The ongoing reparations fraud

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views May 3, 2004]

The president of Brown University has appointed a committee to look into the history of the connections of that institution to the slave trade. This is to be no academic exercise of scholarly research. There is obviously supposed to be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

Dr. [Ruth] Simmons said that the idea of appointing a committee to look into Brown University's past came to her because she is a descendant of slaves and the building in which she works was built with the help of slaves. Unfortunately, there are descendants of slaves all over the world, and they are every color of the rainbow.

A recently published book titled Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters by Robert Davis shows that a million Europeans were enslaved by North Africans between 1500 and 1800. Nor were they the only Europeans enslaved. Julius Caesar marched in triumph through Rome in a procession that included British slaves he had captured. There were white slaves still being sold in Egypt two decades after blacks were freed in the United States. It was the same story in Asia, Africa, and among the Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. No race, country, or civilization had clean hands.

What makes the current reparations movement a fraud, whether at Brown University or in the country at large, is the attempt to depict slavery as something uniquely done to blacks by whites. Reparations advocates are doing this for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: That's where the money is.

Who is supposed to benefit from all this?

Are young blacks, who have a lot of educational lags to make up, supposed to be helped by this distraction or to become more employable with a chip on their shoulders? Are they to be helped by being led to believe that the way to get ahead is to hustle white people? The only clear winners in the reparations movement, whether at Brown or elsewhere, are the people who engage in it. At a minimum, they get publicity and ego gratification.

Dr. Simmons' standing has no doubt risen in politically correct circles, which would include not only the academic world but the foundation world and the world of liberal politics. If she ever wants to make a career move in any of these directions, she is now well set.

But at what price?

©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

-- Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, is the 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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