It's not going to happen

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views August 27, 2001]

Blacks have already been the first victims of the campaign to get reparations for slavery. The longer this futile campaign goes on, the more additional blacks will be victimized.

How have blacks been victimized thus far? Some have been asked to supply identifying information, so that they can get their individual shares of the reparations. Those who complied and supplied this information have since discovered that it was being used to steal their identities and saddle them with debts run up by con men.

The most important thing to keep in mind about reparations is that it is never going to happen. No Congress is going to pass, and no president is going to sign, a bill that takes money from the great majority of American voters to pay a debt that they don't feel they owe.

You are never going to convince people whose ancestors arrived in America after the Civil War that they owe anybody anything for what happened in the antebellum South. You are never going to convince people outside the South that they owe something for what happened in the South. And you are never going to convince the descendants of the majority of white Southerners, whose ancestors were too poor to buy slaves if they wanted to, that they owe anybody anything.

The great majority of blacks will gain nothing. Among the things they will lose is the good will of the rest of the society--a society in which they are not even the largest minority any more. In that vulnerable position, blacks can ill afford to come across as people who are constantly trying to get something without earning it.

-- Thomas Sowell, syndicated columnist 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).

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