Reparations: Taking money from people who never owned slaves and giving it to people who never were slaves Robert Zimmerman
The effort to justify the new fad of forcing all Americans today to pay blacks reparations for the evil of slavery that was eliminated a century and a half ago at the cost of more than 600K lives continues. A recent published study by two “Didn’t Earn It” (DEI) academic elites at the Harvard Kennedy School attempts to justify the distribution of reparations now by claiming that the U.S. has a long history of paying out money to harmed individuals. From the paper’s abstract:
[T]he United States has a long-standing social norm that if an individual or community has suffered a harm, it is considered right for the federal government to provide some measure of what we term “reparatory compensation.” In discussing this norm and its implications for Black American reparations, we first describe the scale, categories, and interlocking and compounding effects of discriminatory harms by introducing a taxonomy of illustrative racial harms from slavery to the present. We then reveal how the social norm, precedent, and federal programs operate to provide victims with reparatory compensation, reviewing federal programs that offer compensation, such as environmental disasters, market failures, and vaccine injuries. We conclude that the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted word is key to understanding the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of these incompetent Harvard academics. In their paper they use numerous examples of cases where the government has provided compensation to actual individuals — such as veterans, individuals harmed by radiation from nuclear tests, and those who lost their pensions due to bankruptcy or mismanagement of their pension funds — and then claim this proves paying reparations to the community of blacks, based merely on their race and the past existence of slavery, is within traditional American jurisprudence.
This is all a lie. The American tradition of doling out government aid and compensation has always limited that aid only to people directly harmed by a specific circumstance or event. By law and traditional western values it has always been considered wrong to give aid to someone merely because of their skin color or the group they belong, for events that happened before they were even born.
First, slavery ended 150 years ago. No one in America has been a slave for generations. No one in America has owned slaves for generations. Second, most Americans today are not even descendents of either slaves or slave-owners. This applies even among blacks, since a large percentage of today’s black population are themselves immigrants who came here after slavery was abolished.
Third, even when slavery existed in the U.S., it was confined a few select states in the deep South prior to 1865. The rest of the country opposed it deeply, and when those slave states attempted to break away in order to continue the practice of enslaving blacks, the rest of the country rose up and fought a war to end slavery forever in those states.
California is a great example. It never had slaves and was always a free state. Yet, its legislature now wants to impose reparations on the modern generation, for something no one then or now had anything to do with. Similar proposals have been introduced in New York and Massachussetts, both of which were also free states that fought in the Civil War to end slavery.
I myself am personally enraged by this new effort to impose reparations for the slavery. I am Jewish. My ancestors did not even arrive in America until the turn of the last century, around 1900 give or take a decade. When the Civil War was being fought they were being oppressed by the Czar in Russia. Not only did they never participate in slavery or the slave trade, by religious and historical tradition Judaism has opposed all forms of slavery since the Romans kicked them out of Israel in the first two centuries after the birth of Jesus.
Essentially the modern movement to impose reparations is a power game, attempting to take money from people who never owned slaves and give it to people who never were slaves. And the purpose is to weaken the former while empowering the latter. In fact, it is simply another DEI program, giving preferential treatment to blacks based on their race.
Linda Bilmes
As for the authors of this paper, I call them “Didn’t Earn It” academics based on their writing and their own history. Linda Bilmes, the lead author, is clearly a partisan Democrat political operative, working in academia, based on her own profile posted on Harvard’s webpage. Her work is rift with typical DEI gobbly-gook pushing the leftist agenda. The obtuse language in the abstract above illustrates this quite well.
She has also repeatedly appeared on cable news outlets and other news programs pushing leftist political ideas and policies, under the guise of a “scholar”. The shallowness and partisan nature of her thinking is especially illustrated by how she describes her primary research goal:
Natural Capital accounting, and studying the economic value created by nature, open spaces, and the environment.
An honest translation of this sentence tells me that her work is really trying to prove that bankrupting human beings is a good thing if it results in a wonderfully pure environment.
Cornell William Brooks
Cornell William Brooks is no different. His profile pushes what he calls “social justice” repeatedly, an agenda that always translates into communist policies that also routinely favors some people over others, solely due to their race. His own academic work is amazingly thin, apparently comprised solely of this one paper. Yet Harvard has made him the “Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations” and the “Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice.” The one course he teaches there endorses the advocacy of communist and terrorist bomber Angela Davis, and is apparently focused on training leftist activists who can then go out and riot, occupy buildings on college campuses, and maybe spray paint on priceless art.
But then, these two professors at Harvard are now par for the course for all the Ivy Leagues schools. The professors in all the soft sciences and liberal arts at these schools are all partisan Democrats with shallow academic creditentials, all aimed at pushing the Marxist agenda in all things.
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