In an interview about his excellent book Black Rednecks and White Liberals, the eminent scholar Thomas Sowell underlined several peoples that have been racially persecuted throughout history but who nevertheless tend to succeed whenever they transplant themselves.
For example, the number of Chinese killed in various regions of Southeast Asia in recent history far exceeds the total number of black people who had ever been lynched in America. The number of Armenians that fell victim to the attempt at genocide by the Ottoman Empire during the first world war is unknown, but could be as high as 1.5 million. The Jews, even before the Holocaust, were the victims of horrendous violence. For example, 900 Jews were burnt alive in Strasbourg during the Black Death when they were accused of poisoning the wells.
Yet these peoples, and one may add Nigerians, Vietnamese, Koreans, and others, have the tendency to overcome often violent racism wherever they find themselves. A Jewish, Chinese, or Nigerian immigrant to America may start off with no money, no status, not knowing English, no support network, and do only menial jobs, but after a decade they may own a small business, and in another decade or so it won’t be a surprise if their children were attending Ivy League schools on a scholarship.
One reason why these groups of people tend to succeed is that their cultures incline to share in a similar ethical framework that elevates family values, perpetuates hard work, and reveres education. At the same time, they have a certain self-respect not to waste their energy feeling sorry for themselves.
Opposed to this resilience, which has been proven to bring success, is a current strain of Western culture, where victimhood, and not hard work, is celebrated and rewarded. Amazingly, San Francisco’s reparation committee is proposing paying every longtime black resident $5M each as reparation for slavery and racial injustice.
Five million US dollars is more money than most people make in their lifetimes. As of 2020, the census shows some 46,000 African Americans living in San Francisco. Given the rather wide net cast in this proposal, if 10,000 people qualify, it would cost the city an astronomical $50 billion. This is a city that is already more than $700 million in deficit as of 2022, with the state of California forecast to have a $25 billion deficit in 2023.
Putting even the monetary snag aside, the sheer laziness of this proposal regarding history and the consequent injustice of it is astounding. It doesn’t pass the pub test. Putting it plainly, the proposal is to extract money from people who were never slave owners and give it to people who were never slaves.
It makes even less sense if you just scratch the surface. Even if it could be proven that all white people in California were decedents from slave owners (in fact only a small fraction of whites were ever slave owners in America) and all blacks were decedents of slaves, is it reasonable for the sins of the great-great-grandfathers to be placed on the heads of their great-great-grandsons and daughters?
Furthermore, many white people immigrated to America after the end of slavery and even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, like Jews escaping the Holocaust, Polish refugees, Greeks evading economic and political turmoil, or Bosnians who were exiles of war. Why should they and their children’s tax dollars go towards reparation for something that their ancestors never took part in?
Adding more complication to this is the fact that California is composed of almost 40 per cent Hispanic or Latinos and 17 per cent Asians. Asians were not involved in the transatlantic slave trade. They themselves indeed have historically faced much racism. While the Portuguese or Spanish ancestors of many Hispanic or Latinos may have been involved in the slave trade, the ancestry of Hispanic and Latinos are well-known to be multi-ethnic, with many having a mixture of European, native South American, indigenous American, African, and Asian backgrounds. If someone is a decedent of both slave owners and slaves, how would this piddling proposal work?
And this peccadillo is not limited to Hispanic or Latinos. Studies have found that the average African American is almost a quarter European. What’s more, African slaves were sold to European and Arab slavers by other Africans, what might be considered the radix malorum of the slave trade. There were also many black and Native American slave owners in America. In 1830, the census lists 3,775 free blacks as slave owners, owning a total of 12,760 slaves. How will that be sorted?
Spend five minutes and you can see that the proposal is ludicrous. It will not pass, but is clearly meant to be a virtue signal exercise. However, this ideology of victimhood worship is threatening to ruin generations, making black people born in the richest, arguably freest nation mendicant, spiteful, resentful, and needlessly pessimistic. It also serves to wedge divisions, to the benefit of no one but the activists.
Because what happens in America will inevitably spread across the Western world, this poisonous proposal and others of its ilk, and the people peddling them need to be challenged at every corner.
