Reparations in a Post-October 7 World
with John McWhorter
This is a clip from an episode that went out to full subscribers earlier this week. To receive early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.
On The Glenn Show, I can talk about sensitive topics, like affirmative action and protests against the Gaza War, and be relatively certain that nobody is going to get their feelings hurt. My guests tend to have thick skin. But the classroom doesn’t work like that. Evaluating and analyzing these topics can leave students feeling angry or hurt. I don’t judge them. They’re young and trying to think through some complex problems, some of which affect them personally. In this clip from my most recent conversation with John, we talk about how teaching the reparations debate has been unexpectedly complicated by the Gaza War.
As others have already noted...
If I wrong you... if I steal your property, appropriate your achievements, mistreat you, beat you, enslave you... then you are owed recompense from me, and can pursue that 'atonement', via the Justice System.
But If someone, long dead, who looked vaguely like me ....wronged someone, equally long dead, who looked vaguely like you (way back in the long ago).... then not only do I NOT owe you anything, neither are you (as a look alike) an actual victim of any of that. In fact, you're owed nothing. We are both, non-participants in that antique drama and neither of us holdd any kind of Account Due / Account Receivable.
How is this truth confusing?
Guilt for the damage inflicted is carried only by the one who inflicts. It is not blood-borne. It does not continue, generation after generation, ad infinitum, down through the ages. Mea Culp, Mea Culpa -- great, great, great Grandpa did a bad, bad, bad thing. Rather It stops. It simply and always stops. The son is not guilty of his father's sins; the son is not the beneficiary of his father's sainthood.
Pre-October 7th; post-October 7th: it doesn't matter.
But yes, the Israeli families who suffered the atrocities inflicted by Hamas and unknown numbers of ordinary Palestinians -- yes, they are significantly owed something for their personal suffering. Right now that debt is being paid in Palestinian blood.
German and Austrian reparations have been given to actual individual living survivors of the Holocaust. Descendants are not given reparations though many descendants of Holocaust survivors do continue to carry psychological damage via their emotionally damaged parents.
Just a bit of clarity. Not a comment on for or against reparations for American slavery or Jim Crow.