Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too by David Horowitz (2001)
This list appeared as a full-page paid advertisement in several college newspapers around the country in 2001.
I THERE IS NO SINGLE GROUP CLEARLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CRIME OF SLAVERY Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?
II THERE IS NO ONE GROUP THAT BENEFITED EXCLUSIVELY FROM ITS FRUITS The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous “nation” in the world. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped.
III ONLY A TINY MINORITY OF WHITE AMERICANS EVER OWNED SLAVES, AND OTHERS GAVE THEIR LIVES TO FREE THEM
Only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves. This is true even for those who lived in the ante-bellum South where only one white in five was a slaveholder. Why should their descendants owe a debt? What about the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves? They gave their lives. What possible moral principle would ask them to pay (through their descendants) again? IV AMERICA TODAY IS A MULTI-ETHNIC NATION AND MOST AMERICANS HAVE NO CONNECTION (DIRECT OR INDIRECT) TO SLAVERY The two great waves of American immigration occurred after 1880 and then after 1960. What rationale would require Vietnamese boat people, Russian refuseniks, Iranian refugees, and Armenian victims of the Turkish persecution, Jews, Mexicans, Greeks, or Polish, Hungarian, Cambodian and Korean victims of Communism, to pay reparations to American blacks.
THE HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS USED TO JUSTIFY THE REPARATIONS CLAIM DO NOT APPLY, AND THE CLAIM ITSELF IS BASED ON RACE NOT INJURY
The historical precedents generally invoked to justify the reparations claim are payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans and African-American victims of racial experiments in Tuskegee, or racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. But in each case, the recipients of reparations were the direct victims of the injustice or their immediate families. This would be the only case of reparations to people who were not immediately affected and whose sole qualification to receive reparations would be racial. As has already been pointed out, during the slavery era, many blacks were free men or slaveowners themselves, yet the reparations claimants make no distinction between the roles blacks actually played in the injustice itself. Randall Robinson’s book on reparations,
The Debt, which is the manifesto of the reparations movement is pointedly sub-titled “What America Owes To Blacks.” If this is not racism, what is? VI THE REPARATIONS ARGUMENT IS BASED ON THE UNFOUNDED CLAIM THAT ALL AFRICAN-AMERICAN DESCENDANTS OF SLAVES SUFFER FROM THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF SLAVERY AND DISCRIMINATION No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended over 150 years ago. But there is plenty of evidence the hardships that occurred were hardships that individuals could and did overcome. The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? West Indian blacks in America are also descended from slaves but their average incomes are equivalent to the average incomes of whites (and nearly 25% higher than the average incomes of American born blacks). How is it that slavery adversely affected one large group of descendants but not the other? How can government be expected to decide an issue that is so subjective—and yet so critical—to the case?
VII THE REPARATIONS CLAIM IS ONE MORE ATTEMPT TO TURN AFRICAN-AMERICANS INTO VICTIMS. IT SENDS A DAMAGING MESSAGE TO THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY.
The renewed sense of grievance—which is what the claim for reparations will inevitably create—is neither a constructive nor a helpful message for black leaders to be sending to their communities and to others. To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans may have done to their ancestors fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victim-hood. How are the millions of refugees from tyranny and genocide who are now living in America going to receive these claims, moreover, except as demands for special treatment, an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can’t seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others—many less privileged than themselves?
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