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Reparations and the Racial Republic ocregister.com/2019/06/29/rep…
The ensuing legacy of slavery and overt discrimination have led some to call for “reparations” for African-Americans. Essentially as we have gradually stripped away the shackles of that nasty past, some seem determined to bring it back.
We see this in efforts to “race norm” admission to elite public schools, as in NY City, or to adjust SAT scores along racial lines. This violates the idea that people should, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. , be judged not on their race, but on content of their character.
In academia it is increasingly common, as Harvard College’s dean Rakesh Khurana told graduates recently, that individual achievement is seen as less important than the “dynastic” forces of race.
This underpins the notion that students “of color” need to be treated differently than others. This follows from the notion that “group rights,” not individual rights, are what matters.
As one liberal observer noted, the West is “now inculcating in a new generation ideas where the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse.
Fortunately, these racial obsessions do not reflect the on the ground reality in most of America. Housing segregation, for example, has declined in most metropolitan areas, with the notable exception of the most “progressive” cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.
Once restricted to barrios and ghettos, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians have been moving en masse towards the ever more integrated suburbs.
The racial Republic is losing ground with the masses of Americans. Today roughly 86 %, according to one recent survey, of adult Americans do not believe European roots are necessary to be “truly American.” Two in three said they felt optimistic about breaching racial divides.
Culturally we have become ever more integrated. Americans have gone from consuming bland Northern European fare to being regular patrons of Italian, Jewish, and, most recently, Asian and Latino fare. If we are indeed, “what we eat,” we are a rapidly diversifying people.
. Many African-Americans are more than descendants from African slaves; roughly one quarter of their DNA, according to one recent study, comes from Europe, Asia, Latin America or Native Americans.
This is particularly true of places like Louisiana, where many African-Americans identify as mixed-race creoles and where a significant number — quarter of New Orleans population in 1830 — lived as free people before the Civil War.
The fastest growing part of the African-American population is from the Caribbean or Africa. Today, nearly one in ten African-Americans is an immigrant or their offspring; the number of such Americans has grown fourfold since 1970, and now accounts for over 3.7 million residents.
Racial bean counting will become even more difficult due to the rise of mixed race children, which has almost tripled to 14% since 1980; it is roughly 20% in Calif, and well higher in both red Alaska and blue Hawaii. This will increase as 17% of all marriages are now interracial.
It is often suggested that since other groups have received reparations — such as Japanese Americans forced into concentration camps in the Second World War — that African Americans should get them too. But those went to the actual victims, not their offspring.
Today’s African Americans are a century and half from slavery, and nearly a half century from the worst impacts of Jim Crow. Racism, to be sure, remains a problem, but as Bernie Sanders has correctly noted, the real issue is class.
The strongest case for reparations is based on economic disparities, but neither poverty or lack of upward mobility are primarily racial in nature. The plurality of poor people in America are white, even though Latinos and African Americans suffer poverty at higher rates.
More relevant issues — family breakdown, globalization and de-industrialization, high housing and energy prices, and, ironically, some argue, mass immigration — generally transcend race.
Barely one in four Americans, and only a small portion of whites, supports reparations, one reason why in 2016 Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders opposed them.
Now most leading party candidates, pandering for left-leaning voters in the Democratic primary, seems to be largely “all in” for reparations, not a promising position for the general election.
The real focus must be not on symbolism but economic growth, community and family stability. Having a black President may have been a deservedly proud moment for African Americans, but arguably they, and other minorities, may be doing better under President Trump.
If Democrats hope to defeat him, their emphasis should be on those issues — health care, lower taxes on working people, greater economic growth — that lift people of all races out of poverty and propel them into the middle class.
Give the larger portion of minorities in this position, such an emphasis on such policies would help minorities but would do so without excluding everyone else.
Americans want a fairer, more equitable America. Restoring the bad days of the racial republic — where people are defined by their ethnicity, not their character — is not the best way to get there.
