The base of the Democratic Party, the group that votes consistently and reliably for it, consists largely of women and people of color. One of the ways that some Democratic presidential candidates have been differentiating themselves while playing to that base is by backing reparations for African-American slavery.
This idea not only takes the moral high ground, it is a genuinely liberal goal that outflanks Bernie Sanders from the left while showing how his color-blind approach to (primarily economic) equality does not serve the base. Politically, it’s a bold move because it’s very much one of those broad, sweeping agendas that is ambiguous yet capable of alienating. In its current form, we can expect it to turn off white people broadly, even ones who genuinely oppose racism.
One answer to the ambiguity and skepticism comes from Marcus H. Johnson, a Twitterati celeb with a solid track record of compelling, well-thought-out political analyses. This rant is my sympathetic but partially dissenting response to his most recent one, entitled “Here’s What A Reparations Plan Could Look Like“. Read it. I’ll wait here.
There is much to admire about the approach he takes here, but also one fatal yet fixable flaw. First, he makes the moral case, which is honestly the easiest part. No amount of money can make up for what America did to the people they kidnapped, imported, and enslaved, but it can go a long way to countering the lasting harm by, as he says, “closing the racial wealth gap”. Otherwise, slavery’s effects continue through the generations unabated.
Second, Johnson does the math about how much it might cost, showing that it’s economically feasible, not only in terms of being a manageable ongoing expense but also due to savings from second-order effects, such as lowering incarceration rates.
If he wanted to, he could probably make an even stronger argument here. For example, any substantial downward distribution of wealth has beneficial collateral consequences because of the increase in demand and subsequent creation of jobs, leading to a positive feedback cycle that strengthens the economy.
Finally, Johnson recognizes that reversing the effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutionalized racism (particularly redlining) is a multigenerational project, not something that can be accomplished with a lump sum payment.
He offers a few alternatives, including a persuasive hybrid. And he is entirely cognizant of how such a program would be at risk of being, as he says, “siphoned off by outside actors”, both before and after the money is spent.
The problem that remains is the elephant in the room, which is that “reparations would be race-specific as opposed to a race-neutral plan”. Only Black people—by whatever definition—would be eligible. He defends this by saying that, while race-neutral plans are popular, they “have a poor track record of actually curbing the racial wealth gap”.
That may well be the case, but I don’t believe that race-specificity is necessary, plausible, or good for reparations.
We know it’s not necessary because Jim Crow laws, not to mention modern voter-suppression techniques, successfully target Black people while ostensibly remaining race-neutral. It’s a simple trick, but one that goes both ways.
The fallout from historic white supremacy is plainly visible in a variety of metrics, so economic reparations can be targeted to disproportionately help those who were disproportionately hurt while still remaining race-neutral in form. This would amount to turning the methods of systemic racism back against itself.
It comes down to the difference between equality and equity. The truly color-blind approach leads to equality, which helps everyone but still leaves some people out. That’s because it assists those who don’t really need it while not giving enough to those who truly do. However, helping people on the basis of their identity uses group membership as a proxy for need, with errors in both directions and at the cost of abandoning equality, which generates backlash.
The alternative is to bring equity by focusing on context, not color. Under this doctrine, people get as much as they need of what they need, not just a nominally equal share, with distribution based on metrics, not demographics. For example, in the cartoon above, the second frame shows boxes assigned based on height, not hair color.
Race-specificity is not plausible because predicating benefits on racial identity is politically and intellectually self-defeating. It feeds the narrative that the equal rights movement is nothing more than a constellation of partisan agendas, each seeking to boost its own identity group over others.
This false narrative thwarts intersectionality, undermines support from equalitarians, and provides cover for white supremacists. St. Bernard will deride it as identity politics, and just this once, he’ll have half a point. Moreover, the whole concept depends on an essentialistic notion of race as a biological fact, which is literally the core of racism. This will never fly.
Practically, there is no principled, reasoned basis upon which to define Blackness for this purpose. The #ADOS movement insists that reparations should be limited to “American descendants of slaves”. By that measure, neither our first Black president, Barack Obama, nor our (hopefully) next one, Kamala Harris, would qualify. After all, neither Kenya nor Jamaica are part of America, and both of these people are “mixed race”. Many Americans would, in practice, be unable to prove that they qualify due to a lack of birth records dating back to the days of Lincoln.
Johnson’s version is more sane and would apparently include both Black presidents, but it’s not clear where he’d draw the line or on what basis. If history teaches us anything, I can only imagine that any attempt at legislating Blackness at this level would collapse into the same absurdities that led to terms like quadroon, octoroon, and hexadecaroon, all of which are based on the overtly-racist “one drop rule” of hypodescent. This just won’t work.
Race-specificity is not morally good because it leaves out all the other groups that are the targets of systematic oppression, both historical and ongoing. African-American slavery was not just an economic crime, but a cover for rapes, beatings, and murders, yet it exists on a spectrum of badness that is populated by other forms of oppression against other victims.
Native Americans were enslaved, massacred, and forced into reservation ghettos. Where are their reparations? How about the Japanese-Americans who were rounded up into internment camps? Or the Hispanics who were mass deported in the 30’s or the ones who have more recently been separated from their families and caged? Or the women who could not vote, were excluded from professions, and to this day make dimes on the dollar? Or the gays or the Jews or the Muslims? Why some but not others? It’s not fair.
A wise man, martyred for the cause, once said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. Yes, we do need reparations, much along the lines that Johnson outlines, but they have to be aimed at closing the discrimination gap for everyone; not in a blind way, but in one that counters all forms of discrimination against irrelevant and effectively-immutable traits instead of feeding them.
We want to create an America that not only has a low Gini coefficient, but where Black men can feel safe when the police drive by, and women can feel safe in their own homes. By serving the greater goal of fostering equality of both civil rights and economic standing, we can achieve true social justice.
The two goals are interdependent, so we must fight both heads of the hydra—bigotry and oligarchy—at once in order to achieve them. If we focus on just one aspect of hierarchy at a time, the other will defeat our efforts. Systemic and social discrimination are not just attacks on the obvious targets, but a proven way to undermine unity among the oppressed so as to let the already-rich and already-powerful become even more so. Likewise, equality of opportunity depends on economic equality in order to yield equitable results.
The solution is intersectionality; the recognition that, whether seen in terms of identity or class, there is only one war for equality, no matter how many fronts its battles are fought on. We can only do this by crafting policies that focus on context, not color and use metrics, not demographics so as to serve each person in each group according to their own needs, never leaving anyone behind.
There is strength is unity, but only if the unity is fair. That’s why I support all the reparations for all the people in the form of a Newer Deal. This includes reparations for African-American slavery, but is not limited to them.
Nice.