" . . . Clever? How about racist. . . .
Oh please.
I heard a paper at the AEA meetings by Cecilia Conrad
about reparations which took one of her relatives as a
point of departure. There was apparently a very clear
system of discriminatory pay in New Orleans, where
the aunt was a school teacher or nurse, I forget which.
She made a good case.
It should be obvious that the proximity of the people
in question, in terms of time, has something to do with
the salience of the issue. It's one thing to refer to
a close and familiar relative, whether it's CC's aunt
or somebody's grandparents killed by the Nazis.
At some point, however, going back in time becomes
an exercise in political rhetoric rather than one
of social justice. How far back is appropriate?
What about indentured Irish servants? Chinese
railroad builders? Suppose the debt is so high
(a realistic possibility, I would say, as I did
in my little essay on this topic) that repayment
is utterly implausible. Or suppose we had
socialism. Would a socialist govt extract
from those who 'owed' and make those who
were owed richer on that account? I doubt it.
The distribution of wealth has little moral
rationale in many dimensions. That's a worthwhile
topic for political discourse -- maybe the most
important one. But you can't turn history
inside out, and a politics based on some illusory
approximation of that is incoherent emotionalism.
Slavery in the Western Hemisphere endured over
centuries. So why shouldn't the jews petition
Christendom for a similar period of oppression?
Why is that any less serious? That's the irony
underlying the joke.
Now someone could say, oppression deriving from
slavery endures to this day. But in that case
reparations is no longer the issue: current
circumstances are. Those with no historic
claim (i.e., the Hmong people in Minnesota)
are no less relevant than the descendants
of slaves.
I think this follows regardless of how much
race should be elevated as a political issue.
If I was a BRC person, I would talk about the
injustice of wealth and its historic roots,
including the obvious racial dimension.
I would not elevate reparations as a remedy.
One reason reparations
gets the attention it does is the landscape
of likely remedies seems so barren. It there
was a movement pressuring the Gov to enact
all manner of progressive programs and laws,
or for that matter a serious revolutionary
movement, nobody would be wasting their time
on reparations.
mbs
