The Associated Press reports on New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul setting up a commission to make “non-binding” recommendations regarding the state’s debt to the victims of slavery, presumably that they should be addressed by monetary reparations. This is going to take at least a year, after which Hochul assumes, I’m guessing, that she’ll be able to use reparations as a wedge issue. But I digress; the post is about this section of the story:
The idea of using public money to compensate the descendants of enslaved people is almost certain to draw a backlash from some, including some white people who don’t believe they should have to pay for the sins of long-ago ancestors, and other ethnic groups that weren’t involved in the slave trade.
The Associated Press certainly understands evil, racist “white people.” It just knows they will selfishly want to hold on to their ill-gotten wealth and protest a massive transfer of cash from those who had nothing to do with slavery to those who never experienced slavery a day in their lives or ever knew anyone who did. And surely no African-Americans will be objective enough see the logical, economic and political problems with such a plan.
The AP apparently employs no editors capable of reading that swill and had and gently saying to some proudly woke reporter, “Uh, no. This is blatant racial stereotyping. Try again. I have an idea: why not just report the facts without indulging in mind-reading or making baseless predictions of what will happen more than a year from now? Incidentally, reparations are hardly a new idea, so you don’t need to speculate about what “some white people” are ‘almost certain to think.’ You can factually report on what economists, social scientists and other experts on both sides of the issue and of a variety of races and ethnicities have already said about the concept.”
Ethics Alarms 
When was slavery abolished in New York?
In the 1820s.
Is she trying to outdo Newsom, who backed away from reparations because it would be both political and economic suicide, or is she ignorant of what happened to California? (Although, I guess I could have left off “of what happened to California”…)
It’s either..
A) “We can do it better” like all those deluded Americans who think Communism hasn’t truly been tried and, in any case, wouldn’t be the same in America that it was in Russia.
Or…
B) Political pandering. She’s smart enough to know that it won’t work but she wants to get the black vote so she’s going to talk about it and then shrug her shoulders when it doesn’t happen and say, “Well, I tried.”
B.
Never underestimate a New York politician’s ability to waste money on studies for things they know they won’t ever do so that they can signal their virtue with all the lumens of 100,000 stars. Bill de Blasio was famous for this, every other year he would commission a study on schools in New York City, and why they were failing. Every other year, the report would come off, listing things, reasonable or not, that could be done, and then instead on enacting any of the recommendations, he would sit on it until people forgot about it, and start the process up again.
New York appears to be doing much the same for climate-change studies, and Francis Menton has used a LOT of blog space documenting them.
Newsom had the excuse of slavery not having existed during statehood in California.
I don’t know if I’ve related this story here before, but when I was in college, I had a math professor who was mathematically brilliant but socially retarded. The things he would do on a whiteboard freehand constantly baffled me. I loved his class so much. Interacting with him… Not at all.
I remember, vividly, a situation where a group of my friends were looking over the bursary and scholarship guide. As white men, and more than half of our graduating class, we we eligible for three or four, if we were native, there were dozens more… pages and pages. And if we were women, pages and pages more than that.
Now, some of the native ones made sense, a lot of them were sponsored by bands, and they wanted to keep their money in house. For some of them, you even had to claim specific ancestry.
The one that really stuck in my craw was the RBC Scholarship, the single largest scholarship on the list, to any class of people, and it was carved out for native applicants only. RBC isn’t a native band, it’s the Royal Bank of Canada. Now, we had taken law courses, we knew that this was technically (the best kind) allowed by “disenfranchised minority” language. We knew why RBC was doing that, they hope to ingratiate themselves with Native communities and gain business share that way. But the reality is that the technically (TBK) legal, business savvy discrimination of RBC was discrimination, and we said as much.
Well, our mathematically brilliant but socially retarded (MBSR) professor hear that opinion and said:
MBSR: “They’re allowed to do that, because they’re a disenfranchised minority”
Me: “Well, yeah, obviously. But that doesn’t make it right.”
To which he repeated a slogan that had been going around at the time, loudly, seemingly angry;
MBSR: “But we stole their land!!!”
Me: “I didn’t. Did you?”
And that’s the thing. MBSR was actually something of a family friend. His son and I went to high school together. He knew my family immigrated less than 50 years before then. He knew my grandparents, and that they started from nothing. He knew I was the first member of my family to go to school. In fact, even if you want to consider the original settlers land thieves, most Canadians can’t track their roots back to them.
So if this sin exists, where does it lie? Why would it lie with me? If you want to say that anyone who lives on the land, who buys property, is the beneficiary of a system that started with the theft of land… Sure, maybe. That’s at least coherent. But that would be true of recent immigrants from the Philippines as well, and that’s almost never the point being made. The point being made is that white people, regardless of their history, are a special class of oppressor. White people, to use this example “don’t believe they should have to pay for the sins of long-ago ancestors” while “other ethnic groups […] weren’t involved in the slave trade”.
Unless the white people weren’t. It’s even more stark in the context of American slavery. Even for families that can trace their roots so far back the approach the Mayflower, the reality is that there was probably never a slave owning person in their family tree. While slavery was relatively common, actually owning people was a <1% pastime.
The idea is that white people, as a class, should accept responsibility for the actions of people who weren't related to them, hundreds of years before they were born because we happen to share a skin tone. In any other context, this would be called out for the particularly ugly form of racism that it is.
Thanks, HT. I can always count on you bringing an excellent perspective to the issues raised on this blog, even though I might not agree with your positions. Your arguments are well crafted and reasoned. This comment is no different.
Reparations is a form of compensating someone for harm caused – in its purest form, it is putting parties in the prior positions, before the damage occurred. How does that work now? No one living in the US has been a profiteer or injured by slavery.
My problem with the reparations issue is this: How far back are we to go and who is required to pay reparations? Why single out descendants of slaves in the US? Why not give reparations to descendants of the Jews who built the pyramids in Egypt? If reparations are to be paid to ancestors of African slaves, when and where does it end? Are descendants of Chinese who worked on the railroads also entitled to reparations? How about Italian and Irish immigrants who faced discrimination? More recently, are descendants of illegal aliens/undocumented migrants entitled to reparations because their ancestors worked low-skill low-paying jobs without any legal status?
And who should pay? Should the current African governments pay reparations for the clans that sold their enemies to the Portuguese, the Italians, the British and Dutch, and Spaniards, who then took them to all parts of the newly discovered North and South American continents? What about the Maya? Should they pay reparations to the Toltecs and/or the Totonacans? As you stated, HT, slavery is not a sin committed only by Europeans. What about the Chinese and Japanese?
jvb
“As you stated, HT, slavery is not a sin committed only by Europeans. What about the Chinese and Japanese?”
Nevermind that…. I didn’t mention this in the comment, but a thought hit me as I was writing it: Because of the practice of slave rape, there are probably more descendants of slave owners among the black American population than there are among the white American population. Perhaps not in raw numbers (but maybe, who knows?) but almost certainly per capita. Angela Davis is a direct descendant of a slave owner.
Now I didn’t mention that because there’s no good argument to be made that slave-rape babies somehow benefitted off the sins of their father. But, I would be very careful, were on Team Reparations, about talking about how the descendants of these people should be made to pay.
The rationale in this specific instance is that New York had slavery, so New York, as a whole, has a duty to compensate, from its treasury, those who were enslaved under the laws of the State, and from that ordinary inheritance laws will be used to decide who inherits how much compensation.