Reparations aren’t about justice. They’re an act of revenge

Ten years ago, the idea of “reparations” sat on the political fringes in America. The question of whether or not compensation should once have been paid to former slaves had died out.  Not least because by the start of the 21^st century, no one in America had actually suffered from slavery. The country was a century and a half away from the bloody civil war it had fought over the issue.

But there’s a tendency in our own age which does not allow wounds to mend or heal. Indeed, there is a movement that locates long-healed wounds in order to rip them open again. And then complain about the hurt caused to themselves.

In 2014, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an essay in The Atlantic making “The Case for Reparations.” In recent times, few articles have had more impact. The issue of reparations began to be picked up by the radical left and then made its way to the political center. By the time of the Democratic primaries in 2020 all of the party’s candidates were willing to talk about the issue. Some, including Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, expressed support for some form of reparations. Such candidates pointed to the disparity between average household wealth in white families and black families in America.

Once the Democrats were in power, one of the first things they did in Congress was apply pressure on President Biden to set up a commission to study reparations for black Americans both for slavery and for “systemic racism” — a guilty verdict that was already in.

More