House Resolution 40 would establish a commission to "study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans." Since President Biden supports the proposed legislation (sort of), some questions might be in order, of a moral, practical, and political nature.
• First, how consistent with American values is it to force those who were never slaveowners to pay reparations to those who were never slaves (those who didn't inflict the injury to those who didn't suffer it)?
More specifically, how does this square with our traditional understanding of fairness and justice, which emphasizes individual as opposed to group rights and rejects notions of collective guilt?
Since we have never been a nation in which sons were forced to pay for the sins of fathers, how would it be appropriate to now make them pay for those of their great-great-grandfathers?
Proponents of reparations cite the Civil Liberties Act signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1988 as a precedent, but that legislative remedy actually reveals the fundamental distinction between compensating the living that were unjustly injured (surviving Japanese Americans interned in camps during World War II) and compensating descendants of those unjustly injured in the distant past.
• If reparations could be accepted in principle, how would compensation work in practice?
What of those Black Americans whose ancestors came to America long after slavery was abolished and never lived in the American South under Jim Crow? Would they be compensated in an equal or lesser fashion according to some calibration of victimhood?
On the other side, would there be any differentiation among white Americans, with descendants of slaveowners perhaps paying more than those with no slaveowners in their family trees? And would folks who could trace their lineage back to white soldiers who died while fighting for the Union in the Civil War (and thus to successfully abolish slavery) be exempted?
• If we accept, to avoid the myriad complications, that all Black Americans should receive reparations, what possible accounting could be used to determine the proper ("just") amount?
More specifically, how could an actual price be set for the experience of slavery, particularly since the supporters of reparations trace all the ills of Black America, including the disintegration of the Black family, Black educational underachievement, and high Black crime rates, back to its legacy?
Isn't it conceivable, under such circumstances, that whatever amount suggested would be summarily dismissed as insufficient and even demeaning, and might ignite a virtue-signaling bidding war that would end up undermining public support for the broader endeavor?
• If reparations in whatever form are agreed upon for Black Americans, what other groups who have suffered various forms of (admittedly lesser) discrimination would become eligible for redress, perhaps beginning with Native Americans?
Would there be any logical stopping point along the reparations path, or even any means of identifying one; a way of saying yes to claimant groups "B" and "C" but no to groups "D" and "E," without giving offense in such a way as to establish new bases for grievance?
In short, would there be any feasible way of cordoning off the reparations concept so that it could be applied to just one group (Black Americans) without encouraging others to seek it for genuine, exaggerated or even imagined injustices stretching deep into the past, sans any kind of workable statute of limitations?
A "nation of immigrants" is also unavoidably a nation of periodic anti-immigrant and nativist movements, and each successive immigrant cohort could, if provided with the right incentives, search and find experiences that could constitute briefs in an argument for compensation for suffering.
That such groups came to America voluntarily in search of opportunity (unlike Blacks under slavery), chose to stay when they could have left because they mostly found it despite the assorted obstacles, and mostly came to prosper to a level well beyond what they could have in their original homelands would be beside the point once a potentially lucrative victimhood competition commences.
• Finally, if sizable (however defined) reparation payments are eventually made, what, if anything, would come next for Black Americans? Would it be a one-time payment of acknowledged debt (as most of those paying would probably assume and prefer) or simply a first installment, given the magnitude of what is allegedly owed?
If reparations were sold in the latter fashion (as the first in a series that would continue indefinitely), it is unlikely that a sale would be made.
If presented as a more palatable one-time payment, a perception of debt satisfactorily discharged would accompany it in a manner that might mean the end of the civil rights movement as we have known it for 70 or so years now.
The concept of debt makes no sense unless there exists a possibility for repayment, but a paid debt also implies the erasure of obligation, in this case the obligation that the supporters of reparations have not unreasonably felt white Americans have long had to Black Americans.
At the least, the burden would be placed thereafter on those demanding further means of racial redress, including the expansion of systems of racial preference now being proposed on the grounds of equity.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.