the American mainstream. Indeed, whites have joined blacks in movements to end slavery, to extend voting rights and civil rights, and to achieve some measure of economic justice (always a thread in the other movements) such as through reparations. Reparations are not an attack on America’s heritage, they are a bid to get blacks into the economic mainstream.
However, I think Horowitz is right: reparations are a bad idea because they are, in a way, separatist.
The reasons for reparations are correct. Blacks need to know the history that led to America as it is today. Blacks as a group are not poorer than whites as a group because of any inferiority of any kind, including culture and character. Blacks, while making the most of the opportunities they have, need to fight for a fair deal with an accurate understanding of the present and the history that led to it. (A partial list of this history includes two and a half centuries of slavery, another century of legal discrimination, continued employment discrimination, widespread exclusion from labor unions during the period that these unions helped create the modern middle class, exclusion from buying suburban homes – from discrimination, not just poverty – just as the house became the primary way in which the middle class held wealth…) But everyone needs economic justice— not just blacks. Poor whites in general are no more poor because of character flaws than blacks are. Blacks and Native Americans, because their poverty was nakedly imposed on them, simply show more clearly the unfairness of basing children’s opportunities so largely on their parents economic situation. America needs to go back and apply "All men are created equal" once again. We must make opportunities more equal – which in my opinion means less inequality of wealth; Robinson calls for a Marshall plan of educational and other resources – in order to hinder the grossly unfair past from being continually passed on to the future.
See also my notes on The Debt.
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[below are scattered, fragmented thoughts to be ignored, or read at one’s own peril]
The tiny amount of scholarship on intergenerational economic standing suggests that America’s much-vaunted social mobility is rather inconsiderable. (Your parents’ parents are poor, your parents are poor, you’re poor... what’s wrong with your character?) You’re not supposed to talk about it in America, but the wealth of parents has a lot to do with the wealth of children. It is a disgrace, a crime.
Rather, by being no better and certainly no worse than other people as groups, blacks as a group
Horowitz has no problem believing that African-Americans have it better than Africans but he seems incapable of comprehending that whites on average may have more opportunities than blacks on average.
a benign angle on Horowitz’s ideas is that America once had problems but they’re all solved now. Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus and all discrimination disappeared, and by now blacks are supposed to have made up the wealth difference. That blacks as a whole have not, although there is a black middle class, proves that they are inferior in some way.
The debt is there, but its not fair to ask all Americans to pay it.
The problem of America is when it fails to live up to its ideals. The pertinent ideal right now is equal opportunity.
The United States government is not absolved of its sanctioning of slavery and discrimination simply because most people who were alive at that time are dead.
but for blacks to achieve parity with people who have advantages in wealth and discrimination requires them to be better, on average, than other groups. The research has not been done on wealth and income across generations, but what little has been done shows that America’s much-vaunted social mobility is rather inconsiderable.
Even Horowitz never claimed that slavery wasn’t all that bad.
Blacks are p
What about whites who are poorer due to geographical location and Why should children suffer for the circumstances of their grandparents?
America has a great answer for all of this: it's called equal opportunity.
In terms of hiring decisions, treatment in school, treatment as consumers, and just about everything else that matters economically, blacks face discrimination. To use the vernacular, daaaa-aammmnnn
Which is mostly what supporters of reparations say they want, a debate.
There have been well under seventy articles and letters to the editor in the New York Times since the 1980s that address, even tangentially, reparations to black Americans or to Africa for slavery.
His laundry list style and self-contradictions
Horowitz's advertisement exemplifies what Robinson and other seekers of reparations are fighting against more than anything: blaming blacks as a group for black poverty. The claim that black poverty stems from a character problem among blacks is false, and Robinson and others believe the notion to be damaging to the psyche of poor blacks.
very specific when the Reparations movement isn't
David Horowitz proposes no magic way that the past would stop having an effect on the present, presumably this task falls to the great American ideal of equal opportunity.
Horowitz has a case when he asks who should receive and who should pay. His argument falls apart when he insinuates that the conditions of blacks today have nothing
Other groups have been discriminated against, although few with as great force and consistency as African-Americans.
and they have a moral and legal claim that is dismissed because of its very enormity.
advocates of reparations can show us quite clearly that the past isn't fair. Thoughtful critics and David Horowitz can show us that it's pretty complicated, too. The question we have to ask ourselves is why do we reproduce the past through unequal opportunity, much of which comes down to money?
blacks are 'behind'
if it's not
either genetics or an attitude problem.
whether this view is racist or not can be placed beside the point. It's something that society has to discuss regardless.
reparations appear to be deserved
their administration appears to be impossible
blacks are supposed to be the only group to whom the past has been unfair?
David Horowitz's article is another drop in the overflowing bucket of whites' unjustified sense of superiority with regards to blacks. It's not new. Aristocrats always felt superior to commoners.
While accusing others of calling his ideas racist, Howitzer (Horowitz) accuses those who want reparations of racism
His tactics are identical to those he is decrying. 'they must demonize him, because they have no argument.' And then he demonizes the
" Fortunately for Horowitz I do not go by his definition and I do not consider talking about groups of people as 'races,' although it is not a scientific category, automatically racist.
Affirmative action Now people like David Horowitz are claiming that it
the argument personified in Booker T. Washington, accommodate to the ideas of the era, get what help you can and work on self-development without antagonizing whites by talking about what's fair.
Horowitz stated: "If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well". (I had no idea property inheritance worked that way, but more on this later.) He then wrote about how much better blacks in America have it than blacks in Africa. Besides the misleading comparison of per capita incomes in an extremely developed market economy and economies with significant subsistence farming, Horowitz conveniently ignores the statements about the pillaging of Africa in Randall Robinson's book, which Horowitz claims is "the manifesto of the reparations movement."
Way, way, way better on average than whites who have four times the wealth
Maybe nobody wants to hear that. But it's the truth.
Reparations
willfully misrepresents Randall Robinson's book.
If The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks is the "manifesto of the reparations movement," it's the longest, most personal and soul searching manifesto ever written.
should be such a PC thing. Yeah, slavery was bad; I guess we should do something to make up for it. David shows that it isn't that simple.
Randall Robinson, for one, never claimed that it was simple. He may not be
They should realize — if their written views are honest — that they have some common ground. Both
Reparations isn't about punishing a 'group' responsible for slavery. Advocates don't feel that the sins of the fathers should be dumped on the children. They particularly don't want the sins of slaveowners to continue to weigh on the descendants of slaves, and so they fight for reparations as a remedy
offer these groups that have been exploited and continue to be exploited by virtue of their option-limiting poverty equality of opportunity.
If someone robs you and gives some of what was robbed back, that is not a gift. If
We should appreciate and consider deeply Jefferson's views on, say, America as a country independent small property holders, but we must not ignore the fact that he was also a slaveholder and indisputable racist. We can't just pass these off as his being "a man of his times," for this kind of moral relativity can justify every evil institution ever set up. Closely concerning the matter at hand, we are all products of our times. As such we owe it to ourselves and the future to critically examine "our times."
The past has indisputably not been fair. On average, some groups have been
To catch up, these groups would have to be on average much better at acquiring wealth, not simply because they started out with less but because having
close your eyes to the unfairness . They argued that this is not the best use of our time, particularly because of the danger of white backlash.
Understanding of the situation: In the main government taxation and spending has not redistributed wealth from richer to poorer
Hypothesis: and at exceptional times when it has such as the Great Depression
More understanding of the situation: blacks were discriminated against
More hypothesis: Furthermore, this is financed out of debt, which means rich people lend the government money and everybody pays them back, with interest, through taxes.
If you won't have the government involved in the redistribution of wealth, don't have it involved in the protection of property either.
Blacks and all disenfranchised people face the incredible task of fighting for equal opportunity while making the most of the opportunities they have. To drop the first will leave the world where it is now-- mostly poor. To drop the second would leave them poorer than they have to be.
Bill Gates got rich(er) without doing a thing for black people. It's nice he’s donating a few computers to their schools now, but the fact is wealth is at best based on providing products and services to people who have money; you get money by doing things for people with money, so the poor by definition benefit least.
Even if you come from a line of royalty, but shortly before your generation the family squandered its entire fortune, why should you face staggering disadvantages compared to the descendants of Rockefeller?
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