Reparations for Slavery? California’s Bad Idea Catches On

Another barber, an old-timer named Eddie, sides with Ricky. “We’ve had welfare and affirmative action. Is that not reparations?” When another customer says that he thinks each black American is entitled to at least $100,000, Eddie responds, “What do you think that’s gonna do? That ain’t gonna do nothing but make Cadillac the No. 1 dealership in the country.”

Twenty-one years ago, as I watched the movie in a Brooklyn theater full of other black people, these exchanges brought howls of laughter from the audience. What also struck me was that a couple of minutes of film dialogue had produced a more honest conversation about racial preferences than book-length treatments of the subject from some of the nation’s most celebrated black intellectuals.

More than 20 years later, we’re still debating the topic. Last week New York voted to follow California down the slavery-reparations rabbit hole. Nutty ideas that originate in the Golden State often spread to other parts of the country over time, so the development isn’t too surprising, and more states are sure to follow. But it is another indication that the progressive left isn’t interested in getting past race, and that social justice in practice amounts to little more than a power grab.

New York state lawmakers concluded the legislative session on Thursday by creating a commission to study the lingering effects of slavery. California set up a reparations task force in 2020, and last month the state Legislature voted to make direct cash payments to black descendants of slaves that could amount to $1.2 million per person. Neither Kathy Hochul nor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governors of New York and California, respectively, has committed to signing off on this nonsense, yet it’s notable that proponents have moved the ball this far.

California was never a slave state, and New York outlawed slavery in 1827, but the absurdities of these proposals don’t end there. Slavery was an atrocity, but all the slaves and all the slaveholders are long gone. Furthermore, the vast majority of whites living in the antebellum period, even in the South, never owned slaves. Most white Americans alive today are descendants of people who came to the U.S. after the Civil War. Proponents of reparations want people who aren’t even descendants of slaveowners in the U.S. to compensate black people who were never slaves.

Progressives insist that there is a direct link between the past mistreatment of blacks and black outcomes today, but that claim is undermined by the experience of other groups. Chinese- and Japanese-Americans were also mistreated in the U.S. They were lynched, placed in internment camps, forced to attend segregated schools and denied property rights. Yet today both Asian groups outperform white Americans academically and economically and have done so for decades. Conversely, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report, median black weekly earnings are slightly higher than those of Hispanics, yet no one would argue that Hispanics have experienced more discrimination in the U.S. than blacks.

Those who want to blame the legacy of slavery for outcomes today are overlooking the legacy of the welfare state, which grew dramatically beginning in the late 1960s. The Great Society programs implemented under President Lyndon B. Johnson

Reparations can’t solve these problems, as Ricky and Eddie pointed out, because they are mainly cultural deficiencies. Another government-imposed wealth-redistribution scheme won’t do the trick, but it will almost certainly make race relations worse and encourage blacks to continue seeing themselves primarily as victims who have no control over their lives.

Compensating blacks today for the suffering of their ancestors wouldn’t be just. It would be corrupt. “When you trade on the past victimization of your own people, you trade honor for dollars,” Shelby Steele writes. “And this trading is only uglier when you are a mere descendant of those who suffered but nevertheless prevailed.”