I do not marvel at the idiocy of what you are about to read. I marvel that the Washington Post put it out under the paper\’s masthead.
Here are the first four paragraphs of article written by Theodore R. Johnson which was published this past Friday…
If you want to shut down a conversation about race, just say the word “reparations.” Even black Americans are divided over the idea that money can compensate for the vestiges of an evil institution that ended 150 years ago; only 60 percent think the government should make cash payments to descendants of slaves. White Americans, on the other hand, have reached a consensus: In a YouGov poll taken shortly after the Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates\’s viral feature, “The Case for Reparations,” 94 percent were opposed.
Yet a year of protests over disparate law enforcement practices, a decade of particularly sharp income inequality and centuries of imparity in America show that racial reconciliation is impossible without some kind of broad-based, systemic reparations. Recognizing the original sin is simply not enough; we must also make moral and material amends for our nation’s treatment of African American citizens. But if a pecuniary answer can\’t fix the structural disadvantage – and it can\’t – what can?
Weighted voting.
Thanks to a compromise between Southern slaveholders who wanted enslaved blacks counted in the population, for the sake of boosting Southern congressional representation, and Northern whites who didn\’t, the framers enshrined the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. This agreement set the census value of a slave as 60 percent of the value of a free person. Even after the 13th Amendment neutralized the political (and moral) compromise by abolishing slavery, Jim Crow laws, which contravened the 14th Amendment\’s guarantee of equality, stopped blacks from voting. The just answer today is to invert that ratio. If black Americans were once counted as three-fifths of a person, let each African American voter now count as five-thirds.
…and I guarantee you the rest of it is every bit as idiotic.
Here are a few observations, and questions, for Mr. Johnson to ignore (as I strongly expect he would, if he read them):
-Yes, most Black people oppose reparations. You seem very surprised, because you assume Black people, as a group, think the way you do. Personally, I am not, because I assume Black people are individuals who think for themselves, and that a very large number do not want a concocted handout that makes them look like helpless, hapless, hopeless beggars.
-Are you surprised that non-Blacks – who, presumably would be paying reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, to people based exclusively on their skin color – would be even more against it than the intended recipients? Why?
-By the way, which Black people would get reparations? All Black people, including those who emigrated here after the slave era, thus whose forebears never spent a day enslaved in the USA?
-How about people from Haiti and other Carribean Islands, who intentionally, proactively bypassed Black-majority countries to come to the USA – often risking their lives to do so? Do they get reparations too?
-What about mixed-race people? Do they get 50% reparations? Or do you do a genealogical search on each one to determine the exact percentage?
-Do you demand that descendants of the Ashanti tribes, which were so instrumental in hunting Black people and selling them to the slave traders get reparations? Pay them? What?
-You seem to understand that the 3/5ths definition was not a value on the slaves as human beings, but on how they would be counted for tax and representation purposes. What, relevance, then, does your 5/3rds calculation have to do with voting?
-Can you point to any place in the USA today, or in your entire lifetime, where Black votes counted less than White votes?
I don\’t expect any answers from Mr. Johnson – not to me personally because I assume he will never see this blog, but to other people whom he has contact with and, I would like to think, are asking the same kinds of questions.
Now: can someone at the Washington Post explain why it published this idiocy?
