REPARATIONS REDUX

A movement toward reparations for Black Americans — government payments based on a recipient’s racial lineage — lingered on life support after voters chose Barack Obama for president in 2008 and 2012.

Obama, a descendant of white slave owners, said his mother’s ancestry traced back to former Confederacy President Jefferson Davis. His father was a Black immigrant from Kenya and an influential Harvard alumnus. The former president embodied the complexity of race in America while also self-consciously presenting himself as a uniter. He opposed reparations in no uncertain terms while seeking his first election.

“Reparations would be an excuse for some to say ‘we’ve paid our debt’ and to avoid the much harder work of enforcing our anti-discrimination laws in employment and housing,” Obama said in 2008. “The much harder work of making sure that our schools are not separate and unequal, the much harder work of providing job training programs and rehabilitating young men coming out of prison every year, and the much harder work of lifting 37 million Americans of all races out of poverty.”

Reparations advocates don’t agree. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Ibram X. Kendi, the godfather of critical race theory, in his 2019 book How to be an Antiracist.

Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the reparations movement acquired new life, bolstered by academia and the tale of a slave ship founding the nation in 1619 and exaggerated claims of widespread “white supremacy.”

“Reparations to me explicitly is giving money for harm,” said Brandon Greene, an attorney and director of the racial and economic justice program for the ACLU of Northern California, as quoted by CNN. “If reparations is giving me a million dollars, I can do whatever I want with it. If I want to buy a million dollars’ worth of Jordans, I can do that.”

The civil rights movement of the 20th century sought to level the playing field and unite the nation in equality. The distortion of this movement today seeks division and a compulsory transfer of benefits from those labeled “oppressors” to those said to be “oppressed.”

Kendi, Greene, and others pushing for reparations were never enslaved. Nor were their parents, and probably none of their grandparents either. Most have known only a country that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to forbid institutionalized discrimination

based on race. They live in a country that, more than nearly any other, protects its people against racial discrimination.

The call for reparations should stumble and fall over that very diversity.

Almost no living American Black people lived in conditions even remotely akin to slavery. Some slave owners of the past were American Indians and indeed Black people. Nothing like all Black people in this country are descended from slaves or from anyone who suffered grievous injustice. Likewise, most white people have no direct link to former slave owners.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, D- Calif., an A-lister for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination and a white man born three years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, has launched the country’s most aggressive push for reparations. He means reparations not just for slavery but also for discrimination against Black people with housing and for other racist offenses of the past. His committee has spoken of individual reparation checks of $250,000 or more.

Whatever the innovation, whether it be on fashion trends or emissions standards, nothing from California stays in California. If Newsom succeeds, it is likely that similar reparations will be pursued in state legislatures, local governing boards, and Congress.

House Resolution 40, introduced in 1989 and stalled for three decades, proposes a commission to recommend compensation for slavery, segregation, and other horrors historically imposed by whites on Blacks.

A Pew Research Center poll in 2021 found 77% of Black adults want reparation payments to descendants of slaves. Only 18% of white adults agree. Among all races combined, 30% of people support reparations for past injustices.

Despite significant reparations support in the Black community, Obama isn’t the only Black leader to oppose them. Scores of Black pundits, clergy, and scholars are eager to push back on the movement’s resurrection. They consider the proposition insulting, counterproductive, and possibly harmful to Black children and young adults. They recognize that reparations are likely both to be a distraction from areas of real importance to Black people and to provide an excuse for social pathologies within the Black community.

Alveda King spent much of her childhood in the home of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Her father was the Rev. A.D. King, another major figure in the mid-20th century civil rights movement. Racists bombed her family home in retaliation for her father’s and uncle’s civil rights work. Alveda King considers cash reparations an ill-conceived insult to her uncle and father and the Black community for which they fought so hard to liberate from racism.

“In order for America to truly be repaired, we must treat each other with human dignity, as brothers and sisters, as one blood, one human race created equally in the image and likeness of God,” King said. “Otherwise, we are doomed to perish as fools.”

King says the country must continue working for equality for people of all backgrounds. She believes equal opportunity outweighs attempts at “equity” and equal outcomes with no direct nexus to effort and achievement.

“Such justice can be meted out in a value-added process that includes opportunities for leveling the playing field in America but not simply cash value — rather, a hand up, not just a handout,” King said.

Money given to people who don’t earn it only holds them down, King argues. She lists past efforts at “reparations,” by any name or description, that have done more harm than good to fellow members of the Black community.

Among the more enthusiastic fans of Alveda King’s uncle and father is former state Rep. Ed Jones, R- Colo. Brought up in 1940s Mississippi, Jones drank from Blacks-only water fountains. He wasn’t merely confined to the back of the bus but prevented from riding buses entirely. He attended an all-Black school. A handful of restaurants willing to serve him and his family allowed them only takeout, delivered at back doors.

“Nobody today owes me anything for that,” said Jones, 80, who served in the Army before taking up a private sector and political career. “I lived through it. I overcame. I love that song ‘We Shall Overcome.’ I love Dr. King. We overcame together and I overcame. I don’t need white politicians sending me a check.”

If anyone tries to pay Jones for his past suffering, he will take offense, perhaps seeing both payers and recipients as at fault.

“The whole notion is very insulting,” Jones said. “It says Black people need white people to rescue them. And rescue them from what? Most Black folks today have not experienced slavery, Jim Crow, and all that we have overcome. What about the suffering of Asians and Hispanics? Shouldn’t we send them a check?”

Jones blames a “reparations mentality” for his defeat in a reelection bid for the state Senate. At the urging of California’s Ward Connerly, a businessman and founder of the American Civil Rights Institute, Jones ran a state bill to forbid affirmative action for Black people. Like direct reparations, he found affirmative action objectionable. He argues that affirmative action, which he considers a form of reparations, undermines achievement and tells young people to focus on color more than character.

“Black people have freedoms we fought for, not freedoms that are gifts from white people,” Jones said.

His white, left-wing successor, who was later recalled by voters, used the anti-affirmative action bill to win favor among minorities, white Democrats, and unaffiliated voters.

“I remember looking out a Capitol window (in Denver) and there were buses of people showing up to protest my bill,” Jones said. “It felt like the mob coming to get me because I told other Black people they can succeed without special assistance from white people.”

The Rev. C.L. Bryant, a former missionary to South America and a descendant of slaves, was among the first Black children to attend an integrated school in Louisiana during the 1960s. Like Jones, he endured indignities and injustices of life in the South when racists were overt, unapologetic, and often supported by law enforcement.

Today, Bryant owns 64 acres of a Louisiana plantation on which his ancestors worked as slaves. His parcel comes from 300 acres his relatives acquired after the Civil War, from their slave owner, by working for it. No one gave them a thing, Bryant said, yet they died as property barons who earned what they had.

“There is no way that I, never having been a slave, should get paid for anything my grandparents went through,” Bryant said. “It was them who paid that price. It was they, not I, who achieved freedom and earned property. I have never known the degradation my father and grandfather experienced. I’ve drank from colored water fountains, but I can assure you 2023 America is not 1956 or 1965 America.”

If we pay reparations to Black people, he said, we should do the same for descendants of Japanese Americans interned by our federal government during World War II.

“The diabolical attempts to divide this country by race are harmful to children,” Bryant said. “It paralyzes and shackles white and Black kids. The white kid thinks, ‘I’m a bad person because my forebears were oppressors.’ The Black kids hear they are oppressed and can never be more than what they are until a white person pays them and keeps them right where they are. … When you hear Gavin Newsom telling Black people they need his help, he exhibits the slave-master mentality. He’s white, Black people need him, and he wants their loyalty in return.”

Civil rights activist, author, and community development leader Bob Woodson calls reparations an intentional distraction from the country’s more pressing concerns.

“We’ve got Black children born out of wedlock in droves,” Woodson said. “More Blacks are killed in one year by other Blacks than the Klan lynched in more than 50 years. The teen suicide rate in Silicon Valley is six times the national average. We are losing kids to drug overdoses. Young people devalue life to the point they want to take their own or someone else’s.

“So, we’re going to focus on reparations? As long as we are talking reparations, we will never address this moral free fall that’s affecting all of us.”