— Newsday (my pick for the worst newspaper in America) columnist Sheryl McCarthy writes a bizarre column on reparations for slavery. First she ticks off some of the reasons that reparations would be counter-productive, such as backlash and fraud. But she then changes her tune and says reparations would be hunky-dory as long as they’re paid by private companies and not the government. Her reasoning, if you can call it that:
With This New Suit, Reparations Start Making Sense.
A colleague of mine made a convincing argument that these and others companies should be made to pay up. The U.S. economy is like Enron, she said, a structure that in its reliance on slavery first and on the devaluing of black labor later is an economy built on business gimickry, accounting fraud and illusion. And at last the whole scam is being exposed.
There’s an illusion here alright, but its not that we live in an Enron economy, or even that slavery was ever a significant factor in the development of the American economy; the illusion is that most Americans are as addicted to class jealousy as McCarthy and the reparations demagogues (Sharpton, Gates, Jackson, et. al.) Americans are no more eager to be taken to the cleaners by a band of flim-flam artists raiding our 401K’s than our federal treasury, so we aren’t going to suddenly drop critical judgment on the belief that they’ve found the Money Tree. Secondly, there’s no way of helping people who are dead, no matter how hard their lives were. And thirdly, most descendents of African-American slaves are embarrassed by the opportunistic reparations movement and rightly fear the division and backlash that can be its only legacy.
Reparations paid by the taxpayers as a whole make no sense because the victims are dead; reparations paid by stockholders and other retirees fail for the same reason.
Not to mention the fact that at the time these profits were being made, slavery was legal. Isn’t there something in the Constitution about not being able to retroactively change the law?