Reparations Madness

What should be paid to the descendants of free blacks who owned black slaves?

June 19, 2019Mary Grabar 

To coincide with the day of celebration of emancipation, Juneteenth, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is holding a hearing today, featuring the plaints of millionaire movie star Danny Glover and MacArthur “Genius” Award winner ($625,000) Ta-Nehisi Coates, “to examine . . . the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice.”

In other words, pay-outs to African Americans. It makes even less sense than it did thirty years ago when former Democratic Congressman John Conyers introduced the measure. Since then, historians have added to our knowledge about the complicated issue of slavery, including African Americans’ own participation in the practice. Additionally, their own voting records have instituted the discriminatory practices for which they now seek redress. Such facts add to the host of others being discussed, such as the impossibility of determining damages because some blacks have no slave heritage (including former President Barack Obama.whose Kenyan father enjoyed the privilege of studying in American universities), the number of whites who died in the Civil War that ended slavery, and white immigrants who had come to these shores long after slavery had been abolished.

Even the case Coates recently made in his New Yorker interview about the financial losses suffered by African Americans when they were denied federal housing loans and resorted to unscrupulous lenders does not stand up, though it appears to have the hallmarks of a case of limited and traceable losses due to discrimination—as was the case with the Japanese interned during World War II........To Read More....