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4) The program will work severe inequities.
Affirmative action’s quirks and injustices are notorious. But they will be nothing compared to the strange consequences of a reparations program. Not all black people are poor. Not all non-black people are rich. Does Oprah have a housecleaner? Who changes the diapers of Beyonce’s baby? Who files Herman J. Russell’s taxes? Will their wages be taxed and the proceeds redirected to their employers?
Within the target population, will all receive the same? Same per person, or same per family? Or will there be adjustment for need? How will need be measured? Will convicted criminals be eligible? If not, the program will exclude perhaps one million African Americans. If yes, the program would potentially tax victims of rape and families of the murdered for the benefit of their assailants.
And if reparations were somehow delivered communally and collectively, disparities of wealth and power and political influence within black America will become even more urgent. Simply put, when government spends money on complex programs, the people who provide the service usually end up with much more sway over the spending than the spending’s intended beneficiaries. The poorer the beneficiaries, the more powerfully this rule holds—and it has held strongest of all in programs intended to aid the black poor. The District of Columbia public schools have excelled at delivering stable jobs to their unionized employees. They have failed their students.
5) The legitimacy of the project will rapidly fade.
Affirmative action ranks among the least popular thing that U.S. governments do. When surveyed, white Americans crushingly reject race preferences, Hispanic Americans object by a margin of 2 to 1, and black Americans are almost evenly divided, with only the slightest plurality in favor.
Now imagine how Americans will feel when what is redistributed by racial calculus is not university admissions or workplace promotions but actual, foldable cash.
Ta-Nehisi Coates anticipates this trouble by suggesting that reparations might be paid not to individuals but collectively to African Americans as a group. He favorably cites the example of German reparations to the state of Israel after World War II.
But the state of Israel was a sovereign, elected by a democratic process. Few in the Jewish world doubted that Israel could and did act for the Jewish people as a whole. Black Americans, however, do not have a state of their own. If reparations are deemed some kind of collective debt to black Americans as a group, rather than to black Americans as individuals, then the question will arise: Who decides how this money will be distributed? Some kind of National Endowment for Black America? Chosen how? Accountable to whom?
Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree suggests widening the concept of reparations even further, into a national "program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.” In that case, reparations would cease to be a new program, but would become instead a new argument in favor of the preexisting policy preferences of the left wing of the Democratic party. Earlier in his article, Coates quotes with seeming disdain the radio host Rush Limbaugh’s disparagement of the Affordable Care Act as a form of “reparations." But aren’t Limbaugh and Ogletree more or less in agreement here?
Coates dismisses all these questions and so many others. He suggests the country first enact Rep. John Conyers’ Reparations Bill and then open a discussion about how reparations would work. But committing yourself to a solution before you have any idea whether such a solution is workable—or, rather, in defiance of pretty strong reasons that your solution is utterly unworkable—is not a responsible reaction to America’s racial dilemmas.
Instead, we’ll be all too likely to repeat once more the sad pattern of so many civil rights initiatives: the bold announcement, the raised hopes, the unexpected difficulties, the suppression of open discussion of those difficulties, the ossifying of the project into bureaucracy, the realization of failure, the discovery of the political impossibility of reforming or repairing the failure.
In his Lincoln Memorial address of 1963, Martin Luther King spoke of the words of the Declaration of Independence as “promissory note” on which the nation had defaulted. He meant this as a metaphor, not a financial analysis. Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken him literally. King understood, however, that the wrongs of which he spoke could not be redressed with money (or money alone), and that is even more true today than in 1963.
Affirmative action’s quirks and injustices are notorious. But they will be nothing compared to the strange consequences of a reparations program. Not all black people are poor. Not all non-black people are rich. Does Oprah have a housecleaner? Who changes the diapers of Beyonce’s baby? Who files Herman J. Russell’s taxes? Will their wages be taxed and the proceeds redirected to their employers?
Within the target population, will all receive the same? Same per person, or same per family? Or will there be adjustment for need? How will need be measured? Will convicted criminals be eligible? If not, the program will exclude perhaps one million African Americans. If yes, the program would potentially tax victims of rape and families of the murdered for the benefit of their assailants.
And if reparations were somehow delivered communally and collectively, disparities of wealth and power and political influence within black America will become even more urgent. Simply put, when government spends money on complex programs, the people who provide the service usually end up with much more sway over the spending than the spending’s intended beneficiaries. The poorer the beneficiaries, the more powerfully this rule holds—and it has held strongest of all in programs intended to aid the black poor. The District of Columbia public schools have excelled at delivering stable jobs to their unionized employees. They have failed their students.
5) The legitimacy of the project will rapidly fade.
Affirmative action ranks among the least popular thing that U.S. governments do. When surveyed, white Americans crushingly reject race preferences, Hispanic Americans object by a margin of 2 to 1, and black Americans are almost evenly divided, with only the slightest plurality in favor.
Now imagine how Americans will feel when what is redistributed by racial calculus is not university admissions or workplace promotions but actual, foldable cash.
Ta-Nehisi Coates anticipates this trouble by suggesting that reparations might be paid not to individuals but collectively to African Americans as a group. He favorably cites the example of German reparations to the state of Israel after World War II.
But the state of Israel was a sovereign, elected by a democratic process. Few in the Jewish world doubted that Israel could and did act for the Jewish people as a whole. Black Americans, however, do not have a state of their own. If reparations are deemed some kind of collective debt to black Americans as a group, rather than to black Americans as individuals, then the question will arise: Who decides how this money will be distributed? Some kind of National Endowment for Black America? Chosen how? Accountable to whom?
Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree suggests widening the concept of reparations even further, into a national "program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.” In that case, reparations would cease to be a new program, but would become instead a new argument in favor of the preexisting policy preferences of the left wing of the Democratic party. Earlier in his article, Coates quotes with seeming disdain the radio host Rush Limbaugh’s disparagement of the Affordable Care Act as a form of “reparations." But aren’t Limbaugh and Ogletree more or less in agreement here?
Coates dismisses all these questions and so many others. He suggests the country first enact Rep. John Conyers’ Reparations Bill and then open a discussion about how reparations would work. But committing yourself to a solution before you have any idea whether such a solution is workable—or, rather, in defiance of pretty strong reasons that your solution is utterly unworkable—is not a responsible reaction to America’s racial dilemmas.
Instead, we’ll be all too likely to repeat once more the sad pattern of so many civil rights initiatives: the bold announcement, the raised hopes, the unexpected difficulties, the suppression of open discussion of those difficulties, the ossifying of the project into bureaucracy, the realization of failure, the discovery of the political impossibility of reforming or repairing the failure.
In his Lincoln Memorial address of 1963, Martin Luther King spoke of the words of the Declaration of Independence as “promissory note” on which the nation had defaulted. He meant this as a metaphor, not a financial analysis. Ta-Nehisi Coates has taken him literally. King understood, however, that the wrongs of which he spoke could not be redressed with money (or money alone), and that is even more true today than in 1963.
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