A new poll says that only 28% of Californians support cash reparations for Black residents. But this number is fairly meaningless because it masks partisan differences that are even bigger than usual:
- Democrats: 43% support
- Republicans: 3% support
I myself have long believed that cash reparations are a misguided idea. I have four primary reasons:
- Equal treatment: The goal of civil rights is equal treatment for all. This is by far the biggest problem facing Black people in America and cash reparations do nothing to advance this goal. It could even make things worse if white people decide that paying reparations ends their obligation to improve treatment of the Black community.
- Details matter: Who get reparations? Adults? Children? Only those who can prove they're descended from slaves? Former presidents of the United States? Half pay for those of mixed race? You can't just hand wave this away. Get it wrong and it will tear the Black community apart.
- Education: I've long believed that education is the single biggest key to equal treatment. On average, Black kids leave high school two or three grade levels behind white kids, and equal treatment is all but impossible until we fix this. If we're going to spend large sums of money, this is where it should go.
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- Do the math: The California reparations task force recommended payments of at least $1.4 million per person. If you extend this to the entire country it comes to $63 trillion. This is ten times the federal budget and is obviously a nonstarter even if you spread payments out over a decade.
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So what would be affordable? If we settled on $100,000—which comes nowhere near making Black people whole—it would cost about $4.5 trillion. That's $450 billion annually over ten years, which is just barely in the realm of the plausible.
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In other words, the outside maximum would be a fairly piddling amount ($10,000 per year for a decade) that wouldn't do much to change people's lives. It would almost certainly be spent fairly quickly on ordinary, day-to-day necessities and that would be that.
In summary: Cash reparations probably wouldn't solve any problems; might make things worse; and are unaffordable except in paltry amounts. In the end, Black people would get a small amount of money but would still be poorly educated and treated like crap. Absolutely no one, Black or white, would be satisfied with this. That's why I don't support them.
It could even make things worse if white people decide that paying reparations ends their obligation to improve treatment of the Black community.
This has always been my objection. "Ok, all done, paid off, isn't any more racism in anything, ever!"
Electing a black president already unleashed the “racism is over” sentiment amongst tens of millions of Americans.
And reparations for descendants of the original tribes living on this land? If we can't honor all of those broken treaties.could we at least improve conditions on reservations & not deprive their people of adequate shares of water supplies. etc.?
Shhh. … we can’t mention the true original sin of the “New World”
There is a great deal that needs to be done to achieve some level of justice for Native Americans. Thank you for reminding us.
I think Kevin touched on the key reasons this is a non-starter, although I think he underestimates how badly it would go over.
$63T is $600K per household, although as the RomneyBot 2012 pointed out, only about half of all households actually pay Federal income tax. So, say $1.2M per household that actually pays taxes. The 75th percentile net household worth is about $400K, so you're talking about taking 3X the net worth from every tax paying household.
Alternative, you could just assess every household a $600K debt, but with a median NW of $120K, well, good luck collecting.
In all of these cases, you're taking multiples of people's savings, when most people probably can't even afford to retire today.
On top of that, you have the obvious questions: if you have one white parent, do you only get half? If you're Black, but you immigrated from the Cayman Islands, do you still get reparations? What if one grandparent came from Kenya, and one grandparent was white, and the other two grandparents were descendants of American slaves?
Besides which, the Obama family is wealthy enough that they don't need reparations.
Should Oprah get them, too?
Black kids are behind before school even starts. What should help in evening things out is free pre-K for everyone. The Supreme Court could not reject this. 13 years of school are already provided so a couple more years would not be some horrible new thing. This is a winner in polls.
I agree, free pre-K, free school lunches, and free tutoring for everyone would help tremendously. So would eliminating the tipped minimum wage, and increasing minimum wage nationally. Programs that include everyone tend to get less pushback, and once installed garner increased support.
I like Cory Booker's "baby bonds" proposal. That would help everyone, but make the most difference in lower-income, lower-wealth households.
Doing more to eliminate residential segregation would greatly improve the financial condition of Blacks.
While some of those are good moves which would ameliorate things, I think that the real things keeping our Black countrymen from achieving what our non-Black countrymen achieve are from deep-seated cultural issues in both the Black and non-Black populations.
And it's really hard to legislate culture...
California wasn't a slave state, so why is reparations being considered at all?
And if you say, the Task Force also mentioned other unfair treatment [it does], so it's not just slavery, the obvious follow up is:
Then why not reparations for everyone?
The solution is to spend the money on ALL of the poor
That gets around all of the racial issues while still mostly benefitting the people who were damaged the most
"equal treatment": It is misguided to argue against attempting to address a problem because we can't fully solve the problem and we would have to maintain vigilance. (One mechanism for maintaining vigilance is to require that yearly reparations continue until equality is reached.)
"details matter": It is misguided to argue that we shouldn't solve a problem because figuring out how to solve the problem is hard.
"education": For all we know, reparations would improve educational outcomes.
"do the math": An argument can be made that black people were prevented from accumulating wealth, first by being slaves, and more recently via prejudice supported by government. Restoring stolen wealth would be a first step.
"Non-Hispanic White householders had a median household wealth of $187,300, compared with $14,100 for Black householders". This suggests paying each black household $173,200. Which works out to around $2.6 Trillion.
The average Black American family averaged 3.4 people. Increasing the income of a black household by $34,000 per year ($10,000 per person) from the current median household income of under $50,000 per year is not "piddling".
You could also more directly model wealth. You could create a virtual fund of ~$3 Trillion. Each year, you could then look at, say, the amount of money that the Harvard Endowment's investments raked in, and distribute that to black people. The yearly payout would be lower, but it would also last longer than 10 years.
Counterfactuals are nothing if not a rathole, but if they were not first slaves, would Black people have come to the the United States? The stolen wealth would be that which they would have accumulated had they/their ancestors not been brought here no?
Why should Blacks in America be compared to Blacks in Africa and not non-Blacks in America? Isn't the latter be the relevant comparison?
"...Isn't the latter be the relevant comparison?"
No, because without slavery there would be very few blacks in America.
1) You dont know that.
2) Even if we assume that your guess is true, its not clear why that matters. We dont need to imagine up a world where slavery never occurred and try to guess at how history would have played out. We have an actual world that we can use to estimate losses and damages. Slavery and all the follow ons actually did occur and the people who were harmed do actually live and work in the US. Slaves and future generations of black Americans did actually build parts of the American economy yet recieved unjust compensation for their efforts.
Its not just the forced boat ride that caused the harm. Dismissing the generations of work here in the US simply because those people come from poor Africa is....well, pretty indicative of how deeply ingrained racism is into the fabric of the nation.
He certainly can know that as you can look to see where Modern descenants of sub-Saharan Africans are distributed - and it is slave trade aligned with tiny numbers in percent of population otherwise.
So one can see very clearly non-Slavery.
Of course Bohemian Bouregouisie Left with their Uni dorm room level of thinking will deny quite evident demographifics to posture in defence of an idea that has become one of their virtue signalling flags, regardless of how impractical, in typical third rate intello fashion.
"... Bohemian Bouregouisie Left ... Uni dorm room level of thinking ... demographifics ... virtue signalling flags ... typical third rate intello fashion."
Is there a right-wing bullshit dictionary you consult to come up with this crap? If I were you, I'd ask for my money back.
I thought AI was supposed to fix these sorts of things?
No. Once here, the wealth stolen from enslaved Africans and their descendants is the difference between what they earned and could accumulate, and what European-Americans earned and could accumulate. The differences include not only pay at market rates, but access to education, to property ownership wherever one could afford, opportunities for employment, and many others that continued long after Emancipation, through the era of Jim Crow, redlining, blockbusting and de jure segregation.
If cash reparations were granted, I suspect the bulk of the money would land in the hands of large corporations within a week of the payment date.
And no, I'm not saying black people can't handle money, I'm saying corporations have the economy firmly in their grasp. See, "Stimulus, Covid."
"...which comes nowhere near making Black people whole .."
On average black people living in America are better off than black people living in Africa. So what are you talking about?
My comment above:
Why should Blacks in America be compared to Blacks in Africa and not non-Blacks in America? Isn't the latter be the relevant comparison?
With all due respect, your point seems not only stupid but racist. You're ignoring centuries of slavery and Jim Crow (among other wrongs) to apply a standard that applies to no other group in America. Most Americans are doing "better" (financially) than their distant cousins in the lands their ancestors left. That's because we're a rich country. The standard that should apply is how one group in America is doing compared to other groups in America.
Yes. This should be self-evident.
"...The standard that should apply is how one group in America is doing compared to other groups in America."
So the best performing group should pay reparations to everybody else?
The discussion here is about reparations. That is, an attempt to correct wrongs of the past. In this case, government-enforced practices that persisted for centuries.
The case for reparations, whether you agree or not, is not that Blacks underperformed and better-performing groups owe them a handout. It’s that the government denied them their rights and the chance to live a normal life.
What the fck is wrong with you, James? Virtually every ethnic/racial/national origin group in America is better off than wherever their ancestors came from, because America in general is richer than 98-99% of other countries. So wtf is your point, other than broadcasting how stupid and racist you are?
Folks like Jimmy here are very eager to apologize for slavery with a sort of subtextual white man's burden sort of argument. E.g., slavery wasn't all bad b/c it brought civilization to the savage, or something horrible like that.
In other contexts, he'd no doubt be arguing that the poor aren't really poor except by comparison to the wealthy, because after all, even the poorest person alive today is very unlikely to be killed and eaten by a sabertooth tiger, and so by comparison to our cave-person ancestors, we are all wildly well off!
Given the violence and vast criminal behavior of black gangs, I want reparations from them.
You're an ignorant racist mother-fucker. Go away.
Jesus Christ, why is Justin allowed to continue living on this earth and sharing his ignorant selfish monstrous views with others?
Two more reasons. First, there are no living ex-slaves to be compensated. Reparations would have made sense up to about 1920, maybe 1930. After that, it was too late. Second, most black Americans have both slaves and slaveowners in their ancestry. Are they supposed to pay reparations to themselves?
1) Injustices enforced or sanctioned by governments against African-Americans continued long after Emancipation; 2) Sure, African-Americans who inherited from their slaveowner-rapist ancestors can pay. Find one.
There were some black slave owners as well.
And who pays? Everyone or only those descended from whites living at the time? Are Italian, Hispanic, Chinese, Indian, etc immigrants expected to bear this burden created prior to their arrival? Because that's who'd pay and you can imagine the cultural animosity which would arise.
I really wish Kevin would post a second education chart based on household income or other wealth measure versus just race. I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the difference in his chart is due to black Americans having a larger percentage of lower income folks. Low income over generations being a greater drag on educational performance than just race.
"And who pays? ..."
It would be an obligation of the US government (or of some state government) and funded in the same ways as other spending. That is by taxes and/or in the case of the national government by printing money. So rich black people (as well as rich white people) would be paying reparations to poor black people.
When I started into my fifth grade class (which was one of about five fifth-grade classes which existed in my city), we got a bad teacher. A really bad teacher. So bad, that I blanked after the first two weeks. So, apparently, did all the other students, because at the end of that school year, every kid in that class tested at the same educational level that they were at prior to the fifth-grade school year. We were all an entire year behind.
The school administrators then did something that they had never done before; they kept everyone together in the same class for the sixth grade, and assigned the school's absolute best teacher to teach us both fifth and sixth grade in one year.
Remarkably enough, he did it, and most of us went on to the best track in the best high school in the city.
I don't think that, years later, giving money to the children of the people in that class would have made up for the setback that the fifth grade teacher inflicted upon us. I will say that the timely gift of the best education available made a huge, positive difference in our lives.
"...would have made up for the setback that the fifth grade teacher inflicted upon us. ..."
The setback would likely have been mostly temporary in any case. Differences in one year seem to gradually erode over time. That is the effects of a particularly good or bad teacher tend to wash away in future years.
This is the direction I favor on ‘reparations’. I don’t think cash payments would compensate for generations of systematic discrimination, cultural suppression and deliberate disruption of family and community (all of which apply to Native as well as Black people). I believe we need an enlarged concept of restorative justice; of adopting policies and taking focused actions to reverse the specific harms done by the former policies.
For Chrissakes Kevin, can you just not touch upon some topics that really bring out the racists and ignorant fcks amongst your readership?
Idk what the point is of bringing up reparations, but literally nobody in the entire country has any intention of granting them at the state or national level in any of our lifetimes. So it’s like worrying about “what happens if America institutes a policy of one child per household?” or “what happens if a state passes a law abolishing climate change?” If something has zero chance of happening (one child policy) or is beyond the ability of humans to actually implement it (canceling climate change), it’s all just mental masturbation to game out the pros and cons. Reparations are both politically and mathematically impossible to implement, so there’s no need to bring them up just to give the sick Justins and Jameses an opportunity to poke their heads out of whatever shithole they’re stewing in and spout off disgusting rhetoric.
I don't know if it's Kevin's fault to write a post about reparations. He could ignore it, but it was a front-page story in the L.A. Times.
Seeing the anger and open racism in the comment section here is an eye-opener. If nothing else, I see that denialism of this country's racism (past and present) runs deep. Racism denialism should be regarded no better than Holocaust denialism.
Putting aside what the remedies should be, if we can't own up to the evils perpetrated against other Americans, we'll never solve the problem.
The piecemeal reparations that are going on may create a bizarre landscape of winners and losers. My city is offering money to buy a home, but only if your ancestors lived in a particular neighborhood and you plan to buy a house in the city. Tough luck if your great grandparents managed to buy outside that neighborhood (not all neighborhoods had racial covenants) or couldn't afford a house at all! No money if you want to live in the burbs, either!
It's the blue states that are looking at reparations, and southern cities simply can't afford to do the same things northern cities with small Black populations can consider.
Reparations to black residents, for past injustice, fails on two fundamental levels.
1. Its a political loser: sub 45% support from Democrats within very blue CA. 3% GOP support: Fox News LOVES talking about this topic!
2. It is almost impossible to not be unjust. What I mean is how could you stop just with black Americans? What about native Americans? Woman (could not vote, get credit etc for most of American history)? Gay Americans? Jews? Chinese Americans? etc. Where do you stop? Almost everyone in the US decends from someone who was mis-treated or oppressed....
Because injustices perpetrated by government policy against Blacks was gross and systematic in ways that wasn't true for the other groups you mentioned.
I've always felt Blacks and Native Americans were two groups owed special consideration for the wrongs they were forced to suffer. That's not to say cash reparations is necessarily the answer, but I'm struck by the vehemence that so many here have against the idea without so much as a nod to the plain fact that centuries of government-sponsored unjust and inhumane treatment was the reality for millions of Americans. So many people here don't give a shit. They're moral abominations, imo.
So far this country has done very little to acknowledge -- not to mention, correct -- one of the two great evils of our past (and present). Forty acres and a mule was a broken promise. Until this country does something more, we as a country are no better than a guy like Trump.
"... partisan differences that are even bigger than usual:"
Is a 40 point gap really bigger than usual? The partisan gap for Biden's approval rating appears to be about 70 points.
As a nod to the Constitution, make Black votes count 1+ 2/5ths power for 75 years, matching roughly the time between 1789 and 1865.
Encourages political participation and knowledge of history, plus lets Black people decide for themselves if they want money directly or more money for better teachers in schools etc.
Picture a road race lasting say 300 years with some contestants handicapped by having to carry 20 lb weights. After 300 years it’s obvious that those carrying weight’s were losing and that the weights had something to do with it. So when the race continued it was decided that no one would be forced to carry extra weights but because we wouldn’t want to disadvantage those who were ahead, the race would continue with the runners in the exact positions that they held when the initial 300 years of racing ended.
America’s faux devotion to equality is exposed once again.
And in case you didn’t realize it affirmative action was a form of reparations.
If the democratic party NEVER wants to, you know, WIN an election, sure they will pay reparations. It is a moral answer to a purely political problem. And if you think the majority of non-black people will agree to this, you are delusional. They will make sure no pol who voted for that will ever win.
I am convinced the whole idea of reparations is a republican plot to destroy the democratic party
+1
To me, this question of reparations is why the Far Out Left no better than MAGA and in many ways is mirror image of it.
They know politically there's no popular support for such plans. They know the money isn't there. They also know simply giving out money, their own taxpayer money, to pay themselves isn't going to fix racism in the country (in fact may well make it worse) and may well open the doors to other claimants whose reparations they would have to pay for as well (The decendents of Chinese immigrants, for example, who suffered greatly building the railroads across the West, may want some money for their past troubles too).
But they don't care! These utopians come up with these ridiculous figures and then somehow expect the politicians and the public to somehow say "Oh yes, sure, that's a fair amount. We'll be happy to open our checkbooks for the next 100 years." Where the hell do they get these fucking notions? Why do they waste their time with this shit, unless its just performative politics, the kind that MAGA always engages in. What constituency do they think they are impressing, the small minority of Black socialists?
They would be better off working on private and perhaps some smaller public institutions, churches and corporations connected to the slave trade in the past to receive reparations and some of that has already been done, so it doesn't become a political football that not even California liberals want anything to do with. That's smart politics and much more effective than these grand gestures of meaninglessness. But it seems like they would rather posture than get anything done.
Exactly right. I'm sure the commission that put out the report was made of normal pragmatic people. And Newsome sucks!
+1
This is a pretty good summary of why i also oppose reparations, particularly #2 and #4. There's logistically/administratively really no way to do it fairly, and to do it in an amount that would be meaningful and impactful in the long term would just be insanely politically unfeasible. If it were politically and fiscally feasible #1 becomes less of a concern, because you know what goes a long way to getting better/equal treatment in this world? Having 1.4 million dollars.
I'm of Irish descent. The English used to make slaves of the Irish and the Welsh. Guess I should be petitioning the UK for my reparations.