Reparations: racial power play

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views May 20, 2002]

In "So much for patriotism; now back to the race war" (4/5/02), syndicated columnist Sam Francis describes the new lawsuits for "black reparations" against three major corporations, Aetna Insurance, Fleet Bank and CSX Railroad. With hundreds of companies to be targeted in the future, in the name of literally millions of black plaintiffs, Francis observes:

He [Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School] also lets an important cat out of his bag, at least for those who did not already know the cat was there.

The purpose of reparations is not simply to rake in an almost uncountable amount of swag from corporate and government coffers, let alone to exorcise the racial furies that still haunt most American blacks and many whites. The purpose, Mr. Ogletree tells us, is "to bring American society to a new reckoning with how our past affects the current conditions of African-Americans."

What that means is that the purpose of reparations is to bludgeon white Americans into further guilt over slavery and racial segregation and thereby soften them up for a continuing river of financial swag far into the future. Like Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month, the war on Confederate iconography and the crusade against major heroes and symbols of American history and culture, the reparations boondoggle is simply one more part of the continuing political race war that blacks are determined to wage against whites.

The legalistic flaws and ethical fallacies of the reparations lawsuit are therefore not really the point. The point is the struggle for what can only be called racial power that the whole reparations issue spearheads. What is happening with reparations is not a silly argument that won't stand up in court but a racial power play that may well eventually win simply because most whites have neither the will nor the brains to see what it means or why it's happening, let alone understand how to resist it.

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