Increasingly, mainstream Democrats are calling for reparations to be paid to the descendants of African slaves who were owned in the antebellum Southern United States. From hand-wringing to high dudgeon, our Democrat leaders emote that only cold, hard cash can assuage our collective guilt. “We” all owe “them”, they assert. The time is now, they say, to face up to the American Original Sin that is Slavery!
Speak for yourselves, you willing descendants of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis! Perhaps, as Democrats, you keenly feel the guilt that your party earned by being America’s Party of Slavery for its first fourscore and seven years. Maybe their party’s legacy of supporting a century of Jim Crow Laws, backed by Ku Klux Klan terrorism, has provoked a moment of reckoning with conscience for Democrats.
I would have no problem at all if today’s Democrat Party paid reparations to the descendants of their victims. However, like every other Democrat “solution”, they do not limit responsibility for crimes to those who are personally culpable. Today’s Democrats claim that every American owes money and an apology to every black person for slavery.
This perverse irrationalism, a fever dream of shared shame and collective guilt, is a pretext for a redistribution of wealth that would make Karl Marx proud. It is racism, repackaged for the 21st Century.
No, I do not owe anyone a blessed thing! I never enslaved anyone, nor have I ever directly benefitted from that “peculiar institution”. No living American has ever owned a slave. No living American has ever been a chattel slave.
This is a long-dead issue. Our nation fought its bloodiest war to be free from sea to shining sea. A century later at the height of our Golden Age, we literally ripped the guts out of our cities to right the wrongs of Jim Crow and establish the legal guarantee against official legalized racism: the Civil Rights Law of 1964.
American Progressives are obsessed with collective identity. Democrats have always deemed individuals to be mere representatives of their group identity. The Democrat Coalition used to be urban party bosses, working class people, newly-arrived legal immigrants, and southern white elites. It is now composed of single women, Black people, Native Americans, welfare recipients, homosexuals, newly-arrived illegal aliens, and college-educated internationalist elites.
Never in its history did the Democrat Party identify itself with “Middle America”. It still does not. Middle America consists of culturally-assimilated descendants of immigrants from all over our world. Those of us in the cultural mainstream, who identify ourselves as American individuals rather than as members of variant special interest groups, are Middle America.
Believers in collective identity argues that structural racism exists which defies individual solution. For example, Reparations advocates complain that, “Too many young Black men are incarcerated!” This statistical disproportion is understood by the Woke to be a result of systemic racism and White privilege. Racism is so deeply ingrained into American society, Progressives argue, that black people haven’t a chance of earning their own success.
This is a self-serving delusion. The reason why a much larger proportion of young Black males are in prison, relative to their proportion of the population, is because too many young Black males commit serious crimes. Personal choice, not group identity, is the cause.
Reasonable people then fairly ask precisely why so many young Black men are prone to crime. The answer is not, and never has been, racial. The failed culture of today’s dystopian inner cities is what dooms so many residents of all races to live utterly wasted lives.
Black people are the primary victims of those demagogues who claim to speak for, “the Black Community”. Their Federal Welfare Programs have made generational poverty a way of life. Unproductive men have no place in families where Uncle Sam provides for and protects legions of single mothers and their fatherless children.
Boys grow up wild, in failed schools, without learning from men the self-discipline that is at the core of being a civilized man. Women cannot easily teach this to boys. Such males become cultural cannibals, predating upon their neighbors and relatives. Anarchy beckons seductively with the examples of the rich drug dealer and the smooth-talking grifter. Functional men, providers and protectors, are almost unknown.
Generations have been wasted because Democrat politicians leech parasitically off of the misery of the “Black Community”. Without an isolated and failing “Black Community”, what need would there be for the middlemen who dole out the government cash of political patronage to the desperate and hopeless?
The last thing that young Black men and women need is more Liberal compassion, and the “free money” it provides. Instead of Reparations, poor people need a new system of social welfare; one that is not designed to kill the souls of its recipients and keep them eternally dependent.
Poor people need not be perpetual victims! Poverty can be a temporary ordeal which hard-working individuals can overcome.
No one should accept their so-called group identity. Every single human being has a capacity to achieve success and independent self-sufficiency. This is what Democrats fear most; that their victims will take heart and make their own way in the world.
Welfare should be contingent on work, not guaranteed as an “entitlement”. We would need no illegal alien labor if those on welfare had the chance to earn a living doing those jobs which no one else wants. Recipients should be willing to move with their work.
American schools should not be warehouses for the uneducable. The children of poverty deserve schools where successful students are not demonized as being “Uncle Toms”. In the toughest neighborhoods, the savagery of the streets used to stop at the schoolyard gate. So we should make it once again.
Chattel slavery and Jim Crow are not merely crimes against Africans and African-Americans. Like the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, they were and are crimes against humanity. Every human being shares kinship with the long-dead victims of these crimes. Every one of us has an interest in giving truth to the words, “NEVER AGAIN!”
Only by reviving genuine hope in the capability of each free individual to successfully overcome the limits of the universal human condition will we reach MLK’s Promised Land of a colorblind meritocracy. Only when we see each other as fellow members of the same human race will we all be free at last.
