Slavery was a crime against humanity, but it was ended by this same government over 136 years ago. There are no slaves or children of slaves alive today to receive such reparations.
On the other hand, blacks now living in America are the freest and most prosperous black people on earth.
The average descendant of African slaves in America earns between 20 and 50 times as much as the average black person in Africa, whose ancestors were not kidnapped and enslaved.
Why should a Vietnamese or Iraqi refugee, a Mexican migrant worker or Polish escapee from Communism pay reparations for an injustice committed more than a century ago? Why do African-American leaders want to separate African Americans from other Americans? Blacks came before the Mayflower. Who is more American than the descendants of African slaves?
For African Americans to pursue "reparations" claims against European, Asian and Hispanic Americans is a divisive and self-defeating idea.
A leader of the reparations movement, Randall Robinson, has written a manifesto, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," which is a model of what is wrong with the reparations cause. Anti-white sentiments and anti-American feelings leap out from every page of Robinson's book, including a chapter devoted to praising Fidel Castro, one of the world's longest surviving and most sadistic dictators. A rhapsody for Fidel Castro's Marxist police state would seem a bizarre irrelevance to a book on reparations for American blacks, except that for Robinson, Castro is a quintessential victim of American "oppression" and therefore a hero regardless of his crimes.
In Robinson's telling, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the proclamation that "all men are created equal," was merely "a slave owner, racist and, if one accepts that consent cannot be given if it cannot be denied, a rapist." (Robinson is referring to Jefferson's affair with his slave Sally Hemings.)
In Robinson's view, the fact that Americans still honor the author of the Declaration of Independence makes his personal sins into archetypes that define America itself: "Does not the continued unremarked American deification of Jefferson tell us all how profoundly contemptuous of black sensibilities American society persists in being? How deeply, stubbornly, poisonously racist our society to this day remains?"
Behind the reparations idea, finally, is an irrational fear and hatred of America. It is about holding America responsible for every negative facet of black existence, as though America were God, and God had failed.
