[WAPO] 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.
Reparations in America have come to mean "free" money, so any serious discussion about them also mandates a discussion of how much -- an exercise doomed to failure. Other ways of imagining reparations (as the spilled blood of more than half a million Union soldiers during the Civil War; as affirmative action in universities and workplaces; as subsidized education) don't involve cash payments, but they also don't do enough to combat the structural disadvantages black Americans face -- disadvantages that have gone largely unaddressed by our legislative and executive branches.
Author's Website found here. He appears to have a rather singular focus. |