This is such a bad idea on so many levels:
Advocates who say black Americans should be compensated for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath are quietly chalking up victories and gaining momentum.Fueled by the work of scholars and lawyers, their campaign has morphed in recent years from a fringe-group rallying cry into sophisticated, mainstream movement. Most recently, a pair of churches apologized for their part in the slave trade, and one is studying ways to repay black church members.
Reparations would have made more sense a little closer to the damaging events, when there were still actual victims to compensate. For every white American who still feels enough guilt to go along with this, there are 1,000 who will say, sensibly, that they shouldn't be made to pay for something that happened generations ago. It is hard to imagine anything more divisive than this movement.
As John Torepy explains, it's a whole new way of looking at things politically, looking backward instead of forward. We can and should learn from the past, but we can't hold onto it like a festering wound we keep poking at:
"Under normal circumstances the past returns only fleetingly and remains simply part of the stock of ideas on which people draw to make sense of their lives. But it is scarcely the predominant part; ordinarily, people maintain a balance between past present, and future that allows them to move forward in their everyday lives." He continues: "An excessive preoccupation with the past is usually a sign that something is amiss - whether in the manner of nostalgia or of failing to let go of past troubles - for individuals as well as societies."
There are "reparations" other than money, of course, and perhaps the movement will head in that direction. Money doesn't solve everything -- if it did, the billions and billions already spent trying to make amends for our past would have fixed everything already. If reparations in the form of money were successful, it would, in fact, be a final victory for racism. We would forever be separate nations.
