By Jason L. Riley | Wall Street Journal
Democratic
Sen. Elizabeth Warren. PHOTO: KAREN
PULFER FOCHT/REUTERS
How can centuries-old oppression be to blame for problems that
became severe only recently?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren told a town-hall audience in
Jackson, Miss., Monday that “it’s time to start the national, full-blown
conversation” about slavery reparations for blacks. Come again?
Compensating
black Americans for past oppression has been a subject of discussion for
decades. The senator’s problem is that large majorities of the public have
consistently opposed reparations, not that we don’t talk about it.
James Forman, a black activist, called for $500 million
in reparations in 1969 and inspired a 1973 book, “The Case for Black
Reparations,” by Yale law professor Boris Bittker. Civil-rights organizations
rejected the idea, which the NAACP’s assistant director called “an illogical,
diversionary and paltry way out for guilt-ridden whites.”
Bayard Rustin, who
organized the 1963 March on Washington and was one of Martin Luther King’s
closest advisers, was another vocal skeptic of blacks cashing in on the
tribulations of long-gone forebears. “The idea of reparations is a ridiculous
idea,” Rustin said. “If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then
he may deserve some money, but he’s dead and gone and nobody owes me anything.”
Each year for more than a quarter-century, Rep. John
Conyers introduced a reparations bill in Congress.
Other books, like Randall
Robinson’s “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” have become best sellers.
And prominent legal scholars, such as Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School,
have filed class-action lawsuits seeking compensation for the descendants of
slaves.
The civil-rights leadership and black elites today generally support
reparations.
But public opinion hasn’t moved much.
In a 1997 ABC poll,
77% of respondents said the government should not pay black descendants of
slaves.
In a 2002 Gallup survey, it was 81%. A 2016 Marist poll put opposition
to reparations at 72%.
Even black support for reparations isn’t as high as you
might imagine.
The Gallup poll from 2002 found that half of blacks opposed
reparations, along with 90% of whites.
In 2015, a Kaiser Family Foundation/CNN
survey found that 52% of blacks, and only 8% of whites, agreed that the
government should “make cash payments to black Americans who are descendants of
slaves.”
Put another way, opposition to slavery reparations among
whites has been far higher than support for them among blacks.
Which might
explain why even prominent Democrats have frowned on the idea.
Barack Obama
opposed reparations when he ran for president in 2008, as did Hillary Clinton
and Bernie Sanders eight years later.
By contrast, reparations supporters in
the 2020 field include not only Ms. Warren but also Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen.
Cory Booker and former Housing Secretary Julián Castro. Mr. Sanders has been
more circumspect when pressed, but it’s clear that he’s less dismissive of the
idea than he was three years ago.
It’s too early to tell whether this recent Democratic
enthusiasm for reparations represents confidence, recklessness, an
exceptionally crude strategy for appealing to black voters, or some combination
of all three.
But it’s clear that supporters have convinced themselves that
racial disparities today persist due to racial discrimination in the past.
In an interview with National Public Radio last week, Ms.
Harris said that the “trauma” experienced among blacks today stems from their
slave past. “It is environmental. It is centuries of slavery, which was a form
of violence where women were raped, where children were taken from their
parents—violence associated with slavery,” said the senator. “There was never
any real intervention to break up what had been generations of people
experiencing the highest forms of trauma.”
Ms. Harris wants to hold slavery responsible for black
America’s contemporary problems.
But that requires ignoring the progress made
by blacks—both in absolute terms and relative to whites—who lived much closer
to the era of slavery.
For example, the soaring violent-crime rates that
produce so much “trauma” in poor black communities today did not exist in those
communities in the first 100 years after emancipation, even though poverty
rates at the time were much higher and racism was still legal and widespread.
Barry Latzer, a criminologist at John Jay College,
reports that black male homicides fell by nearly 18% in the 1940s and by
another 21% in the 1950s, while rates remained relatively flat among their
white counterparts over the same period.
Similarly, Harvard sociologist William
Julius Wilson has written that “in ghetto neighborhoods throughout the first
half of the twentieth century, rates of inner-city joblessness, teenage
pregnancy, out-of-wedlock births, female-headed families, welfare dependency
and serious crime were significantly lower than in later years and did not
reach catastrophic proportions until the mid-1970s.”
Did the “legacy of slavery” and Jim Crow skip over a
couple of generations and then reassert itself in the mid-1970s?
Or is it
possible that something else is primarily responsible for the outcomes we see
today?
