Slavery Reparations Gaining Momentum

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Advocates who say black Americans should be compensated for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath are quietly chalking up victories and gaining momentum.

Fueled by the work of scholars and lawyers, their campaign has morphed in recent years from a fringe-group rallying cry into sophisticated, mainstream movement. Most recently, a pair of churches apologized for their part in the slave trade, and one is studying ways to repay black church members.

And

Reparations opponents insist that no living American should have to pay for a practice that ended more than 140 years ago. Plus, programs such as affirmative action and welfare already have compensated for past injustices, said John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

"The reparations movement is based on a fallacy that cripples the thinking on race _ the fallacy that what ails black America is a cash problem," said McWhorter, who is black. "Giving people money will not solve the problems that we have."

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In principle, I support reparations. For me, it all depends on how the money is disbursed. That is, I think direct cash payments to all African-Americans is a pretty bad idea--as the conservatives often say, you can't solve problems by throwing money at them. However, if the payments are in the form of measures and funds that would be certain to spur economic growth and education in the black community, I'm all for it--I'm thinking in terms of a GI Bill, or a massive endowment to provide free loans for education, business, and community reconstruction and repair, a sort of Marshall Plan for black America. That, I think, ought to get us somewhere, and avoids all the many criticisms over the years of welfare.

And on top of that, you know, the United States fucking owes black people, without whose labor this country would have never been built. Think of it as back pay with interest.

As for the criticisms in the excerpt above, I must admit that I don't really understand them. It's not living citizens who would be paying these reparations; it's the government, which was most definitely around then--it is a massive understatement to say that the government had something to do with slavery; indeed, the government made it all possible. Affirmative action and welfare were never reparations, either. They were about solving modern problems, not about disbursing back wages--besides, lots of white people have benefitted from these programs, too; it's not really a race issue when you get right down to it. Probably the best criticism of the reparations movement I've heard isn't even mentioned here: reparations are paid to victims, not their descendents. Well, okay, but ultimately that's so much hair-splitting. Let's just do what I've been doing and call it earned wages or damages and stop worrying about the word play. Like I said, I just don't understand why people oppose this. Nobody is really trying to explain why the government isn't liable here. I mean, come on, how can the feds not be liable?

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