The French people recently completed paying out about $60 million to non-French victims of the Holocaust and their survivors in a program administered by the United States, a reminder that the United States’ central role in the rehabilitation and rebuilding of postwar Europe never quite came to a conclusion.
This settlement, which is separate from the reparations paid to French victims of the Holocaust, recognizes the French collaboration in transporting non-citizens to Nazi death camps on French trains. Most of those receiving the reparations are now Americans or Israelis.
The terms of the payments are specific, limiting the reparations to the survivors themselves, their spouses, their children, their grandchildren, or legal heirs. Forty-nine survivors were paid about $400,000 each; 32 surviving spouses of those deported received about $100,000 each, along with a larger number of heirs and estates.
Across the Atlantic, the 2020 Democratic primary already is under way, and it is happy hour at Chalmun’s Cantina as the contenders look not only to out-radical one another in 2019 but also to out-radical Bernie Sanders’s 2016 performance on the theory that it did not establish the outermost bound of politically potent left-wing radicalism in today’s Democratic party. Senator Elizabeth Warren, formerly promoted by her employers as a woman of color, has ’fessed up to being as white as Rachel Dolezal waltzing with the ghost of George Plimpton as snow falls gently on Vienna, has endorsed the payment of reparations to African Americans, a position held by Senator Kamala Harris but forsworn by other Democrats, Barack Obama notable among them, and rejected by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn socialist who represents Vermont in the Senate and who is seeking the Democratic nomination even though he does not belong to the party.
This is, needless to say, another case of symbolism-over-substance Democratic politics. Democrats who gave a good goddamn about the lives of black Americans have had a great many years to do something about the schools in Philadelphia or the police department in Chicago, the so-called war on drugs, and a passel of economic policies that help to keep blacks poor — including such Democratic favorites as the Davis-Bacon Act, which explicitly was designed partly for that purpose — “superabundance of Negro labor,” and all that.
But doing the hard work of responsible governing doesn’t have the juice these hustlers are after.
Slavery, and the systematic subjugation of African Americans that followed it officially until the day before yesterday, was evil. Its legacy is evil. Its surviving remnants are evil. It is not an evil that is unique in the world — savagery and horror being the natural state of H. sap. — but it is an evil that is unique in the context of the United States of America. Its consequences remain very much with us, as anyone with eyes to see can discern for himself.
Reparations are the wrong way to mitigate that evil. One reason for that is that reparations proposals are not intended to mitigate that evil. They are intended to make Elizabeth Warren, “professor of color,” president of the United States. And, if not Warren, then Senator Harris, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, or some other tedious mediocrity.
Unlike the case of the Holocaust, an American reparations program would necessarily be amorphous, there being few if any specific legal relationships by which eligibility and liability could be established. There is no Confederate treasury to seize or extant antebellum plantations to appropriate. The few corporate relationships that endure are now at many degrees of removal from slavery. There is the United States government, the record of which is not spotless on the question of slavery; the people represented by that government overwhelmingly oppose reparations (more than two-thirds report against in most polls), in part because many of them believe that their government justified itself at Gettysburg, and paid its debt.
But it is more complicated than that. White Americans are the most strongly opposed to reparations, and not without reason. It is not obvious that an American whose ancestors arrived here from Ireland or Poland after the Civil War has sins of the father to bear and atone for on this score. And, without diminishing the evil of slavery, Americans of Jewish, Catholic, Southern European, Eastern European, and other historically denigrated ancestries can point to discrimination and exclusion, too. To ask white Americans with no personal connection to slavery to accept guilt for it by virtue of their being white is to ask them to accept an idea that is fundamentally alien to our political culture.
Nor is it obvious that African Americans such as Barack Obama, who is not descended from slaves, has a valid claim. Indeed, the term “African American” is increasingly useless as a meaningful social signifier as well-to-do immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean slide easily into the upper ranks of American society while black citizens of more ancient American ancestry continue to founder. The American sense of fairness is prickly and defensive — and central to our political culture. To present reparations as a means to justice, from that point of view, is to beg the question.
The “Great Society” was a form of reparations for blacks.
Affirmative Action was another form of reparations for blacks.
Lowering standards for holding jobs is another form of reparations for blacks.
Now, in schools, lowered standards of spelling, grammar, showing proof, reaching the correct answer, even of paying attention, are another form of reparations for blacks.
Obama created disparate punishment in schools as yet another form of reparations for blacks.
The Piggford Settlement was a direct $$$cash payment to any and all blacks who applied for it, yet another form of reparations for blacks.
What have all these reparations achieved/cost?
The have helped black Americans too little and cost us all far too much.
@Nan G:
That is a politically incorrect but factually correct assessment.
In effect, all of those payments and accommodations may be viewed as bribes for votes and tribute for peace in the streets. Problem is, once you pay the Devil, the hunger for more grows, and the Devil never stops seeking re-election.
You reach the point of diminishing returns on your investment before you make your first payment.
@Nan G: Perfect, its a “do not feed the bears” proven theory, if not fed they will go about feeding themselves and teaching the cubs how to do the same. Fed bears knowing only that food comes easy from a certain source lose the ability to feed themselves will tear things up looking for the easy meal. Other creatures see the bears behavior, like racoons, foxes etc can you afford to feed every creature in the forest? What happens when you run out of money to feed the adorable forest creatures, they smell your food.
We dont even hang a bird feeder at camp.
@kitt:
In return for your help with my address problem, here’s a tiny bit of maybe helpful advice:
The correct abbreviation for “etcetera” is “etc.” not “ect.”
At first I thought your “ect” was a typo, but apparently not the case.
@George Wells: I see you found the reply, good job, yes at times the old fingers type dyslexic and it goes unnoticed except by grammar and spelling Nazis 😉
@kitt:
Part of my old job was proof-reading patent applications written by PHDs too busy to clean up their own work. So it comes naturally. I do it to my husband all the time, and he hates it!