Three Questions That Probably Doom California’s Reparations Push

A s California seriously debates the logic of paying reparations to black Americans, it is important to review the implausibility of a reparations plan.

Although I would likely accept payment should money ever actually be offered (ungallant to refuse, really), reparations are a notably bad idea. As I noted in a recent book chapter, any serious reparations program must confront three tough questions: Who is to get paid, who will be paying out the money, and who is next to be paid.

The first question might sound easy to answer: “Black people” get reparations money. But who counts as black? Does that pool include the 12 percent of African Americans born in a foreign country, or the 9–10 percent who were “born in the U.S. (but) have at least one foreign-born parent”? How about the perhaps 40 percent of black Americans who have at least an immigrant grandmother or grandad? What about members of the 10.2 percent of the country who identify as biracial, a group that is disproportionately made up of people who are half black and half white?

It should be noted that these populations are doing quite well. Nigerian-Americans often test as the best-educated group in the United States, and black immigrants as a whole earn around the U.S. average, despite their short tenure in the country. The Brookings Institution recently found that multiracial Americans — half of whom, in its sample, were black and white — have achieved academic parity with white students and “have the same test scores as whites on math, science, and writing” exams. On reading tests, multiracial kids “outperform other groups, . . . including Asians” — which certainly bodes well for their futures.

This raises the question — should an upper-middle-class child who is (say) half Caucasian and half Kenyan be given money or privileges for “being black”?

Morally speaking, the “Who gives?” question is even trickier than the “Who gets?” — which has some plausible if creepy answers (e.g., “American descendants of slaves who genetically test as being at least 50 percent African in ancestral terms”). Are first- and second-generation non-black immigrants, or the descendants of Ellis Island– or Bracero Program–era migrants, who have had nothing to do with slavery, expected to pay into a communal kitty to compensate the distant descendants of slaves?

What about the descendants of the Union soldiers who freed the slaves — losing one man in Northern blue for every nine captive Africans who were let go? What about us black folks? All state- or national-level government programs are funded by taxes or the redivision of tax revenue. Am I, at my current level of income, going to have to pay substantially to write myself an unearned check?

The last question waits in the shadows: Who’s next? Largely because of some historical actions of General Sherman, Americans think of reparations as a “black thing.” However, at some level, Native Americans probably faced more specific and remediable harms — including broken treaties that had promised tribes certain tracts of land, for example — than any other group across the sweep of American history. Beyond Native Americans, there seems to be no reason other groups might not qualify for a “stimulus package.” This is certainly the case if, as in California, reparations are tethered to the simple reality of past abuses rather than specifically to slavery or war. In that context, descendants of the Appalachian bondsmen who were brought here on “white guinea-men” and who long “owed their soul to the company store,” the Chinese railroad workers bound by some of history’s most dubious contracts and long denied full U.S. citizenship, and the Mexican Bracero Program peons would all seem to have a solid claim. Women might as well. As any feminist friend will gladly remind you, women only obtained the vote in 1920, and rape by husbands was not made nationally illegal until 1993.

One final point, separate from the three questions, is that the amounts proposed for reparations payments make no sense. While reparations bills authored by California state senator Steven Bradford “merely” propose setting up a major new agency to study the reparations question and eventually manage payouts, the reparations-commission plan — estimated to provide about $1.4 million to each payee — would cost the state $2.8 trillion over 30 years, according to the Pacific Research Institute’s analysis. Worse, San Francisco’s local proposal would provide “payments of $5,000,000 to every . . . Black adult,” eliminate all their “personal and tax burdens,” give them “guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000” for the next 250 years, and offer homes in core-city San Francisco for “$1 a family.”

These ideas are, frankly, absurd.

State senator Bradford specifically has proposed two bills, one creating “a new state agency” to oversee state efforts to compensate blacks for past abuses and the second establishing a “state fund for reparations” capable of eventually making payouts. Governor Gavin Newsom wanted to convert the proposals into a study, which Bradford rejected. Ironically, members of the Legislative Black Caucus did Newsom’s bidding in blocking the bills on the last night of the legislative session.

Bradford now asks, “Why not have a special session on (reparations)? I think that’s worthy of discussion.”

As Newsom and other lawmakers dodge the political hot potato, it’s important that they ask themselves the three key questions above before charting the state’s path on reparations.