Countering the argument for reparations

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When I listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates argue that America has an obligation to “take responsibility for our history” in the form of monetary restitution for slavery and the decades of segregation that followed, I am drawn to a quote from Oscar Wilde, “Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.”

When are Ta-Nehisi Coates, and other writers like Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, going to take responsibility for their own actions that have placed them in their predicament? I did not force them to pursue useless degrees in black studies, they willingly inflicted that upon themselves. Faced with no marketable skills other than fleecing guilt-ridden middle-aged white women, they wonder why no one will hire them to do anything useful.

I am not saying that they are alone in that respect, there are numerous whites who fashion themselves to be intellectuals and feel resentment toward and underappreciated by the world at large. However, unlike Coates and Hannah-Jones, they often end up behind the counter at Starbucks or driving an Uber.

The best advice I can give to young men and women of all colors is to cultivate a passion for understanding the mechanics of the physical world — how machines work and systems function. Then and only then will you be of value to employers in a modern economy. As much as I love poetry, literature, and political debate, it assists little with securing a roof over one’s head and providing material sustenance to one’s children.

However, even if one were to ignore the obvious way in which blacks have handicapped themselves by not training for the needs of the market, it would not follow that their argument for reparations was valid. Coates and Hannah-Jones are parroting Karl Marx’s sentiment that “without slavery, you have no cotton; without cotton, you have no modern industry.” It is the notion that without cheap cotton, subsidized by slave labor, we would have no Northern textile mills and no incipient industrial revolution. I am not refuting that black labor had a role in building this country, but the idea that without black slavery the country would not have industrialized at the pace that it did is pure fantasy. Economic historians like Edward Baptist who wrote, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) supporting this fantasy are mistaken, to put it politely.

Peeling back the onion that is history is a preoccupation of Coates and Hannah-Jones, but need I remind them that they would not even exist if the Atlantic slave trade had never existed. Moreover, their black ancestors would not have flourished in this country, if some person’s white ancestors had not purchased them, albeit those white ancestors should have been horse-whipped for being as lazy and short-sighted as they were to import slave labor from Africa.

The bottom line is that the whole debate about black history is mute. Even if every black person received a check for say fifty thousand dollars from the treasury, it would not alter a mindset that rejects prudent individual agency.

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