Reparations: What’s Enough Payback?

Jason Riley trashed Biden’s call for yet another “study” of slavery reparations when “few issues in history” have been addressed more thoroughly & we know human bondage has plagued every culture on earth.

It's not just that the first slaves in America were Native Americans “owned” by Indian masters & the next victims in line were white “indentured servants” fleeing (ironically) religious intolerance in Europe. The black WSJ columnist recently reminded the president that: “More than 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America between the 16th and 19th centuries, while only about 6% of African captives were sent directly to British North America,” at least, according to historian Steven Mintz. “’It is [also] striking,’ Harvard scholar Orlando Patterson [also] wrote, ‘that the total volume of African slaves acquired by Muslim masters is greater than the total acquired by Europeans in the Americas.’ Nor, [he] stressed, was slavery unique to Africa, Europe and the Islamic world or to a particular stretch of time. ‘There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery,’ he wrote. ‘It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region of the earth that has not at some time harbored the institution…’”

If all that’s true, Riley suggests, the moral argument for American “reparations” is misplaced: “The real moral obligation is to stop discriminating by race altogether, not change who’s on the receiving end,” which is all every reparations plan ever proposed would do … [Those] seeking reparations need to decide whether they want justice or payback.” They also need to tell us why the TRILLIONS already spent on the “Great Society” hasn’t been justice or payback enough.

Davd Soul