Reparations for slavery used to be a fringe idea, but it’s gaining traction among mainstream Democrats.
Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee has sponsored a bill to study the question, and she has garnered support from Democratic presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Liz Warren and Beto O’Rourke. At The New York Times, David Brooks now backs it.
Which just goes to prove that there’s nothing so ill-considered that it won’t be taken up by a liberal.
Let’s concede that, when a wrong has been done, reparations should be paid. That’s a foundational principle in law and religion. Slavery was a grievous wrong, and when the slaves were emancipated, they were owed something for their forced labor. And what assistance was offered at the time was inadequate and short-lived.
And so the debt wasn’t fully paid. Stretching things a little, but not so far as to disfigure them, one might argue that the debt was owed by the federal government, since the peculiar institution was tragically embedded in the American Founding. So does that make the case for reparations?
No, that only disposes of one of the objections. Basic to Judaism and Christianity is the notion that children aren’t liable for the sins of their parents, especially the many millions of us who came here after 1865. Individually, we can’t be sued for slavery.
That doesn’t matter, however, if the debt is owed by the government. Let’s say the government owes money to Joe the Plumber for work he did last week fixing the washrooms at the Pentagon. Government debts owed for reparations stand on the same footing. If they’re really owed.
But now it gets more complicated. There’s the question of who gets to collect when the reparation bill comes due. Tracing debts owed in 1865 to today’s potential beneficiaries opens up questions quite as obscure as Beto’s Hispanic heritage.
What do you do about the recent arrivals from Africa or the children of intermarriages? The black codes of some Southern states during the Jim Crow era made fine distinctions between people who were half- and a quarter-black. Hadn’t we put all those noisome laws behind us?
And who would foot the bill for the reparations payments? Opponents of the law, after all, are sure to seek to suss this out, perhaps through litigation. Would all taxpayers be on the hook? In that case, the beneficiaries would end up funding part of their own reparations benefits.
Or would the payments only be extracted from non-black citizens and residents? Would a Jewish New Yorker whose ancestors arrived on these shores in the 20th century be expected to pay for reparations? How about a more recent immigrant from South Korea? You can see how monstrously complicated these questions can get — and how they’re likely to spark more, not less, racial tension.
After World War II, West Germany offered reparations for the children of Holocaust victims. But only to people who could prove that their parents had been killed by the Nazis, and there were strict requirements for evidence.
Finally, consider the deal proposed by the late Charles Krauthammer. Let the government offer reparations, he said, provided it shuts down the affirmative-action programs meant to give African-Americans a leg up.
But if such a grand compromise were offered, would those in the black community who benefit from affirmative action accept it? Likely not. The demand is for reparations plus continued affirmative action, and any reparations payment today would likely be followed by a demand for another payment tomorrow. For the left, slavery is an indelible sin and reparations-cum-forgiveness isn’t on the table.
At law, debt claims are cut off by limitation periods, typically six years. One of the reasons for this is the need for a fresh start, the idea that at some point everyone has to begin afresh. And nothing gets more in the way or cripples a person more than obsessing over past wrongs, as one does in demanding reparations for slavery.
F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School, and is the author of “The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed.”