Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883

Reparations without prevarications

History was made on August 19, 2020 when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) accepted the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nomination. She is the first major party, national ticket nominee to support reparations for black Americans to compensate for the historical injustices of slavery and segregation. But Harris’ heralding of reparations has not been a profile in courage (or clarity). Like her positions on Medicare-for-all and decriminalizing marijuana and prostitution, Harris has given conflicting statements regarding specific policies. Nevertheless, her support for reparations goes further than Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden (who favors studying the issue) and the Democratic Party platform (which supports establishing a commission to do the studying), both of which also hold positions representing firsts for a major party standard-bearer and platform, respectively. This outcome was all but foreordained when two-thirds of the approximately two dozen candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination expressed varying degrees of openness to reparations.

The present highwater mark for reparations comes one year after “The 1619 Project” appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The Project seeks to retcon the founding of the United States of America from 1776 to 1619, the year the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va., (although whether those Africans were slaves or indentured servants is disputed by historians). The Project itself is a compendium of essays, poems and fiction (although some of the essays might also be best classified as fiction) that purports to show how slavery and antiblack racism are the dominant themes in American history. In doing so, the Project’s authors manage to grossly misstate the impetus for the American Revolution, misrepresent Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality, miscalculate figures relating to banking capital in the North and South and the percentage of GDP derived from cotton exports, and minimize the role of white Americans in the Civil Rights movement. These errors have provoked an avalanche of criticism from leading historians of various races and political perspectives.

One does not have to be a historian to know that the American Revolution was not fought over slavery. But apparently asserting such a blatant falsehood will also not prevent one from winning a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, as Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Project’s mastermind, proved when she was presented with the prestigious award (appropriately named for a purveyor of shoddy journalism) last May. Nor will it prevent the Project from being taught to thousands of school children as a number of school districts have incorporated it into their curricula.

The Project’s prevarications have a purpose. According to Hannah-Jones, she writes “to try to get liberal white people to do what they say they believe in,” by making “a moral argument” using “guilt” and her “ultimate goal [for the Project] is that there’ll be a reparations bill passed.” Hannah-Jones’ goals are laudatory. However, defaming the United States of America is an illogical way to go about achieving her objectives. Black Americans deserve reparations. White liberals should foot the bill. But not as federal taxpayers because slavery and segregation were largely enacted outside of federal programs. White liberals should pay reparations because the Democratic Party, the political party that is primarily funded by and serves as the vehicle for the interests of white liberals, is the institution that bears primary historical responsibility for perpetuating slavery and segregation.

For most of its existence, the Democratic Party was an unabashed champion of antiblack racism. This embarrassing history included militant resistance to the abolition of slavery (until 1865) and desegregation (until the latter third of the 20th Century). Even liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed a former Klansman to the Supreme Court and white supremacists to his Cabinet and entrenched segregation through New Deal housing policies, the consequences of which still plague the black community. Recently, the Democratic Party has sought to distance itself from its shameful past by renaming the once-ubiquitous Jefferson-Jackson Day fundraisers and supporting the removal of statues, monuments, and any other reminders of what the Party would like forgotten. But old habits die hard. As recently as 2010, Senate Democrats allowed a former Klansman to serve as president pro tempore of the Senate, his tenure ending only because of his death. And who (other than the media) can forget that living monument to a bygone era of casual racism currently occupying the Virginia governor’s mansion?

To its credit, the Democratic Party no longer supports slavery or segregation. But that does not relieve it of its duty to compensate black Americans who are today still suffering from the Party’s past torment and oppression. The Democratic Party should be eager to start the reconciliation process by making cash payments to all black Americans. Social justice demands it.

Paul F. Petrick is an attorney and former member of the NAACP.

 
 
Rendered 03/28/2024 07:51