Going through social media, especially Twitter, I’m convinced that no issue in America is more unpopular than reparations. People are truly horrified by the idea. They’re taking it personally—as well they should. In fact, so contentious is the idea that, if it goes much further, it could destabilize our country in unpredictable ways and lead to a permanent realignment of politics.
Why do so many Americans loathe reparations? The simple answer is contained in the well-known meme: “Let me get this straight. A state (California) that never allowed slaves is taking money from [White] people who never owned slaves to give to people [Black] who never were slaves.” This statement is obviously true, and the pro-reparations lobby knows it, which is why they counter by claiming that the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites is so enormous than only reparations can overcome it.
There is a wealth gap, but the public differs on their interpretation of the cause. Anti-reparations people argue that Blacks are worse off than Whites because they don’t try as hard to accumulate wealth and pass it on to the next generation. Pro-reparations people believe that systemic racism is so embedded into America that no matter how hard Black people try, they can’t overcome the odds that are stacked against them.
We can debate this issue forever. Each of us has to come to his own conclusions. In my case, I look at my ancestors, namely my four grandparents, all of whom immigrated to America from the region of Odessa, in the Ukraine, in the early 20th century. They were all Jewish, and unskilled when they got here. They settled in the Jewish slums of New York’s Lower East Side, and began the slow, tedious task of improving their lives and the lives of their children. No one gave them a thing—not tax breaks, not job training, not childcare or government subsidies or food stamps, and certainly not reparations. Yet, by dint of frugality and hard work, they managed to put their children through college, and those children became doctors, lawyers, diplomats, business successes, homeowners. My four grandparents believed in the American Dream, and they did well. They could have whined and complained about how hard everything was, how anti-semitic people were, how biased the economic system was toward Christians and people of Western European heritage. But they didn’t. When I was growing up, I never heard a word from anyone in my family about being “owed” anything by society. My grandparents, and my parents and uncles and aunts, understood that there were fundamentally no limits to the success they could achieve, if they worked hard enough.
Today, I look at the pro-reparations crowd, and I despair at how far this madness has gone. I’m not the first to point out that the U.S. is the only country in the world where this reparations mania is happening. No one is calling on the Black Africans who sold their sisters and brothers into captivity to pay reparations. No Muslim country is calling for reparations for the predominant role Islamicists played in the slave trade. No Western European country is clamoring for reparations. And no one is pointing out the historical fact that since the 1960s and the War on Poverty, the American government has invested trillions of dollars into Black communities.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but politicians who vote for reparations are going to regret it. I’m talking specifically about Democrats, including Gov. Newsom. You got a lot more than you bargained for when you supported forming these reparations task forces. Citizens see clearly the runaway train that’s coming their way: reparations not only from California, but individual cities (San Francisco, Oakland) and counties (Alameda). People are working hard for their money these days; the inflation is ravaging working people, and the last thing they want or need is to be seen as piggy banks for these ill-conceived reparations schemes. We’re seen before how pocket-book issues can turn American politics upside down, as happened in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected president. It can easily happen again.
If the Democratic Party wishes to survive (and this is not guaranteed), it’s going to have to get real about reparations and limit them in scope. There can be no cash awards, period. Other forms of remunerative justice must be modest and affordable. The public has very good instincts when it comes to these sorts of things. They will accept help for Black people in buying a first home, but not a whole lot more. I have to assume that every politician has access to internal polling that shows how suicidal reparations is. I advise politicians, including the Governor, to take these polls seriously. We need to recover from this reparations madness quickly and consign it to where it belongs: an asterisk of history.
Steve Heimoff