California’s Bigotry of No Expectations

C alifornia’s Reparations Task Force released its final report at the end of June. Coming in at over 1,000 pages, the report attempts to analyze the legacy of slavery and other forms of discrimination against black Americans, both within California — which, it should be noted, was admitted to the union as a free state — and nationwide. The report recommends reparations payments that could cost the state trillions, including over $225 billion to atone for the War on Drugs alone, which does not foreclose the possibility of “additional payments as new evidence becomes available.” It also offers a wide variety of other policy recommendations that range from the merely absurd to the highly destructive.

Taken together, the proposals amount to a shameful program rooted in the very sort of discriminatory views the authors purport to confront.

Some of the claims contained within the report are, frankly, ridiculous. It praises the Vietnam-era Project 100,000 as “a successful recruitment tool for Black soldiers.” Project 100,000, which recruited soldiers who would have otherwise been disqualified due to low intelligence or physical fitness, is almost universally decried for its extremely high casualty rate. Erecting “the sort of monuments we make today and the naming of objects we name today” is apparently a “western and post-medieval practice.” The builders of Trajan’s Column, Hadrian’s Wall, and the Great Pyramid of Khufu could not be reached for comment. The accumulation of child-support debt is the fault of laws that “have torn African American families apart,” not the failure of some absentee fathers to support their children. The report even accidentally provides a good case against the efficacy of Great Society welfare programs:

Preliminary research suggests that, despite rapid accumulation of wealth by African Americans in the decades after slavery and a narrowing of the racial wealth gap during World War II and the Civil Rights era, this progress halted by the mid-20th century with the racial wealth gap widening over the last several decades.

The report relies in large part on a 2005 U.N. resolution it refers to as the “Principles on Reparation” to provide the historical precedent and basic legal framework for its demands. The resolution describes reparatory obligations as applicable only to victims of human-rights violations and their immediate families, however, whereas the California report says that eligibility for many of the forms of reparation it demands should include any “Black descendant of a chattel enslaved person or a descendant of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th Century.” This is fundamentally unjust. The funding for these plans comes from the taxpayer. Redistributing money from one citizen to another due to harms done to a third 200 years ago is a complete rejection of the traditional American understanding of property rights and limited government.

The report’s recommendations also extend far beyond mere monetary reparations. Its writers give the impression that they believe black Americans are incapable of succeeding on their own merits. The history of slavery and racial discrimination, they argue, caused “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to become intrinsic to African American culture.” It implicitly relies on this analysis to explain many of the disparities between American blacks and whites that it cannot otherwise show are produced by discrimination.

The consequence of this belief is a deep aversion to holding individual black people who commit crimes accountable for their actions. This aversion is made clear through recommendations that would upend California’s justice system. “Slave patrols,” we are told, “had many similarities with modern police departments”: Both have hierarchical organizations and use dogs. Similarly, the report argues that over-policing and police brutality constitute acts of genocide, even as it also complains about “under-policing.” Unsurprisingly enough, the report calls for the abolition of the death penalty, which it describes as the “modern day, legal equivalent of lynching.” It also recommends an end to cash bail — even though New York recently rolled back a bail-reform law that some analysts blamed for a reduction in public safety. It goes beyond these somewhat commonplace progressive proposals in demanding that “the racial impact of laws” be analyzed before they take effect to ensure they do not contribute to “racial and ethnic disparities,” which, if the wide-ranging nature of the report is any indication, could be used to block an untold number of laws. Even special-education classes come under fire for allegedly “socializ[ing] Black children for prison.”

Perhaps the most striking example of this attitude is the report’s analysis of domestic violence in the black community. Both black men and women, it says, experience domestic violence at higher rates than their white counterparts do. Yet the report explains this disparity by arguing that, among other factors, “systemic racism throughout American history” has produced “displaced anger, hatred, and frustration toward family members.”

I rather doubt this connection. Both Asian and Hispanic women are less likely than white women to have experienced domestic violence, according to the CDC’s “2016/2017 Report on Intimate Partner Violence,” which would be unlikely if it really is spurred by historical discrimination. But if the black American experience is sui generis such that the report’s analysis is correct, its proposed remedies do black Americans a disservice. No amount of money can assuage the feeling of being an outcast in one’s own country. Indeed, the report’s policy program would inflame such feelings, especially through its demand that schools play an active role in promoting “ethnic identity development.”

All the historical wrongs and grievances mentioned in the report (at least those that actually occurred) were inspired by the belief that black and white people are essentially different. Nothing will perpetuate this belief longer than efforts to fixate on one’s sense of ethnic identity. Chief Justice Roberts famously wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it”; the same is true for racial alienation. The achievements of notable black Americans should indeed be taught, but they should be treated as contributors to a shared, color-blind American history rather than isolated into ethnic-studies classrooms or treated as significant by virtue of their race.

The intellectual decrepitude of the report shows the reparations movement to be misnamed. The effect of these recommendations, if enacted by the legislature, would not be to repair the divides between black and white Americans. Its high-flying language about “cultivat[ing] a sense of reverence for the journey of African American political power” merely hides the fact that the report’s authors hope to use that power to enable a cash grab for themselves and their political allies. The expansive eligibility shows that they fundamentally do not believe that the black community can succeed without external support. Yet racial reconciliation has always been driven by the mutual respect created by economic self-reliance, a common commitment to our shared cultural heritage, and, though clichéd it may be, a commitment to viewing people according to their character and not their color. While the members of the reparations task force may not be willing to adopt those values, most Americans — including most black Americans — already have.