​​​Reparations Revisited​

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs into law a bill that establishes a task force to come up with recommendations on how to give reparations to Black Americans in Sacramento, Calif. on Sept. 30, 2020. Office of the Governor via AP

Commentary

The drive for reparations to be paid to African Americans in the United States has been gaining momentum in places such as California and New York. I’ve written before about how morally dubious reparations to descendants of slaves would be. But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that reparations can be morally justified, reparations aren’t a viable public policy because of overwhelming logistical and practical considerations.

Here’s the crux of the problem: how to determine exactly who should receive reparations. The first step would be to identify which Americans of African ancestry are descended from people who were slaves here in the United States. At first glance, this seems to be the low-hanging fruit, the easiest part of the problem to solve. But the task is far more complicated than it appears.

For example, what should be done about descendants of today’s African Americans whose African ancestors captured fellow Africans and sold them to be shipped to the United States? There were Africans on both sides of the slave trade—those who profited from the abominable practice and those who suffered from those abominations. Would it be just for descendants of Africans who profited from slavery to profit now from reparations?

Another complication: What about mixed-race individuals? Are we going to have to start dealing with fractions—Person A is five-eighths black, Person B one-eighth, and so forth? What if a person is descended both from a slave and a slaveowner? Should the government assess a penalty to the portion of the person who’s descended from the slaveowner but give compensation to the portion of the person descended from slaves?

As you can see, deciding who gets paid reparations for slavery presents formidable challenges. Unfortunately, that issue has been further complicated by some of the recommendations of the official pro-reparations task force in California. They’re calling for reparations to be paid not only to descendants of slaves but also to black Americans descended from free American black people with no instances of slavery in their lineage.

The California task force seeks compensation for “several categories of community harms, including health disparities, mass incarceration and over-policing, and housing discrimination,” according to The Guardian. Yikes—more complications! How would one go about quantifying “over-policing”? What about “health disparities”—would they be calculated on a racial basis or an economic one whereby poor black people and poor white people would be compared?

The California “taskforce recommends two avenues for compensation: cumulative compensation for an eligible class and particular compensation for individuals for provable harms,” such as those listed in the previous paragraph, according to The Guardian.

And here it gets dicey again: “Unlike particular compensation, cumulative compensation would not require any member of the eligible class to provide evidence documenting their harm.”

No evidence of harm required? Is that just? Doesn’t that imply that one is receiving money simply for being a member of a particular race?

Here’s another odd (some would say indefensible) aspect of the reparations plan being cooked up in California: While they propose that some black people not descended from slaves receive reparations, other such black people are to be cut out of the action. Yes, the task force actually voted last year “to recommend limiting reparations to Californians who are descendants of enslaved or free Black people who were in the U.S. by the end of the 19th century,” The Guardian reported.

The omission from the list of eligible recipients of any African American whose descendants first came to the United States after 1900 seems arbitrary and unjust. It also brings up the fractional person problem again; e.g., Mr. Bill Johnson, although 100 percent black, is one-quarter descended from black people who were in the United States before 1900 and three-quarters descended from black people who arrived after 1900. Oh, boy.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m against reparations, period. And in one sense, perhaps we should be grateful that the pro-reparations crowd appears willing to place some limits on their monetary requests by not asking for universal reparations to all American black people.

I would be willing to bet, however, that many African Americans who are descended from slaves are better off today than some African Americans who are descended from people who arrived in the United States after 1900. The fact is, not only slavery but various 20th-century public policies, concocted and implemented (you could say “imposed”) primarily by Democrats, have wrought havoc on African Americans’ social and economic well-being. If the point of reparations is to compensate for harm suffered as a result of white-imposed policies, then where’s the justice in compensating black people who are relatively well off while excluding other black people who languish behind?

The damage attributable to 20th-century government policies, such as the minimum wage laws that have disproportionately hurt black people, the anti-family welfare policies of the war on poverty, and the persistent imprisonment of black children in underperforming union-dominated public schools, is considerable. Decades of cynical progressive/Democratic policies—policies that were pro-black in rhetoric, but anti-black in practice—have done much harm to millions of black Americans.

Finally, there’s one more practical problem that could render any reparations program unjust: Most government handouts are plagued by fraud. The larger the payouts, the greater the incentive to fudge one’s identity. Just think of all the fraudulent claims that were successfully filed when Uncle Sam was handing out big bucks for emergency COVID-19 relief—allegedly more than $45 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims alone. It isn’t difficult to picture something similar happening in connection with reparations. Don’t be surprised if enterprising individuals would quickly invent ways to provide documentation certifying bogus family trees that would make people eligible to receive payments. A lot of ineligible people would scheme to get a piece of the reparations pie.

The sad fact is that, like so many other government handouts, reparations would be characterized by poor execution and widespread fraud. Some things never change.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.