Reparations Won't Fix Anything
with John McWhorter
With several American cities possibly poised to take action on reparations, what seemed like a pipe dream a couple decades ago—cash payments to African Americans in “compensation” for slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining—could become a reality. I think this would be an utter disaster, and, in this excerpt from our most recent episode, I tell John McWhorter why.
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Demands for reparations are almost as dangerous as gender-queer activists trying to trash science and strangling whatever good will we've built up over the course of my long life with Christians and the tens of millions of others in the heartland who think we're disease-and-sin-ridden or plain icky, not to mention breaking up the LGBT community itself in the process. Their communal narcissism is staggering.
$800 billion in reparations for California alone? I'm Scottish American on both sides, booted out during the Highland Clearances, which I why I speak with this accent rather than Sean Connery's, damnit. I don't want that bleak, frozen, unarable land back; I'm fine here. There's also that bucolic farm Upstate New York we were forced to sell under eminent domain to make way for the Thruway. I don't want reparations for that.
Then there are the White slaves on my Australian mother's side, the ones transported in the same conditions in the very same shackles, at least according to Hulu's diversity-cast 'Great Expectations,' except they were taken all the way Down Under, a much longer journey, and an exponentially stronger sun to break rocks in with no melanin to shield their skin, punishment for crimes as petty as fishing in the wrong lake. I wouldn't dream of reparations for that, either. Nor do I hate all Englishmen for what happened to ancestors whose names I don't even know — well, I can take a guess: they would've had mine, or William, or Arthur, or Stephen, not a long list.
As for discrimination Blacks have endured after All That Horror was over, it's never wise to get into a measurement contest with a gay man of a certain age about discrimination. I'm a screenwriter: no matter the anodyne LGBT content being churned out right now in the name of "representation," "diversity" and "inclusion," the truth is that the Sidney Poitier of gays hasn't even showered yet, much less shown up for dinner.
I don't hate all straight people. I don't want reparations for my experience, and there are stories upon stories, the notable difference being they actually happened to me, not to William, or Arthur, or Stephen, or the rest of that not-long list.
Reparations are never going to happen, not at that scale. But with "race entrepreneurs" that's beside the point: It's proving that "systemic racism" and the rest of the catechism in the Gospel According to BLM is real, alive, omnipresent.
For me the whole Wokeism hustle is summed up in the Spanish saying, "They beat the wolf until he bites just to say he's bad."
The silver lining about all false-flag Wokeist activism is it underscores how little residual discrimination and oppression, the real kind, is left in America: the wolf beaters have no choice but to make shit up in order to keep historical narratives that are no longer valid alive in the present.
Glenn's hypothetical 3rd generation Irish person objecting to reparations is not who I suspect will resent reparations the most strongly. I think about the 1st generation immigrants... say someone from Mexico working in agriculture, a restaurant, or landscaping or an Eastern European working in one of the construction trades. I don't suspect relations among these groups are necessarily that strong today. Animosity and potential conflict would seem a real danger among these ethnic groups should reparations become a reality.