Not So Forgiving: The Reparations Argument Revisited (David Horowitz: Its Still A Bad Idea Alert)

Political argument in America is increasingly a dialogue of the deaf. The controversy over reparations for black slavery, in which opponents argue across a Grand Canyon of disagreement where no common ground seems possible is a case in point. A recent book by San Diego Law professor Roy L. Brooks -- Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations -- attempts to extricate the two sides from the impasse. His failure illustrates exactly how difficult the task is.

Brooks’ argument begins by defining the reparations issue: “When a government commits an atrocity against an innocent people, it has, at the very least, a moral obligation to apologize and to make that apology believable by doing something tangible called a ‘reparation.’ The government of the United States committed atrocities against black Americans for two and one quarter centuries in the form of chattel slavery and for an additional one hundred years in the form of Jim Crow--…and it has not even tendered an apology for either.”

The problem begins with this opening, which contains two false claims, starting with the statement that the Government of the United States maintained a system of chattel slavery for 225 years. In fact, the Government of the United States had existed for only 87 years before it enacted an Emancipation Proclamation, which ended the slave system it had inherited from the British Empire. It paid a terrible price in blood and treasure, moreover, to do so. The Government which Brooks indicts as criminal was created in a Declaration that proclaimed the then revolutionary idea that all men are created equal. This declaration resulted almost immediately in the ending of slavery in nearly half the newly united states. Within a generation it led to the freedom of all slaves in North America and the Western hemisphere. These are not small facts when weighing the matter of restitution, yet they are entirely absent from Professor Brooks’ considerations.

Before 1776, slavery existed at one time or another in all human societies, and for 3,000 years was unchallenged by any moral authorities. American Founders and the English Christians who inspired them were the first individuals to condemn slavery as an institution (albeit not all the American Founders did so). This puts the crime of America in a somewhat different light than that suggested by reparations clamants. Slavery was an institution that America inherited, but destroyed within a generation, something no nation had thought to do since the beginning of recorded history prior to 1776.

It is also false to say, as Professor Brooks does, that no apology has been made for slavery or for Jim Crow. In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, generally regarded as the most eloquent speech in the English language, the American President called slavery an offense to God, said the Civil War was God’s retribution on America for slavery, and warned that the war would continue until “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” If that isn’t contrition and if the 300,000 Union lives sacrificed to end slavery isn’t some kind of payment, it would be hard to say what is.

Like others who argue his case, Brooks ignores these reparations because he dismisses the Civil War as a conflict solely about “preserving the Union” rather than ending slavery. This is historically untenable and Professor Brooks does not himself believe it. Thus, without pausing to notice the contradiction, he also decries the flying of the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery. Well, which is it? If the confederacy was created to preserve slavery – as it was – and if the civil war was about restoring a union based on the proposition that all men are created equal, then those who died to achieve this result, died in the cause of freedom for all Americans and African Americans in particular.

The indisputable truth in the reparations claim is that slavery was a crime and that no restitution was made to the slaves themselves. But the reparations case that is argued today is not made in behalf of the slaves who suffered, and who are all dead. It is made in behalf of living black Americans who are alleged to be victims of slavery in some politically relevant sense, enough to require payment from their contemporaries. But how can an injury from slavery be demonstrated three or four generations after the fact, and by people who may be quite wealthy themselves like such millionaire reparations supporters as Jesse Jackson, Oprah Winfrey and Cornel West?

Half the black population in America is now middle class. It is true that approximately 25% of black Americans have been left behind and live below the poverty line. But how can this be established as a consequence of slavery (or segregation) if 75% of blacks are not poor? Moreover, if discrimination is in itself an explanation for economic failure, how account for the success of minorities like Jews and Asians, or those blacks whose ancestors came from the West Indies and whose income is close to that of whites?

Professor Brooks does not even address these issues but proposes instead a “new model for reparations,” involving contrition rather than judgment. In criticizing what he refers to as the “tort model,” Brooks makes a welcome point: “The tort model like all litigation, is too contentious, too confrontational to provide the kind of racial reconciliation and accord that is needed for future race relations.” Moreover, the legal case for reparations is thin. “A final blow to slave-redress claims based on international law,” observes Brooks, “is the fact that most legal scholars have determined that slavery was not illegal during its practice in the United States.” For obvious reasons like this, reparations suits have been unsuccessful in the courts.

In fact all the slavery reparations suits are frivolous. In the case of governmental suits, the wrong government is in the dock. If the claims were directed at the Confederacy, they would make sense, but directed against the government that destroyed the slave system they make no sense at all. In the case of private corporations, the torts are absurdly old and the appropriate plaintiffs, witnesses and defendants, are long dead. There is no real connection between a corporation that existed in 1850 and a corporation that might bear the same name 150 years later. If the courts weren’t so guilt-ridden over the treatment of Africans and their descendants in America, the lawyers involved in these suits would be disciplined under Rule 11, which bars officers of the court from wasting its time and resources on such fooleries.

To extricate the reparations movement from its legal cul-de-sac, Brooks proposes an “atonement model.” Half of his argument in this section of the book is admirable. He proposes a government financed “Museum of Slavery,” for example, to remind Americans of this tragic past. Who would oppose this?

But he then proceeds to agendas that are more questionable, such as a formal apology for slavery from a government that ended slavery and has provided more freedoms to black citizens in America than black people enjoy anywhere else in the world, including all of black Africa. Brooks recognizes that living Americans did not perpetrate slavery, but argues that segregation and discrimination also had damaging effects for which reparations are necessary. Unfortunately this argument has problems identical to those of the original tort model. Most Americans alive today had no complicity in segregation, which was confined to southern states. Most were born after the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. Many participated in the movements that led to those Acts. Huge numbers are immigrants or minorities themselves. Moreover, there have already been significant apologies for America’s racial injustices made by American leaders, including presidents Clinton and Bush.

Perhaps Professor Brooks is unaware that Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty at Howard University on the 100th anniversary of the liberation of the slaves and devoted his speech to the difference between white poverty and black poverty, ascribing the latter to social injustice and the crimes that America had committed against African slaves. Or that the programs his speech spawned have transferred more than $1.5 trillion from non-black Americans to poor black Americans net. Perhaps he hasn’t noticed that national holidays honoring the births of America’s founding fathers, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln were removed from the calendar so that we might honor the only American now with a national holiday in his name. That man is Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the civil rights movement that ended segregation and legal discrimination. If that recognition is not enough to satisfy Professor Brooks, and those who think like him, what would be?

Unfortunately, Brooks goes a lot further than apologies and museums to propose an “Atonement Trust Fund,” which would tax Americans to provide money to every black child, accumulating for the first 25 years of the child’s life. This proposal sums up the distance we are from the reconciliation that Brooks seeks. It demonstrates how atonement for some is prosecution (and discrimination) to others. Why should tens of millions of black Americans who are already comfortably middle class receive monies based on their skin color that is taxed from Mexican, Korean and Arab Americans, let alone white Americans who had no part in slavery or discrimination, and who may be no better off or even worse – and to do so in the name of injustices committed 50 or a 150 years ago? What kind of reconciliation is this?

*This review was originally commissioned by the Los Angeles Times, which held it for more than a year without publishing it, before informing the author that it had no intention of doing so.

Fred Reed said it best a few years back:

I see by the papers in the Yankee Capital that Johnny Cochran, and of course Jesse and Al, are wheezing and blowing like a county-fair calliope with a leaky boiler. They always are. This time it was about the need to pay reparations for the ravages trala of slavery. It got me to thinking.
I hate it when that happens.
Now, I know I’m hard-hearted, and mean-spirited, and no damn good. It’s probably my only virtue. But on consideration, I realized that they might be right. The ravages of slavery do run deep, and cause motingator trouble, with no end in sight. I decided that compensation was only reasonable. Sometimes you don’t like a conclusion, but you have to reach it. All right. I’ll be a man about it.
You can pay me reparations, Johnny.
To start with, I figure you owe me for three bicycles. Maybe it’s a small thing, but I’m tired of losing bicycles. Are we talking market value or replacement? What I really want to be paid for is having to keep my latest two-wheeler in my living room. Do you know how many times I’ve knocked the fool thing over? And, oh, the scratch in my granddad’s antique desk that the brake lever made. What’s that worth?
Call it three grand. OK? Direct deposit would be nice.
But . . . how do we dollarize cultural retrogression? God knows I appreciate your offer of reparations, but I’m having trouble with the arithmetic. Help me.
A few years back, my middle-school daughter brought home a horrendously misspelled science hand-out. Now, Johnny: You and I both know that it’s easy to make a typo, and write “phenylkeetone” instead of “phenylketone.” But “feemelkeebome” is stretching it. The errors were of this sort. An understanding of chemistry clearly had never rippled the serene surface of the woman’s mind.
Without thinking, I asked, “What color is your teacher?” (If I had thought carefully, I would have asked, “What color is your teacher?”) My daughter responded with an anguished, “Da-d-d-d-y!” She had made the connection, but knew she wasn’t supposed to.
I’ve got no problem with black teachers, if they are competent. No problem at all. But a teacher who is too ignorant to spell her subject, and too lazy to use a dictionary, ought to be flipping burgers. Simple burgers, with no moving parts. Thing is, we can’t fire ignorant teachers, Johnny, because of the lingering effects of slavery. I can yell at an ignorant white teacher, but not at a black one. To expect blacks to meet standards is racist. You can send me the price of four years of tuition in a private school outside the country.
What’s the cost of permanent welfare? Subsidized everything? Enormous police departments? What do you figure? Just add it to your tab. Have you thought about setting up an endowment?
But here’s a large ravage of slavery, Johnny: Fear.
What price do we put on looking over our shoulders? On watching to be sure we don’t go one subway stop too far? Warning our girlfriends not to drive on certain streets? Checking the clientele of Seven-Eleven before going in at night?
People in, say, Switzerland can walk their streets after dark. We can’t. Why? What have we got that they don’t, that might cause fear?
Elvis impersonators, Johnny. Yep. Switzerland doesn’t have any Elvis impersonators. Check for yourself.
What’s fear worth? Is it a minimum-wage job? Forty-hour week or twenty-four hours a day? Benefits? Seniority pay as people grow older, weaker, and less able to defend themselves? You see the actuarial difficulty. Accounting is a more difficult trade than you might think.
The white guy beaten to death 100 yards from my door last year – they never caught the killers, but – what you reckon, Johnny? Do you figure it was white Presbyterian women from the old-ladies’ home? That’s my guess. That’s who usually does it. Anyway, you can send me $540 for the Sig 9mm pistol I bought after blacks started moving into the neighborhood and crime went up. And ammo, carry permit, Hydra-Shock rounds.
Now, millions of honest blacks might write and say, “Fred, we aren’t criminals. Why should we pay for what other blacks do?” Splendid question. But of course whites say, “We don’t have any slaves. Why should we pay for what some other whites did?” If it is a reasonable question for blacks to ask, as indeed it is, why isn’t it a reasonable question for whites to ask?
But while you are in a mood to pay up, Johnny, let me introduce a useful concept: Civilizational rent. You’ll like this. It’s such a good idea.
A culture is essentially software. No? Sure, there are physical embodiments: positron-emission scanners, high-bypass turbofans, radar with Doppler beam-sharpening. Yet basically a culture is a body of knowledge, like Microsoft Word. (All right, throw in values. But I don’t want to make this too difficult.)
White guys invented these things at considerable cost. We had to. Europe doesn’t have much low-hanging fruit, and it gets cold in the north. So generations of people that I’m sure you’re familiar with – Newton, Leibniz, Galois, Gauss, Carnot, Dirac – did work that led to all kinds of useful . . . you know . . stuff.
Western civilization, it’s called.
As a result of slavery, you have been using our civilization without a license. (I know: You’re having trouble with the idea of implied retroactive acceptance of a license I invented five minutes ago. Microsoft would grasp it in a heartbeat. Anyway, I’m writing the column.)
Further, you’ve been using it for a long time, Johnny. Air-conditioning. Roads. Writing. The wheel. Complicated stuff like that. Medicine. Tractors. Shoes. Houses. I’ve spent time in Africa, where people live in stick things that look as if a Cub Scout had built a campfire and forgotten to light it. You’re getting a deal here, Johnny.
I don’t wish stick houses on anyone. I’m glad you have the benefits of electricity, clothes, and daytime TV. I’d love to see blacks study, earn degrees on their merits, prosper. Think of the trouble it would save. But – as suggested by your manly desire to pay reparations -- you owe us licensing fees. Granted, it’s hard to set a price on a culture. But if Microsoft Office goes for $250 at fire-sale prices, I guess a whole civilization is cheap at $100K a copy.
I believe we can do business, Johnny. I hope so. I can use the money.

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