Earlier this month, a committee in San Francisco submitted a 60-page proposal to the City for a one-time reparations payment of $5 million to each eligible African-American resident. While the authors of the proposal acknowledge that San Francisco or California played no part in slavery, they decide to extend the eligibility for reparations beyond being a descendant of someone who was enslaved. Such eligibility requirements include having been incarcerated by the War on Drugs, being a descendant of someone impacted by redlining, or was affected by San Francisco's Urban Renewal between 1954 and 1973.
Let's start with the price tag of this proposal. Given the broad eligibility requirements, it would not be unreasonable to say that the vast majority of San Francisco's estimated 35,455 African-American citizens over 18 years of age would qualify. Giving $5 million to each African-American in San Francisco would make a price tag of $175 billion. The price tag of the proposed reparations is more than ten times the amount of the City's current budget of $14 billion. As a Hoover Institution analysis on San Francisco's reparation proposal points out, this does not even factor in the other proposed recommendations that would add an additional $25 billion to the price tag.
The proposal points out some historical wrongs. It should go without saying that slavery is an atrocious crime against liberty and humanity. Redlining was a harmful housing policy started by the Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration during the New Deal era that exacerbated racial wealth gaps. I have taken issue with the War on Drugs because it created a bloated corrections system incarcerating thousands of Americans while doing next to nothing to lower drug consumption. As for the Urban Renewal, I do not have an issue with improving housing. It is worth pointing out that liberals at the time were in support of the Urban Renewal.
Where I take issue is with reparations being the solution. I first wrote about reparations in 2014 when I tackled the ethical, economic, and logistical issues with reparations. I will bring up some of those issues up here today, but I want to address the argument for reparations by asking some questions and show how implementation of reparations is nigh impossible.
Who qualifies for reparations?
If anyone should receive reparations for slavery, it would be those directly impacted by slavery. At least with Holocaust survivors and the Japanese-Americans who had to endure internment camps, the restitution was primarily made to those who went through the atrocities. It has been over 150 years since this country had a Civil War and slavery ended in the United States. All of those directly impacted by slavery are dead. What should be the percentage of Black ancestry required to receive reparations? Do mixed-race individuals qualify? Should wealthy and successful Black San Franciscans receive reparations? What about recent Black immigrants from Africa or the West Indies? But this avoids a bigger question: Why should people so far removed from slavery be held accountable for the damage caused by slavery?
When does it end?
If this were only about slavery, that would be one thing. However, the San Francisco proposal goes beyond slavery, as does author Ta-Nehisi Coates and countless others who bring up the topic of systemic racism. If reparations were only about slavery, the San Francisco proposal would not make any sense because California never partook in the Atlantic slave trade.
The San Francisco proposal states that these reparations should exist because the "repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement." Here is the issue with that argument that is widely held by the pro-reparations crowd: Black people were not the only Americans screwed over by the government in such a fashion.
There were the Chinese who felt a lot of discrimination through the Oriental Exclusion Acts and coolie labor (苦力), particularly in California. Do you hear a call from Chinese-Americans to receive millions in reparations? There were Japanese-Americans who were interred during World War II. Let's not forget the Jews, the Irish, Native Americans, and gay people. This is not to minimize what African-Americans have historically endured in a U.S. historical context. At the same time, it is equally true that there is no shortage of individuals that could claim harm by U.S. government policies or judicial enforcement.
And that is only looking at U.S. history. If we look at world history, injustice is all too common. By this standard, there is no country or government prior to the 21st century that would be able to withstand woke scrutiny. The brutality that countless had to endure over time would make nearly everyone eligible for reparations of some sort. It would be a nonstop litany of grievance politics. Again, when does it end?
Why aren't reparations proponents asking other countries for reparations?
The United States was not the only country involved in the Atlantic slave trade. There were the European nations of Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Multiple African nations have ancestors who played their part, including Benin, Egypt, Morocco, and Cameroon. Slavery was not a uniquely American institution. Slavery existed prior to the Atlantic slave trade; it has been an institution since antiquity. Sadly, it still exists. So why aren't the woke citizens of San Francisco issuing a compensation claim to the nations that kidnapped, detained, and sold people into slavery?
Who is ultimately going to pay for this?
In the San Francisco proposal, they are asking for an amount that shadows the City's annual budget, as well as the $22.5 billion deficit that the state of California already has. On a national level, we have over $31 trillion in debt and a debt-to-GDP ratio that is higher than it was shortly after World War II. The question of who is going to pay goes beyond the price tag or the solvency issues. San Francisco's population is 51.1 percent White and 37.2 percent Asian (Census). Nationwide demographics are different, but the distribution remains the same: the money would go from non-Black citizens to Black citizens. This brings up some uncomfortable questions to better understand the nuance.
Should Caucasian-Americans whose ancestors fought for the Union be exempt from paying? What about white people whose ancestors were not even in the United States prior to the Civil War? I can tell you that about three-quarters of my ancestors didn’t immigrate to the United States until the 20th century. What about Black people whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy or were descended from slave traders in Africa? And why should Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans pay for reparations? Was the suffering of their ancestors not enough to merit reparations? These may sound like absurd questions, but that is because refuting an absurd system as reparations requires replying to the absurdity.
This highlights another issue with this proposal: collective justice. For the social justice crowd on the Left, reparations are fair because they believe in collective guilt, i.e., everyone should be judged the same for being part of a certain demographic, regardless of their individual involvement. For the rest of us, guilt and innocence should be determined on an individual level. By this collective guilt "logic," all Muslims would be responsible for 9-11. All gun owners would be held responsible for mass shootings. All straight people would be responsible for the oppression and stigma of gay people. But we know that such logic does not withstand scrutiny. All non-Black citizens of the United States should not be held responsible for slavery that ended nearly sixteen decades ago. Oversimplifying white people and their lack of involvement in a slave trade that has not occurred for well over a century is not only racist, but it illustrates the intellectual inconsistency of reparations proponents.
These points get at another issue of trying to give out reparations generations after the incident has occurred. When you go back this many generations, the genealogical answers to who has standing become less straight-forward and more muddled, thereby diminishing the argument for reparations.
Would reparations help heal or ease racial tensions?
If we look at 2022 Pew Research poll results for reparations specifically, we have a mixed picture. 68 percent of Americans do not approve of reparations. Race demographics is where it gets tricky. 77 percent of African-Americans approve, whereas 18 percent of white people do. There is more approval from Hispanics and Asians than Caucasian-Americans (39 and 33 percent, respectively). As we can see, there is a racial divide on the question of reparations. Per the infographic below, there is an even bigger divide by political affiliation.
I thought that reparations would do nothing to help race relations back in 2014. Since then, we have had more political polarization and social media amplifying societal contentiousness. Given these poll results and political contention in 2023 America, it is not difficult to foresee the political battles, social disruption, and further racial tensions that such a policy would most likely engender. And the bigger the payout, the bigger the resentment. As former Manhattan Institute fellow Coleman Hughes stated:
If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further - making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today. We would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors, and turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction, from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.
Would African-Americans have been better off if there ancestors were not sold into slavery?
This question was brought up by Cato Institute scholar Douglas Bandow. This a controversial question, but it points out a major flaw in the reparations argument. Slavery is an abhorrent practice. There is no moral justification for it. We should not forget the legal or economic progress that minorities in the United States have made, as much as reparation proponents would like to do. We should also ask what would have most likely happened if the slavery did not occur. To quote Bandow:
The U.S., for all its flaws, provides far more economic opportunities than the African nations where those seeking compensation would have ended up if their ancestors had not been transported to the New World. That doesn't justify the crime of slavery, of course, but it vitiates any claim for 'compensation' of the descendants of slaves.
Conclusion
Slavery was and is a despicable infringement of human rights. The treatment of African-Americans following the Civil War was no less excusable. At the same time, reparations are nothing more than a massive redistributionist scheme that does nothing to bring about justice while giving the political Left more money and power. To spend so much money to so little effect is fiscally irresponsible as it is morally egregious.
When discussing redlining last month, I listed some policy ideas that did not involve costing billions and further dividing the nation. Although I disagreed with Senator Corey Booker's baby bonds plan, it at least avoided the racial tensions that come with reparations. We should be able to talk about tough issues on the topic of race, but we should equally discard such counterproductive measures as reparations.
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