The United States government launched its reparations program to
African Americans in autumn of 1969. Originally known as “the Philadelphia
plan,” the program set quotas
for black employment in construction trades. Over the next
decades, such quotas would spread from industry to industry, and would expand
into higher education and public contracting.
The plan is usually credited to the Nixon administration. Sometimes it’s even
described as a secret scheme to split the Democratic base. The history is more
prosaic. The plan originated under the Johnson administration, following
President Johnson’s pledge in his 1965 Howard University speech to seek racial
equality as a result, not merely as a theory.
In this month’s Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi
Coates makes an eloquent case for restitution to black Americans, not only
for wrongs done before 1865, but as much or more for wrongs done in the century
of segregation that followed. Yet this powerful essay explicitly disavows any
consideration of the single most important question about the restitution he has
in mind: How would it
work?
The affirmative action experience since 1969 offers some insights into what
is likely to happen next: 1) The program will expand to additional groups.
Within only a very few months of the implementation of Philadelphia plan,
preferences of various kinds were extended to women, Hispanics, and other
groups. With any program of reparations, likewise, other claimants will come
forward. If African Americans are due payment for slavery and subjugation, what
about Native Americans, who lost a whole continent? What about
Mexican-Americans, who were deprived by the Mexican-American war of the right to
migrate into half their former country? Japanese Americans, interned during
World War II? Chinese Americans, the victims of coolie labor and the Oriental
Exclusion Acts? Members of these groups may concede that they were not
maltreated in the same way as African Americans—and may not be entitled to
exactly the same consideration. But if black Americans are entitled to almost a
trillion dollars in compensation (Coates suggests a figure of $34 billion a year
“for a decade or two”) surely these other maltreated groups must be entitled at
least to something?
Coates’s essay is built on an unstated assumption that America’s racial
composition is essentially binary, a white majority that inflicts inequality; a
black minority that suffers inequality. Others enter into his imagination only
at the hazy edges: "One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past,
disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral
immigration. … A nation outlives its generations.”
But the “others” are now 25 percent of the nation and rising fast. Does the
Fujianese delivery man pedaling through the brownstones of Fort Greene owe a
debt to the people whose food he carries? How much? The reparations idea—so long
politically outlandish—has become thinkable today because of the gathering power
of the Obama political coalition. But nothing would blow that coalition apart
faster than the internal redistribution Coates contemplates from some
constituencies to others. And if the idea is that the newest arrivals to America
will be persuaded to accept paying reparations as a cost of immigration—or that
new Americans can be cajoled to pay a symbolic something because the bulk of the
burden will be carried by the dwindling white majority (a majority that already
feels ever more culturally insecure and economically beset)—well, that’s a
prescript for an even more dangerous political explosion. 2) The question of who qualifies will become ever more contested and
embittered.
Under today’s racial preference rules, a nephew of the King of Spain or the
daughter of the chairman of the biggest bank in Chile would both qualify for
Hispanic preferences if they resided in the United States. Harvard can (and
does) meet its African American diversity requirements with the children of
recent African immigrants, whose families never experienced slavery or
segregation in this country.
The problem of “who qualifies?” is explosive enough with hiring and
admissions preferences. As the benefits at stake expand to the vast dimensions
urged by Coates, the question will become more explosive yet. Does a mixed race
person qualify? How mixed? What about recent immigrants from Africa or the West
Indies? What about future immigrants? What about illegal immigrants from Africa
who subsequently gain legalization—would amnesty come with a check attached? 3) Side effects will be large and unexpected.
Affirmative action characterizes some parts of the American economy more
strongly than others, and in particular the public sector more than the private
sector. This pervading fact has shaped the growth of the black middle class. Black
Americans are 30 percent more likely than non-blacks to work in the public
sector, where they earn higher wages relative to whites than they do in
private employment. This strategy brought security to many black families in the
years between 1970 and 2008.
But the strategy came at a cost.
First, the strategy tethered black economic advancement to the growth of
government. That growth has become ever more fiercely contested in recent years.
Since 2008, it has abruptly halted and reversed.
Second, the strategy detoured talented people away from the higher risks and
rewards of the private sector, and especially from entrepreneurship. Black
Americans are less than half as likely as white to own their own businesses.
A reparations plan is likely to prove even more distorting.
If paid to individuals as an income stream, reparations would dis-incentivize
work.
If paid to individuals as a lump sum, reparations would expose one of
America’s least financially sophisticated populations to predatory practices
that would make subprime lending seem socially responsible by contrast.
If paid to institutions or collective entities … well, let’s look at that
under another header. 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. A
real-world example:
Young black Americans spend on average 4.5 hours more per day with electronic
media (notably television, video games, and other forms of online
entertainment) than do their white counterparts, for a total in excess of
13 hours. While all young people spend a lot of time in front of screens, black
youth watch far and away the most television: almost 3.5 hours per day, or an
hour and a quarter more than young whites. Almost 80 percent of black youth say
they "usually" eat meals in front of a TV.
The disparity is growing wider, not narrowing, as more forms of electronic
media become available. The disparity shrinks, but does not disappear, with
education and income. The best predictor of how much TV a child will watch is
not whether he or she lives in a single or two-parent family. It is not family
income or wealth. It is race: Even the most advantaged black youth spend 90
minutes more per day with electronic media than do their white contemporaries.
It won’t surprise you to hear that
heavy use of electronic media correlates with all kinds of bad outcomes, from
obesity to poor school performance. (Across all races, only about 16-20
minutes per day of screentime is connected to schoolwork.)
It’s not difficult to draw a chain of causation from the exploitation so
stirringly described by Ta-Nehisi Coates to the TV-dependence of black youth in
the 2010s. In this case, however, detailing the cause does not reveal the
remedy. To realize their full potential, those kids must watch less TV. No
plausible government program can shut down their devices for them. That
decision—like almost every decision that leads to self- and collective
improvement—must come from within families and within individuals.
The great white lie America tells itself is that the passage of civil-rights
laws in the 1960s and '70s lifted the burden of the racial past. But racial
subjugation imposed over 350 years could not and was not alleviated over a
single generation. Today’s white Americans inherit financial assets and human
capital accumulated over a long span of time—and very possibly by robbing or
cheating victims of color.
In refuting that lie, however, Ta-Nehisi Coates advances an error that also
does harm: that black Americans can build their future by debunking white
Americans’ illusions about their past. It does not work that way. Racism may
have turned the TV set on. Anti-racism won’t turn the TV set off.
The government of the United States could trace the genealogy of every white
family and send a massive bill to the descendants of every slaveholder and every
slumlord who did business from 1619 through 1968. It could redistribute that
money in a princely lump sum. But that money won’t change unhealthy dietary
patterns, or enhance language skills, or teach the habits on which thriving
communities are built.
Germany and Israel may not be historically exact precedent for Coates’s plan.
The more exact precedent may be the sudden surge of oil wealth into the Middle
East after 1973. Nations that had always felt themselves cheated of their due
suddenly saw their incomes triple and quadruple. Yet the nations did not
progress. The wealth of nations is built on their human capital—and the oil
income not only failed to enrich them, but oftentimes incentivized behavior that
left (or will leave) those nations in many ways worse off than before.
The human qualities that advance a community and a nation were defiantly
acquired by black Americans themselves under conditions of horrifying adversity.
Their development has accelerated as equality has come nearer to view.
Education
Next
Disparities remain, of course. Coates challenges all Americans to remember
where those disparities came from—and to think hard what is owed to those on the
wrong end of them.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than
a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is
a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would
mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts
of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while
waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American
consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with
the facts of our history.
If “reparations” means remembrance and repentance for the wrongs of the past,
then let’s have reparations. Americans tell a too-flattering version of their
national story. They treat slavery as ancillary rather than essential. They
forget that the work of slaves paid this country’s import bill from the 17th
century until 1860. They do not acknowledge that the “freedom” championed by
slaveholding Founding Fathers, including the author of the Declaration of
Independence, included the freedom to own other human beings as property. They
can no longer notice how slavery is stitched into every line of the Constitution
and was supported by every single early national institution. The self-reckoning
we see in Germany and other European countries does not come easily to
Americans—and is still outright rejected by many.
If “reparations” means intensifying the nation’s commitment to equal
opportunity for all its people—and most especially for the descendants of those
once enslaved—then (again) let’s have reparations. Better schools, more jobs,
some form of universal health coverage, an immigration policy that does not
exert endless downward pressure on the wages of America’s least skilled workers,
improved nutrition especially in early childhood, higher taxes on alcohol, more
effective and less punitive enforcement of drug laws—there’s a program of group
betterment awaiting the right advocates at the right time.
But if “reparations” means what most Americans reasonably interpret it to
mean—cash flowing from some Americans to others in race-conscious ways meant to
redress the racial wrongs of the past—then it’s a disastrous idea for all groups
in society.
And if, when you advocate reparations, you aren’t sure which of the above
things it does mean, then your advocacy should be postponed until you
are.
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