The latest civil rights disaster
Ten reasons why reparations for slavery are a bad idea for black people -- and racist too.

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By David Horowitz

May 30, 2000 | It began as a fringe proposition favored by the politically extreme. But the idea that taxpayers should pay reparations to black Americans for the damages of slavery and segregation is no longer a fixation of the political margin. It is fast becoming the next big "civil rights" thing. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has already introduced legislation to set up a commission that would examine the impact of slavery as a foreordained prelude to some kind of legislated payback. (Conyers will become chairman of the Judiciary Committee if Democrats win back the House.) A coalition of African-Americans is claiming a debt of $4.1 trillion. A coalition of African nations is claiming a debt of $777 trillion against an assortment of governments including the United States.

Distinguished black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates have given the idea their imprimatur, while Randall Robinson, who led the successful boycott movement against South Africa a decade ago, has written a strident, anti-white, anti-American manifesto called "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," which has become a bible of the reparations cause.

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Nor is it just in the realm of ideas that the payback demand is gaining ground. Last week, the Chicago City Council voted 46-1 in favor of a reparations resolution. The lopsided nature of the vote persuaded Mayor Richard Daley to apologize for slavery (in Chicago?), thus joining what has become a familiar and unseemly ritual of contrition for the Clinton-era left. The primary sponsor of the resolution, Alderwoman Dorothy Tillman, has announced she is going to organize a "national convention" to push the issue of reparations in the coming year.

So what is wrong with the idea? In truth, just about everything. Examined closely, the claim for reparations is factually tendentious, morally incoherent and racially incendiary. Logically, it has about as much substance as the suggestion that O.J. Simpson should have been acquitted because of past racism by the criminal courts. Its impact on race relations and on the self-isolation of the African-American community is likely to be even worse.

If the reparations idea continues to gain traction, its most obvious effect will be to intensify ethnic antagonisms and generate new levels of racial resentment. It will further alienate African-Americans from their American roots and further isolate them from all of America's other communities (including whites), who are themselves blameless in the grievance of slavery, who cannot be held culpable for racial segregation and who, in fact, have made significant contributions to ending discrimination and redressing any lingering injustice.

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