On Grand Avenue, there’s a store with a sign in the window that says, “SHINING BLACK PEOPLE! We are retrieving all that would be stolen by our ridiculous foes.” With all this chatter about reparations going on, I fear the feeling is increasingly widespread, in the Black and progressive communities, that America owes Black people a lot of money.
We can argue all day about the logic of reparations. I, personally, think it’s a bad idea to take money from tax-paying Americans who never owned a slave, and give it to Black people who never were slaves, in a state (California) that never endorsed slavery. It’s also unconstitutional, illegal and dangerous. We already have 35%-40% of the American population who are rightwing Christian trumpers ready to wage civil war; do we really need to further tear this country apart by dividing liberals?
Yet this sense of entitlement among Black people is strong and getting stronger. Let’s talk about the entitlement society. It refers to concerns that “the United States is rapidly becoming an ‘entitlement society’ in which social programs are undermining the work ethic and creating a large class of Americans who prefer to depend on government benefits rather than work.” This critique is aimed primarily at Black people, who justifiably resent the suggestion that they’d rather collect free money than go out and work for it. Yet I suspect that a majority of Black Americans now not only demand reparations, but fully expect to get them. The media seem to be supporting the idea; Democratic politicians seem to be warming up to it, and even if they’re not personally sold on it, they’re afraid to come out against reparations because Black people are such a big part of their base.
Still, if we’re prepared to criticize conservative Christian Republicans for thinking they can turn America into a theocracy (and no one has criticized them more than I), then we should apply the same intellectual standards to reparations-oriented Democrats. These rightwing Christians have as their equivalent in the Democratic Party leftwing progressives who demand reparations. (I’ll trade you one Cat Brooks for one Ron DeSantis.) Both are delusionary, with personal beliefs that have no basis in law or common sense.
“All that would be stolen by our ridiculous foes…”. Think about these words. Not only “what has been stolen,” but future-conditional tense, “that would be stolen.” God only knows that that means. Maybe that’s the basis of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ demand that each adult Black person in the city be paid $5 million. When someone feels that entitled, they’ve cut themselves off from all rationality, all common sense. Hitler felt that entitled. Trump feels that entitled. Clearly, when your sense of entitlement stretches out to infinity, you’re not thinking clearly. Both men, of course, had and have lengthy enemies lists, and so does the reparations cult. “Our ridiculous foes…”. Well, count me as a “ridiculous foe” of reparations, and I think I’m not alone.
I’m also not alone, I believe, with an aversion to race-based politics. God, I’m sick of identity politics, which has resulted in the fractionizing of America. We used to be the American people. We came together to fight the nazis. We built the strongest economy the world has ever seen. We invented rock and roll! We went to the Moon. We passed the strongest civil rights laws in history. We approved gay marriage! But what has happened in the last few decades? Every little group has a grudge, a chip on their shoulder they’re unable to shed. We really have to end this woe-is-me mentality.
If the Black community really thinks they’re entitled to monetary compensation, let them sue the Southern states where slavery occurred. Let them sue the descendants of slaveowners. Let them demand reparations from the descendants of the Black middlemen, including in Africa, without whom slavery could not have existed. But leave the innocent people of San Francisco alone! If the wokes push this issue too far, I predict San Francisco Democrats will abandon the party in droves and become either Independents or Republicans. As for statewide reparations, I hope and assume Gov. Newsom will veto cash payments and will not go overboard in other promises, as the S.F. Supervisors have done. Reparations are the Kryptonite of the Democratic Party.
Steve Heimoff