It’s Not Time Yet for Slavery Reparations

Reparations for slavery, once a fringe issue touted by a motley mix of black separatists, zealots and crackpots and that respected mainstream civil rights leaders shunned, have now been slammed onto the nation’s public-policy plate.

NAACP, Urban League and Congressional Black Caucus leaders all agree that reparations have merit. Outside of President Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, no other prominent black dares to publicly denounce reparations. Even some top white politicians, such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, have given a passing nod to reparations as valid for consideration. The Washington, D.C., reparations march Saturday aimed to put pressure on Congress and the administration to soften their resistance to reparations.

However, there is a simple reason Bush will not embrace reparations. He reads the opinion polls, and they show that the overwhelming majority of whites, other nonblacks and even many blacks think that reparations are a bad idea. And the numbers aren’t close. A CNN/USA Today poll taken after blacks filed two well-publicized reparations lawsuits last February found that 75% of Americans said corporations should not pay reparations, and a whopping 90% said the government should not pay reparations.

Reparations advocates have grabbed at every argument in the book to dent the wall of public resistance. They offer assurances that black millionaires, corporate presidents, superstar athletes and entertainers won’t get a dime of reparations money, that it will go to programs to aid the black poor and that it won’t guilt-trip all whites. They point out that Japanese Americans and Holocaust survivors have gotten reparations.

These arguments still fall on deaf ears. The reparations movement can’t shake the public tag that it is a movement exclusively of, by and for blacks.

Despite countless speeches pleading for racial brotherhood and interracial cooperation by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, that same tag was imprinted on the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.

It took national shock and revulsion over Southern mobs beating, maiming and killing white civil rights workers, and the massive presence of thousands of white students in Southern backwater towns, to shake the “for blacks only” label from the civil rights movement. Only then did it gain widespread public and political acceptance as an authentic movement to change laws and as public policy that would benefit labor, women, minorities and even whites as a whole.

The reparations movement does not possess the inherent racial egalitarianism of the civil rights movement. It is ensnared by its racial isolationism. The focus is solely to compensate the descendants of black slaves and whipsaw whites for modern-day racism. Most whites almost certainly applaud the fight to improve failing inner-city public schools, to provide better housing and health care and to battle drugs and the scourge of HIV/AIDS among blacks. But they also believe that these are social ills that afflict other minorities, the poor and marginally employed working-class whites nearly as hard. Reparations advocates make no mention of this.

As a consequence, reparations come off as a scam that would squander hard-earned tax dollars with nothing in return. In a time of soaring budget deficits, corporate meltdowns, the stock slide and the looming peril of massive layoffs that batter middle-class workers, reparations seem like a frivolous issue that is politically divisive and racially polarizing.

Despite the colossal resistance to reparations, a compelling argument still can be made that it is in the interest of government and business to pump more funds into specific projects, such as AIDS/HIV education and prevention, remedial education, job skills and training, drug and alcohol counseling and rehabilitation, computer access and literacy training. Such projects would boost the black poor, not gut public revenues and, most important, not finger all whites as culpable for slavery.

The issue won’t go away, but as long as most Americans are convinced that reparations are a terrible idea, a march won’t do much to change their thinking.

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of “The Crisis in Black and Black” (Middle Passage Press, 1998).