California Governor Gavin Newsom threw yet another monkey wrench into the seemingly never-ending debate within the California legislature and just about everywhere else on slavery reparations. Gavin tossed a bunch of amendments into a bill the legislature -that is the Democratic controlled legislature- was on the verge of passing. In response to criticism, Newsom said his concern was over cost. In other words, the state doesn’t have the money to foot the cost of more reparation’s initiatives.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Department of Civil Rights moved forward on the issue. Its Reparations Advisory Commission issued a lengthy preliminary report on the formation of a city backed reparations program.
The problem with the latest flurry of activity at the state and local level on reparations is that the issue of reparations is still stuck at the talk, study, debate, and even puzzlement stage. That poses this always thorny question on reparations. That is just how serious are Democrats about actual payments, resource providing, and tangible support programs to African Americans for the past and present effect of slavery and Jim Crow segregation’s horrors?
Reparations for decades was mostly viewed as a fringe issue touted by a motley mix of Black separatists, zealots, and crackpots and that respected mainstream civil rights leaders shunned. That changed with the Biden administration in 2020. Top Democrats all professed support for the study of the feasibility of reparations payments.
Some fleshed out their plans for reparations. They included tax credits, more funding for education, child and health care, and housing funding provisions for Blacks. The California legislature backed reparations commission detailed a sweeping plan to shell out tens of millions in reparations support payments and programs. However, as has been the repeated case on the reparations issue, not a cent has been paid out in any form. The issue is still as always under study, discussion, and always the promise of yet another report.
There’s a reason for the inertia. Every poll that has been taken on reparations for slavery has repeatedly shown that most whites oppose it. They don’t want corporations, and definitely not the government, to pay up.
Reparations advocates have grabbed at every argument in the book to try and dent the wall of public resistance. They offer assurances that Black millionaires, corporate presidents, superstar athletes and entertainers won’t get a dime of reparations money, that it will go to programs to aid the black poor and that it won’t guilt-trip all whites. They point out that Japanese Americans and Holocaust survivors have gotten reparations.
These arguments still fall on deaf ears from the general public. The reparations movement can’t shake the public tag that it is a movement exclusively of, by and for Blacks. Polls that show that the majority of Blacks back reparations simply deepen the suspicion that it’s still nothing but a cash grab by blacks for blacks for the past horror of slavery that whites who oppose reparations vehemently insist was decades ago and something they had nothing to do with.
Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, for instance, is typical of the ambivalence. He worried that reparations could be a potential mine field for Democrats. He said he didn’t back reparations. But then he pivoted and jumped on the feasibility study bandwagon. This was a tepid compromise and sounded like a face-saving ploy banking that the issue would quickly fade into obscurity.
In 2020, one Democratic presidential contender, Beto O’Brien, was roughly and very publicly called out on the issue at one of his campaign stops. He, like Sanders, initially frowned on the idea. However, under verbal assault by a questioner, he relented and said it was an idea that had some merit.
The GOP has repeatedly loaded up its arsenal of hit attacks on the Democrats in the dozen or so states that it targets as the states that determine who sits in the White House. They paint the Democrats as far out loons, who want to press all kinds of wild socialist tinged ideas in health care, climate control, green energy, education, and so on.
They always add reparations support to the supposed screwball list of measures that a Democrats would press on the nation if Harris was elected. The question then is if Democrats stay on record to make reparations a legitimate public policy talking point how much of a political risk is there? This means avoiding at all costs the appearance that reparations seem like a frivolous issue that is politically divisive and racially polarizing.
The reparations movement does not possess the inherent racial egalitarianism of the civil rights movement. It is ensnared by its racial isolationism. The focus is solely to compensate the descendants of Black slaves and whipsaw whites for modern-day racism. Yet. Democrats still can make a compelling argument that it is in the interest of government and business to pump more funds into specific projects, such as AIDS/HIV education and prevention, remedial education, job skills and training, drug and alcohol counseling and rehabilitation, computer access and literacy training. Such projects would boost the Black poor, not gut public revenues and, most important, not finger all whites as culpable for slavery.
Newsom, California legislative Democrats, and the L.A. City Reparations Commission have talked insistently for years about making reparations a reality. The question as always is when will the talk end and the action on payments and programs begin?
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book — “President” Trump’s America (Middle Passage Press). Host of The Earl Ofari Hutchinson Show on blogtalkradio.com and Facebook Livestream. He publishes thehutchinsonreport.net
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Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political analyst. He has authored ten books; his articles are published in newspapers and magazines nationally in the United States. Three of his books have been published in other (more…)
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