Rant about Reparations

By John R. “Buck” Surdu

San Francisco’s African American Reparations Committee recently recommended that the city give every black San Francisco resident $5M in reparations “not for slavery, since California was not technically a slave state, but “to address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.” I have yet to see any real data that supports this assertion of systemic racism – except racism against white men. Note reparations are only for black residents, not Chinese residents who suffered years of drudgery building the railroads, but worked themselves out of servitude and poverty, or white indentured servants, or descendants of Indians who suffered under Mexican (and Catholic church) oppression long before Kalifornia became a US territory or state. Only black people apparently suffered from “White supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement.” So, people who never owned slaves in a state that never had slaves are going to hand over millions of dollars to people who have never been slaves. Every black person in the city will become a millionaire overnight. Does that include the thousands of homeless people?  And how is that going to help anything? Who will pay for this ugly idea? Will there be any kind of metric whether this grotesque miscarriage has had the desired benefit? Will the program be discontinued if it doesn’t work?  Will people who abuse the money be forced to pay it back?  Or will this just be another perpetual unconstitutional government reallocation of wealth designed to further divide the nation and foment racial unrest? The latter, I think.

When I sent this link to a friend who lives in Kalifornia, he sent the following response that is worth reposting verbatim. The author shall remain anonymous, because he/she/it/they fear(s) for his/her/its/their life and livelihood if this was properly attributed.

• In the first 95% of human history, slavery and serfdom were recognized societal institutions, virtually globally, from 3,500 BC to 1800 AD.
• Most of the major world religions and ethics systems accepted that as the way the world was constituted and did not disapprove.
• After that lengthy and accepted tradition, to now try to condemn the practice and the participants of it seems untenable.
• There are ethical and moral reasons that ex post facto laws and bills of attainder are prohibited in the Constitution.  [But the folks in DC rarely read the Constitution.]
• It is inherently seen as unjust to impose laws retroactively or to punish a family for sins of one of its members.
• In the 18^th century, Western Europeans began to adopt the concept of the injustices of slavery.
• Always there are exceptions; the Russian enslaved a major portion of the German Army.
• In the five years after the war, as high as 40% of Germans interned in Russia died.
• The US had begun using slaves in the south before the Revolutionary War. [Thanks England. You created this mess and left us to sort it out. Remember that the next time some Brit gets on his moral high horse about slavery.]
• Half of my family have been in the US since they arrived in the 1600s.
• The other half (Germans and Irish) got here after the 13^th Amendment. [All of my family arrived in the US after the 13^th Amendment.]
• Not one of my US ancestors owned slaves or supported the US slave trade.
• Most of us lived in Illinois which was never a slave state nor enacted segregation.
• My Family and I are no more responsible for US slavery than for any other’s human sins.
• The slave states were very independent entities until 1865, over which we had little control.
• With money and blood, Civil War Illinois supported the slaves’ freedom (They’re welcome for it).
• By the year 1865, slavery was abolished by proclamation, and it was ratified by the 13^th Amendment.
• Other than being stationed there briefly in 1967-68, I never lived in the States from the old Confederacy.
• Neither my family nor even my race ever was any part of capturing and forcing African blacks into slavery.
• Inter-tribal warfare often resulted in ethnic genocide; but some of the losers were spared to be enslaved.
• That was done by their own race, not infrequently slave traders with Islamic family names, e.g. Obama.
• A huge number of black slaves were sold into the Ottoman empire where they were mistreated.
• The males were typically castrated, and the women were assaulted; they had truncated lives.
• The first two paths were death or a torturous life; what of the slaves in Western Africa?
  • If they were sold into the non-English New World, they often suffered tremendously.
  • In the Caribbean or South America, conditions were harsh and disease was rampant.
• The enslaved who were sold to the west were lucky to get sent to the U.S. as their new home.
• In the U.S., they were better housed, better fed, and better treated than free blacks in Africa.
• Their average life span was about 25% longer than their free brothers still in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Their lives were longer than white indentured servants, who got less care due to lower resale value.
• Emancipated Blacks in the ante-bellum era owned slaves at a higher rate than whites, rarely freeing them.
• Today, the median black person in America makes nearly two orders of magnitude [that means add two zeros at the end] more than sub-Saharans do.
• While the blacks were not treated well in Jim Crow South, their plight pales when compared to Jews of the Holocaust.
• The median income of blacks in the U.S. is higher than whites in Appalachia.
• The blacks’ tales of having to drink from separate water fountains and go to a separate-but-equal schools are not even close.
• Neither will they much impress the Armenians who died of the Genocide in the Ottoman Empire or the Chinese living in 1937 Nanking.
• EVERY BLACK PERSON IN THE US SHOULD DONATE $1 TO ME; A “THANK YOU” NOTE WOULD BE NICE, BUT I AM NOT HOLDING MY BREATH.

  The nation fought a civil war and spent billions of dollars to stop and then address the lingering effects of slavery. Thomas Sowell frequently asserts that blacks were better off 100 years after slavery than 50 years after affirmative action. One might argue that soft-hearted and even softer-headed affirmative action programs have hurt the black community by breaking up families (the stated goal of BLM) or removing incentives for work and achievement — the bigotry of low expectations. Affirmative action programs are typical government programs. There is no systematic means to measuring pre- and post-affirmative action results. Are these programs helping, hurting, or making no difference. In the latter two cases, they should be discontinued, and the government should stop forcibly extracting tax dollars for unconstitutional programs. We have no way to know the effects or value of these program. I assert that the government does not WANT to know.

I call them unconstitutional because the 10^th amendment doesn’t permit federal wealth redistribution and because it violates the equal protection clause. The government is proscribed from deciding that certain demographics are more equal than others. The government rarely obeys its own laws.  So, these Affirmative Action programs and racist quota systems continue unmeasured and unabated. And now the woke Leftists want to reward those who have been sheepishly funding these wasteful boondoggles by making their neighbors millionaires.

To say that the whole notion of reparations is disgusting, repugnant, and stupid is a gross understatement. Reparations are merely an effort to foment racial unrest, not an effort to fix anything.