California’s Reparations Proposals Are a Mess

R eparations for slavery have been in the news of late, obviously because no issues less than 158 years old confront the nation.

Randall Robinson’s classic The Debt is selling well again on Amazon, and cities from Evanston, Ill., to Providence, R.I., are considering local programs of racial reparations. Across the aisle, Daily Wire firebrand Matt Walsh recently made headlines — at one point citing moi — for arguing that black Americans are likely not worse off today than we would be had our ancestors remained in Africa and, more broadly, that historical revisionism of any kind is foolish.

Most notably, the U.S. state and People’s Republic of California has formally empaneled a Reparations Task Force. Concurrently, a similar panel in San Francisco has recommended cash or check payments of $5 million to every eligible black city resident. The state-level effort has not floated a precise figure, but the total sum could begin with a B; lawmakers are expected to debate an amount once the task force submits its findings this summer. Already, the group is recommending the establishment of a “California American Freedman Affairs Agency” to help black citizens properly prepare tax-form-style reparations claims, the adoption of a black-studies curriculum in grades K–12, the establishment of totally free “wellness centers” in every black community, and the payment of market or union wages to incarcerated inmates working at jobs such as making big rocks into little ones.

The California and San Francisco reparations proposals, while easy to mock and not yet officially passed, are in fact a fairly sophisticated model for how reparations might actually occur. California, a state that never allowed slavery or the trade in slaves, and joined the United States only in 1850, ducks arguments such as Walsh’s or simple reminders that the Civil War ended 158 years ago by pegging the monetary figures to fairly vague “racism” rather than very specifically to chattel slavery. Awkward questions about racial DNA testing and the like are also avoided, via not limiting proposed payments to “ADOS” black Americans — American descendants of slavery. So far as I can tell, all black-identified persons who have resided in California for a certain period of time would receive monies under the state plan, while San Francisco’s proposal puts only limited restrictions on the applicant pool.

However, this robust try for reparations — currently wending through the legislature of a major state — falls apart quickly upon any serious examination. Multiple major logical issues with the plan, and pointed questions about it, come to mind almost immediately. One of the most obvious questions can be summed up as: If the justification for this windfall is plain historical unfairness, rather than actual slavery, why would reparations be limited to black people?

The great Native American nations and tribes, after all, used to occupy virtually all of the modern U.S.A. They lost their lands not merely because of honest war but also from despicably bad-faith negotiations, broken treaties, and deadly novel plagues spread by the Great White Father’s “death-walking” soldiers and bureaucrats. What are they owed, not merely by whites but by the black descendants of cowboys, since 25 percent of cowboys were black? And what are they owed by descendants of the legendary Indian fighters in the all-black Ninth and Tenth Cavalry regiments — the Buffalo Soldiers?

And, while this has been intentionally forgotten, the ancestors of most Appalachians and other “poor whites” came to the U.S. as indentured servants — serfs bound to work as unpaid laborers for seven or more years in exchange for a single trip across the seas. Many such bondsmen signed their indenture contracts under duress, many were lied to about the sketchy-at-best terms of the deals, and probably hundreds of thousands were simply kidnapped: This neglected era of U.S. history, which lasted until at least the mid-1700s, is in fact where that term “kidnap” originated. Those who survived their term of service generally wound up as penniless sharecroppers in states such as West Virginia, who “owed their soul to the company store.” Is there no case for $2,500,000 per (tow)-head here?

For that matter, why wouldn’t any reparations policy based on responding to general historical injustice extend to women? Adult human females, black and white, can quite seriously make a case for being the most historically oppressed group in the U.S. I’m by no means being glib here: While black men gained at least the legal right to vote in 1865, women of all shades did not until 1920.

Women quite literally could not open accounts at most major banks until the mid-1960s, and many could not “open a checking account, get a credit card, or apply for a loan or mortgage without a male co-signer” until perhaps a decade later. More brutally, it was not illegal nationwide to rape one’s wife until 1993, and an astonishing 15 states still provide major legal exceptions for marital rapists. While it might be argued that no one descends from a long line of only women, and so women as a class cannot have suffered generational harm, the plain fact is that tens of millions of women are alive today who suffered through the last two practices I described. Can my sisters get paid, and if not, why not?

Even should we as citizens be willing to accept the risk of endless lawsuits from every group that has suffered historically (which is to say: every human group), big practical problems remain even with relatively coherent reparations proposals like those in California. The most basic is that the amounts being demanded seem to have been pulled out of thin air — to put that more politely than I would in private — by activists and race hustlers.

Giving that no living black Americans were ever slaves, and few Californians are survivors of pre-1954 Southern Jim Crow, any coherent argument for reparations rests simply on the claim that black people would be $(X) better off absent the course of history — and so are owed $(X) amount of money. However, the practical problem with any figure like “$5,000,000” is that the entire median wealth gap between blacks and whites — at the multiple-person household level — is well under $200,000. Nor is all, or most, of that difference likely to be due to “racism.”

The current wealth gap of $164,100 (per a three-year-old figure likely to be on the high side) is a “raw,” unadjusted figure. The fact that the modal average age of a black American is 27, versus 58 for whites, is surely relevant to it. So is the fact that far larger percentages of black than white Americans live in the southern half of the country, where wages are lower (the same is true for Latinos, who have large and often stable families but only $36,000 in median household wealth).

And, while the overall “IQ gap” is likely closing, black — and Hispanic — students still score roughly 150 points below whites on board exams such as the SAT, which obviously predict down-road income and wealth. For that matter, there are fewer people on average earning money in black households, because a single-motherhood rate of 73 percent means that a far higher percentage of our families are one-earner than is the national norm. None of this was adjusted for in any fashion by California’s reparations efforts, which astonishingly do not seem to have included a statistical methodologist. But all of it matters: In the off chance that actual and fair reparations checks are ever written, these very well might be more on the order of $10,000 than $5 million.

And so forth. A purely empirical/quantitative analysis like this one has not yet even tackled the deeper moral issues surrounding reparations. Who pays them, for example? Will Appalachian descendants of the Union soldiers who freed the slaves, or recently arrived immigrants from Guatemala or Ukraine, be taxed in order to give their slightly richer black buddies and schoolmates money?

All in all, even the “next generation” of allegedly practical reparations proposals seems to face huge if not unbridgeable problems and perhaps serves best to remind citizens of an ancient maxim: It is almost always better to focus on tomorrow than on yesterday.