Dead People: Doubts About Reparations from a Proud Mutt

By Patrick Hall

It’s back again. Although, it never left the political landscape for those pushing reparations for blacks because of slavery.  Chattel slavery had been abolished over 150 years ago, with the death of over 800,000 Americans who engaged in the murderous struggle, we call the American Civil War. However, many in the year 2023, both black and white, still call for cash payments to be distributed to blacks living today.  However, there are some terse historical realities that constituencies pushing reparation do not take into account or just ignore in their crusade for reparations.
 
The vast majority of people who fought and died to free black slaves were white and the overall carnage of this war between the states would be equivalent to losing several million Americans in today’s numbers.  Remember, the entire population of the United States during the time of the Civil War numbered less than 32 million.  

Also, it is time for Black "leaders" to cease pushing the ridiculous lie that this nation was built on slave labor. America did not become a wealthy nation until after the Civil War when the Industrial Revolution arrived. Slavery doomed the South because it is an “inefficient means of production”. Slaves were expensive to own and maintain. Industrialization was key to enriching the United States, as were the vast mineral resources and fertile cropland. Blacks were largely excluded from the creation of wealth for over a hundred years. Despite the horrors of slavery, blacks were not the ones creating wealth in Post-Civil War America. Also from a purely economic standpoint, at the start of the Civil War, the GDP or gross domestic product of the entire Confederacy was only 1/3 of just the state of New York. Slavery was a dying practice, the production of “cotton” made some plantation owners wealthy. However, they were hardly as prosperous as many of the Northern industrialists. We have to be blunt. This country was not built on the backs of enslaved people. Yes, slavery was a horrible stain on this nation’s history, and it caused untold misery for the black slaves.  But it must be reiterated, that America did not become a wealthy nation until after the Civil War when the Industrial Revolution arrived.
 
Here is another unspoken problem with the allocation of reparation monies to blacks living today.  Many prominent black leaders such as Obama (multi-racial) and most African Americans living today are mutts, including this writer.  As a sidebar, most Americans, despite our various ethnic backgrounds are mutts.
 
My oldest daughter (whose spouse is white) and more specifically my “grandchildren according to “23 and me” are less than 34% of West African heritage. At the same time, the other 66% encompasses mostly Eastern European and Irish.   Do we get to sue for reparations from the non-black side of our DNA? Also, the vast majority of Americans of German, Polish, Russian, Scandinavian, Italian, French, and other groups arrive on American shores after slavery was ended. Do they have to pony up funds to pay today’s Black Americans, although these newly arrived immigrants never owned, slaves?  We have friends who were newly arrived immigrants from Croatia, who came here back in the 1990s. We have scores of newly arrived Africans, many of their children born here.  How do you sort them out? Are they responsible to pay-out out or even receive monies?  While I’m thinking about it, many of the stronger West African tribes were directly involved with selling their African brothers to white slave traders. Maybe we can also include these newly arrived African immigrants in separate litigations for reparations. In addition, does Elon Musk who is technically an “African American” receive payment? Just kidding.
 
But to allocate funds from the suffering of people long dead and give it to their descendants is extremely problematic, and incredibly dangerous to the country as a whole. I think it is not an accident that one of the biggest supporters of reparation for blacks is the Chinese Communist Party, through various shell organizations they support. Of course, the CCPs aim is to sow discourse and division among their chief enemy, the United States.

Unfortunately, reparations are just another big money grab, based on an entitlement mentality, “a ward of the state ethos” nurtured and kept vibrant by many within the Democrat Black Political class. If a reparation package is ever passed, (in places like California and New York), that guilt-ridden-mea-culpa white liberals and blacker-than-thou African Americans and race-hustlers are now pushing. This would complete the fracture, balkanization, and out-of-control tribalism that is destroying the nation from within.  

But here in lies the stupidity and intellectual arrogance of those pushing reparations. It is beyond dangerous, if not culturally destructive to base public policy on what one group of dead people did to another group of dead people.
 
The Slavery of Generational Dependency

Over sixty years ago, I first read Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up From Slavery.  Although, I was just a young academically struggling Negro youth in junior high, his life and accomplishment as a former slave affected me greatly.  Here was an individual who suffered through the humiliation of slavery, but was able to overcome his past and the real racism that existed during his time to preach and “live” a positive message to freed Negroes and white America.  He did not spend his life as a free man constantly chastising whites about slavery, nor asking people to make recompense for slavery.  Mr. Washington understood that it was impossible to repay black living at his time (and today) for the historic suffering. Unlike today’s black leaders, he understood suffering could be endured and overcome: but it cannot be repaid. Individuals like the late Martin Luther King Jr and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, politician, sociologist, and diplomat, saw that blacks could be corrupted by society’s guilty gestures of repayment or reparation.  

The Great Society Programs of Johnson’s administration, along with the failed war on poverty was the corruption, that hamstrung a large segment of the African American community. Despite the billions spent on the numerous social program (directly for blacks), most Black people (around 70%) are still caught or labor within a generational dependency.  A dependency that is pushed and gives power to the Black Democratic Political class. Unfortunately, the influences and manipulative power of organizations like the NAACP, and the Black Congressional Caucus remains the largest obstacle for the black underclass to take advantage of the opportunities (no guarantees) that the country offers everyone.  Tragically, fifty years after the Great Society handouts, we are seeing the results. Generations of barely functional, uneducated people on the dole are all funded by working taxpayers.

Once more, society can only offer opportunities. What blacks do with these opportunities is totally up to them.  No nation, no public policy program, or political philosophy can guarantee equal outcomes. As human beings, we are far too different. Some of us are born with minds for mathematics or science. Some of us have the deposition to excel in the arts, language, or literature nomenclature. Some people are predisposed to alcoholism or addiction. There is a range of people across all ethnic groups who are blessed with the capacity for entrepreneurship.  The best thing the United State can do for all its people is to keep the playing field “as level as humanly possible.”

Whether blacks jumping on the bandwagon for reparations want to admit it or not, America is already paying reparation.  It has done so since the advent of the 1960s Great Society Programs. Many within the permanent black underclass receive and have become “willfully” dependent on welfare, food stamps/EBT cards, and government housing via Section 8.  They receive utility discounts, phone service, and free iPhones.  Most are now generationally dependent on Medicaid; head start and the No Child Left Behind boondoggle pushed by both Democrats and Republicans.  Black criminality is even been rewarded by reducing felonies to misdemeanors.  BLM and many black Democratic Politicians have successfully pushed no cash bail and Defund the Police. Decades of affirmative action have also embedded, if not enhanced the “wards of the state mentality” within the black community.    

Affirmative action has been a benefit to some blacks in its applicational history. However, Affirmative action has largely turned out to be a public policy windfall for middle-class blacks, college-educated suburban women (any color), as well as foreign nationals with the right skin tone.¹
 
At the same time, it has placed many unqualified people like VP Kamala Harris, secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, as well as “what-is-a-woman,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson,  into positions that they are unprepared for.  

The most difficult thing for those pushing reparation and other inter-generational entitlements to accept is that suffering (even as horrible as chattel slavery) excuses a person or group from very little.

As the late economist Walter Williams once opined, the suffering of blacks in the past never had the currency to restore.  To think otherwise is to prolong the suffering. But then again, looking at the Black Democratic political class maybe that is their goal.  To keep the black underclass angry, perpetually aggrieved, and ignorant about the nature of their socioeconomic stasis.
 
1 Patrick A. Hall, “Against Our Best Interests: An Ambivalent View of Affirmative Action,” in American Libraries (October 1991), 898-902.