By John Daniel Davidson
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
What do we mean by reparations? Writing recently in the Washington
Post, Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown University, argues that
“reparations should repair what white supremacy still breaks. Atoning for the
legacy of chattel slavery is simply not enough.”
That is, reparations must be broad enough to encompass
the many crimes and injustices perpetrated against black Americans throughout
our history, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. The effects of
these injustices, says Cashin, are “direct and measurable” among slavery’s
descendants: wage gaps, educational disparities, homeownership and property
values, incarceration rates, health outcomes.
She is of course right. There is no question that black
Americans have suffered greatly, not just from the memory of slavery but from
its long legacy of rampant discrimination and racist policies.
It was this history that Ta-Nehisi Coates invoked in
testimony last week before a House subcommittee considering a bill to create a
commission to study reparations. Responding to Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell’s comment that reparations are not a good idea because no one
responsible for slavery is alive today, Coates reeled off a list of racial
injustices that were perpetrated in McConnell’s lifetime.
Because McConnell was born in 1942, there is plenty of
injustice to point to, and Coates, who has built a successful career on
elegantly expressing outrage over such injustice, made the most of it:
We grant that Mr. McConnell was not
alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney.
He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. He was alive to witness
kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft.
Majority Leader McConnell cited civil-rights legislation yesterday, as well he
should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal
of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect
them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black
homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive
today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader.
This is powerful stuff. The history of America, like the
history of all the world, is replete with wickedness and injustice, crimes
perpetrated by the powerful against the weak. Slavery and racial discrimination
are America’s awful inheritance, which cannot be gainsaid.
The proper response is to reproach the crimes of the past
and, if possible, make restitution. The unique genius of America is that it
contains within its system and structure a way to push back against the evils
of the past.
The American Founding itself was a promise against the
perpetuation of those evils—not all at once, but eventually. The only way, in
fact, to root them out and guard against them is to adhere more closely to the
American ideal, to insist upon it and cling to it through every circumstance
and change in our national life.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Believes America Is Irredeemable
Coates does not believe this. To him, America was from
the beginning a regime based on injustice and theft and violence. His 2014
Atlantic cover story on reparations is not so much an argument for reparations
as an argument against America.
“If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and
black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect
of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what
are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?” Coates asks. Later, he
answers: “America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features
that are not contradictory but complementary.”
Another way of expressing this is to say that America is
irredeemable, and that in order for justice to prevail, the regime itself must
be destroyed—violently, if necessary. Coates has hinted at this. In a 2017
podcast, Ezra Klein asked Coates what justice would look like for black Americans:
When he tries to describe the
events that would erase America’s wealth gap, that would see the end of white
supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and
the terror. ‘It’s very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with
processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the
complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process,
maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don’t tend to happen
peacefully.’
For Coates, even hope can be
covered in blood.
This is a vision of America wholly at odds with that of,
say, Martin Luther King Jr., and not far removed from the one held by Richard
Spencer and other blustering white supremacists. It posits that America was
founded not on the proposition that all men are created equal, but on the
belief that some were born with saddles on their backs and others with boots
and spurs to ride them. It is America as a photographic negative, the inverse
of the ideals stated in our founding documents and therefore nothing but a
hypocritical enterprise based on vast plunder. It cannot be redeemed, so it
must be swept away.
Advocates for reparations claim that the victims of this
plunder are no less figures of the past than are the perpetrators, which is why
the debate swirling around reparations has less to do with our troubled history
than assigning guilt in the present day. Assigning guilt is of course a means
of seizing and wielding power, which is the true object of reparations.
Yes, McConnell was alive for the electrocution of
Stinney; he was two years old. He was alive for the blinding of Issac Woodward;
he was four. He is of course responsible for precisely none of the things that
Coates lays at his feet by implication. Like every American in his or her
seventies, McConnell has lived through momentous change. Given the sweep of
human history and the corrupt nature of man, the remarkable thing about the
past seven decades isn’t that black Americans suffered injustice but that the
civil rights movement was so successful.
That is not to say everything is fine now and we need not
contend any longer with the consequences of our history. But the goal of
Coates’ strong rhetoric is not to do that, it is to associate McConnell with
historic injustices against black Americans and thereby to impute guilt. The
purpose of imputing guilt is ultimately to oust him and others like him from
power, and usher in a new regime.
Reparations Are Just a
Way to Divide Americans
Reparations, then, is like any other issue that animates
the American left these days. Where you stand on reparations is like where you
stand on immigration. It has nothing to do with the merits or wisdom of a given
policy and everything to do with whether or not you are a good person.
If you oppose reparations—just like if you oppose
immigration or gay marriage or transgenderism—you are not a good person. In
fact, you are part of the problem. You are helping to perpetrate the injustice
at the heart of America, and therefore culpable. At a minimum, you can’t be
allowed a say in how the country is governed, not anymore.
The goal here isn’t to heal or to bring together, but to
divide. Cashin, the law professor, tries to shoehorn reparations into nothing
more than increased taxpayer spending on “richly resourced schools and
community centers, public transit, opportunity fellowships, housing choice
vouchers, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.” Nothing more than
balancing out public spending in the face of “opportunity-hoarding among
affluent whites.”
But this won’t be enough, because reparations aren’t
really about outcomes or disparities or public spending. They are about sorting
out Americans, separating the good from the wicked and making sure everyone
knows the difference. They are about ushering in a new regime and new ruling
elite.
You might think it insane for the 2020 Democratic
candidates to push reparations going into the election cycle, especially since
it polls so low among Democratic voters. But for them it is not about winning
over Americans who are on the fence. The entire point of the debate is to
ratchet up racial tension and drive a wedge into our national life.
That is another way of saying reparations aren’t really
about the past at all. They’re about the future.
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