Reparations and Irresponsible Demagogues
The first thing to understand about the issue of reparations for slavery is
that no money is going to be paid. The very people who are demanding
reparations know it is not going to happen. Why then are they demanding
something that they know they are not going to get? Because the demagogues
themselves will benefit, even if nobody else does. Stirring up historic
grievances pays off in publicity and votes.
Some are saying that Congress should at least issue an official apology for
slavery. But slavery is not something you apologize for, any more than you
apologize for murder. You apologize for accidentally stepping on someone's toes
or for playing your TV too loud at night. But, if you have ever enslaved
anybody, an apology is not going to cut it. And if you never enslaved anybody,
then what are you apologizing for?
The very idea of apologizing for what somebody else did is meaningless,
however fashionable it has become. A scholar once said that the great economist
David Ricardo "was above the unctuous phrases that cost so little and
yield such ample returns." Apparently many others are not.
The only thing that would give the idea of reparations for slavery even the
appearance of rationality is an assumption of collective guilt, passed down
from generation to generation. But, if we start operating on the principle that
people alive today are responsible for what their ancestors did in centuries
past, we will be adopting a principle that can tear any society apart,
especially a multi-ethnic society like the United States.
Even if we were willing to go down that dangerous road, the facts of history
do not square with the demand for reparations. Millions of immigrants arrived
in this country from Europe, Asia and Latin America after slavery was over. Are
their descendants guilty too and expected to pay out hard cash to redeem
themselves? Even during the era of slavery, most white people owned no slaves.
Are their descendants supposed to pay for the descendants of those who did?
What about the effect of all this on today's black population? Is anyone
made better off by being supplied with resentments and distractions from the
task of developing the capabilities that pay off in a booming economy and a
high-tech world? Whites may experience a passing annoyance over the reparations
issue, but blacks--especially young blacks--can sustain more lasting damage
from misallocating their time, attention and efforts.
Does anyone seriously suggest that blacks in America today would be better
off if they were in Africa? If not, then what is the compensation for?
Sometimes it is claimed that slavery made a great contribution to the
development of the American economy, from which other Americans benefited, so
that reparations would be like back pay. Although slave owners benefited from
slavery, it is by no means obvious that there were net benefits to the economy
as a whole, especially when you subtract the staggering costs of the Civil War.
Should the immoral gains of dead people be repaid by living people who are
no better off than if slavery had never existed? The poorest region of the
United States has long been the region in which slavery was concentrated.
The same is true of Brazil--and was true of 18th century Europe. The
worldwide track record of slavery as an economic system is bad. Slave owners
benefited, but that is not saying that the economy as a whole benefited. The
last desperate argument for reparations is that blacks have lower incomes and
occupations than whites today because of the legacy of slavery. Do the people
who say this seriously believe that black and white incomes and occupations
would be the same if Africans had immigrated voluntarily to this country?
Scholars who have spent years studying racial and ethnic groups in countries
around the world have yet to come up with a single country where all the
different groups have the same incomes and occupations. Why would people from
Africa be the lone exception on this planet? Groups everywhere differ too much
in too many ways to have the same outcomes.
Slavery itself was not unique to Africans. The very word "slave"
derives from the name of a European people--the Slavs, who were enslaved for
centuries before the first African was brought to the Western Hemisphere. The
tragic fact is that slavery existed all over the world, for thousands of years.
Unfortunately, irresponsible demagogues have also existed for thousands of
years.
-- Thomas Sowell is an economist and author of many books, including
Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (Morrow), Inside
American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (Free
Press/Macmillan) and Migrations and Cultures: A World View (Basic
Books). Copyright ©2000 Creators Syndicate,
Inc.
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