Reparations: A Wrong Answer and Sure Road to Democrat Party Defeat

In addition to Bernie Sanders' - in my view, insane - talk about socialism, one other issue being pressed by far left Democrats could help re-elect Donald Trump and, of course, in the process achieve the exact opposite of what these ultra-liberals want.  That issue is reparations for slavery which will (i) push many working class whites firmly into Trump's waiting arms, and (ii) ignores the fact that far more whites than blacks are living in poverty.  In a perfect world, it would be nice to have a magic wand and be able to erase slavery and Jim Crow from America's history, yet the push for reparations will likely only exacerbate racial division, especially among poorer whites who would rightly or wrongly likely view reparations as "those people" getting special rights at their own expense.  Indeed, Trump's 2016 calls to stir up racial division would likely be greatly intensified in 2020.  A piece in The Atlantic by a black authors argues that reparations is not the way to remedy the situation and that the battle against poverty needs to be a collective fight.  Here are article highlights:

Juneteenth—the annual celebration of when enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom—brought two hearings this year on Capitol Hill. The first was widely covered. The House Judiciary Committee looked at H.R. 40, a proposal to create a commission to study reparations for slavery and subsequent discrimination. Witnesses debated the utility and justice of pursuing financial reparations to right some of the wrongs that, past and present, have kept black people economically disadvantaged in the United States.

At the same time, the House Budget Committee held a hearing on poverty in America, which drew a fraction of the media coverage. In that hearing, the economic disadvantages facing African Americans were only part of the story—because less than one-quarter of Americans living in poverty are black.

Slavery, and the systemic racism that has disadvantaged blacks in its aftermath, cannot be forgiven or forgotten. But reparations are not the answer. We cannot fix these injustices by emulating the my-race-first policies that birthed it. While the suffering of blacks hits close to home for me, it also pains me to see someone of another race or ethnicity degraded by the way our country forces poor people to live.

When blacks demand that our poverty be alleviated, it’s simply a matter of one race prioritizing its path to living well, when we should be fighting for everyone to live well. Prioritizing the economic needs of those who share my ethnicity, while so many others are suffering along with us, is morally wrong. The struggle against poverty needs to be a collective fight.

“We are tired of the racialization of poverty, the partisanism of poverty,” William Barber II, a Protestant minister who is a co-leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, told the members of the Budget Committee. More whites live in poverty than people of any other ethnic or racial group; a higher percentage of Native Americans live in poverty than members of any other ethnicity. Poverty isn’t a black problem, but an American problem, Barber told the committee, just as he had told the nine Democratic presidential candidates who spoke to the Moral Action Congress convened by the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., earlier that week.

[T]he prevailing system in the United States isn’t white supremacy, but rather, economic oligarchy. And too much of the discussion of racism adopts the language of oligarchy, offering economic ascension as an antidote.

While racial inequality is sometimes quantified in other ways—by the composition of the prison population, levels of education, or health—it is most often quantified by dollars, and how many one has. In 2018, the Equality of Opportunity Project released the results of a multiyear study of economic mobility. Most of its findings were about economic opportunity. People homed in on its statistics about black boys, who had much less of a chance of rising to a different economic tier than the one into which they were born, or of staying rich, than white boys. Less was said about Native Americans, who, the study’s statistics showed, were about as poor as blacks, or about Asian Americans, who had a better chance to rise economically than whites.

Reparations are often presented in terms that are meaningful within an oligarchic system: A long history of racist practices has created economic inequality between blacks and whites. Of this, there is no doubt. But this is not the racial wealth gap; it is merely a racial wealth gap. One goal of reparations is to close this gap. But that adopts the logic of oligarchy, instead of challenging it. More black people reaching higher wealth tiers, and then living in the cocoon those tiers provide? That’s not something I am willing to fight for.

Barber and Liz Theoharis, the other co-leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, presented a “moral budget” to the committee. It aimed to show that the alleviation of poverty and its degradations is not only a moral demand, but that these goals make good economic sense. . . . The principle behind the movement remains the same as it was in 1968. People of all races who oppose this system of inequality and suffering, and the demonization of the poor, must act as a single force.

[Martin Luther] King was focused on the oligarchic class—or “Bourbon class,” as he called it—and its promotion of a strategic form of divide and conquer, pitting poor blacks against poor whites. Howard University’s E. Franklin Frazier had written about this strategy in his popular book, Black Bourgeoisie, a decade earlier, in 1957. Other scholars before and since have pointed to the post-slavery origins of voter suppression in service of what the wealthy, white, land-owning class publicly called white supremacy. But they had a dual aim, ensuring that poor whites were not part of the supreme.

This is not to argue for an equivalence of historical suffering between whites and blacks, but to emphasize that white supremacy in the U.S. is a strategy, not a system. The system is an economic oligarchy, and racism is an extremely effective tactic for perpetuating it. And the debate over reparations confuses the system with just one of the tactics that sustains it.

Reparations would address the financial ramifications of the racism that stymies blacks from “winning,” and knocks those blacks who have won back down. But they would not right the wrong of a supremacist society that is designed to create a class of winners and a mass of losers, and to do so, in part, by isolating aspirants from those they leave behind.

I switched away from the H.R. 40 hearings to focus on the debate over the more encompassing wrong. The focus should be on transforming the oligarchy, not on lifting up any one segment of society.

Reparations are a sideshow. We are living in the now, in which millions of people of all races and ethnicities are forced into degradation, ill health, and despair in this rich nation. Overturning that system is a goal that is not out of reach for a people who had the intellectual, political, and social will to survive slavery and beat back Jim Crow.

The author is correct.  Reparations are a side show, but one that, if pushed, will only serve to defeat politicians seeking to right the wrongs of today's economic system.  Worse yet, it will maintain in office those who most promote hate and racial division.  Let's hope Democrats aren't foolish enough take the reparations bait.  

Mayor Pete Buttigrieg Is Plenty Gay

As regular readers know, I find the current Democrat "purity test" that leaves no allowances for past mistakes, present personal quirks, and the differences in the conversation/culture now versus 10 or even 40 years ago to be totally maddening.  Here in Virginia, we have seen the damage done by this self-defeating standard as the Democrat party attacked its own and seemingly was bent on a suicide pact.  Thankfully, so far none of Virginia's statewide leadership has given in to the demands of those who would destroy the party from within - much to the delight of Republicans. Now, we are seeing similar idiocy and personal destruction being waged as a huge field of candidates chases after the Democrat 2020 presidential nomination.  A column in the New York Times by Frank Bruni (who is gay) which looks at the insane argument that somehow Pete Buttigrieg is not "gay enough" as its launch point looks at what could be a key part of handing Donald Trump a second term.  Distressingly, to the self-anointed purity police, winning elections is less important than satisfying all of their unrealistic sensibilities. Here are column excerpts:

How do Democrats properly vet their candidates for president without cannibalizing them? How do they rightly insist on sensitive and inclusive leaders while making allowances for past mistakes, present quirks, human messiness and the differences in the conversation and the culture now versus 10 or 20 or 40 years ago?

That’s emerging as a central challenge of the Democratic presidential primary. And it’s worrying me.

I’m worried because there was an actual mini-debate on the left recently over whether Pete Buttigieg is gay enough. Do his whiteness, upper-middle-class background and Harvard and Oxford degrees nullify his experience as a minority and undercut his status as a trailblazer? This question is out there, in both senses of that phrase.

I’m worried because it in some ways echoes an earlier question about whether Kamala Harris — whose father came from Jamaica, whose mother came from India and whose husband is white — is black enough.

And I’m worried because of what Joe Biden is going through — because of the intensity of the censure that he faced after the Nevada politician Lucy Flores’s allegation and because of the fixation on precisely what kind of apology he must issue.

I’ve written that I don’t think Biden, 76, should run, for many reasons, including that someone in politics as long as he has been carries too much baggage; that Democratic voters have generally preferred candidates significantly younger than he is; and that he mismanaged and failed miserably in his two prior presidential campaigns.

But I feel just as strongly that Democrats need to show some proportion, realism and reason as they assess and react to candidates (or, in Biden’s case, probable candidates). With Biden especially but with others as well, too many Democrats aren’t doing that.

It’s nonnegotiable that Democrats hold their presidential aspirants to high standards on issues of racial justice, gender equality and more. It’s crucial that the party nominate someone who can credibly represent its proudly diverse ranks. But it’s also important that the party not demand a degree of purity that nobody attains.

I’m not recommending the Republicans’ course in accepting and protecting Donald Trump, which was to bury principles so deep that they may never be exhumed. I’m saying that to turn the Democratic primary into a nonstop apology tour when the nominee will be going up against a president never expected to apologize for anything is a risky strategy. It obsesses over the flaws in candidates who have many strengths, defining them in terms of what they seek forgiveness for. It blurs the line between job interview and inquisition. Taken too far, it rips contenders to shreds before Trump even takes out his scissors.

As for the mini-debate about Buttigieg’s gayness, it arose principally from this column in Slate, which included the following paragraph:

“A marginalized sexual orientation can remain unspoken and unnoticed for as long as a queer person desires. A gay man who conforms to a critical mass of gendered expectations can move through life without his sexuality attending every interaction, even after he comes out. Buttigieg, for instance, would register on only the most finely tuned gaydar. Most people who are aware of his candidacy probably know he’s gay, but his every appearance doesn’t activate the ‘Hey, that’s that homosexual gentleman’ response in the average brain. That doesn’t mean he’s not gay enough — there’s really no such measure. It just means that he might not be up against quite the same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture would be.”

The author is asserting that Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., doesn’t come across as particularly gay, meaning . . . what? That he lacks stereotypical mannerisms? That his voice isn’t high-pitched? I’m kind of floored, because I and other gay people around my age (54) or older spent most of our lives educating people about the bigotry and inaccuracy of those very stereotypes and trumpeting the message — the truth! — that gay people can be every bit as buttoned-down and strait-laced as, well, Pete Buttigieg! Now his divergence from those stereotypes is deemed remarkable and in need of dissection? Strange days indeed.

[T]his is how he {Buttigrieg] argued that Democrats should reclaim the word “freedom” from Republicans, who have tried to reserve it for their brand:

“You’re not free if you have crushing medical debt. You’re not free if you’re being treated differently because of who you are. What has really affected my personal freedom more: the fact that I don’t have the freedom to pollute a certain river, or the fact that for part of my adult life, I didn’t have the freedom to marry somebody I was in love with? We’re talking about deep, personal freedom.”

He sounds sufficiently gay to me. His powers of empathy seem plenty informed by his sexual orientation. And we need to stop making assumptions about how well someone can understand and address what minorities go through based on his or her looks or vocal inflections or anything of the sort. That’s the quintessence of prejudice. And it’s the antithesis of enlightenment.

Very well said. And I'd also note that under the Slate column standard,  with me being white, having enjoyed a fairly privileged childhood and youth, and having attended a top university and law school, I'm not gay enough.  It's utter idiocy and it needs to stop.