Reparations Are No More Than a Dream of Privilege

Black Americans tragically turned our focus from rights and laws to identity politics and victimization.

By Shelby Steele. Excerpts:

"But since the 1960s, we blacks have been all but overwhelmed with social programs and policies that seek to reparate us. Didn’t the 1964 Civil Rights Act launch an era of reparation in America?

And didn’t that era continue with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty, two sweeping excursions into social engineering that he hoped would “end poverty in our time”? Then there was school busing for integration, free public housing, racial preferences in college admissions, affirmative action in employment, increasingly generous welfare payments and so on."

"America has had some 60 years of what might be called reparational social reform—reform meant to uplift not only the poor, but especially those, like black Americans, whose poverty meets the bar of historical grievance."

"that this vast array of government programs has failed to lift black Americans to anything like parity with whites. By almost every important measure—educational achievement, out-of-wedlock births, homeownership, divorce rates—blacks are on the losing end of racial disparities."

"the Great Society was profoundly disingenuous. It was a collection of reparational reforms meant to show an America finally delivered from the tarnish of its long indulgence in racism. The Great Society was a gigantic virtue signal. It was moral advertising when the times called for the hard work of adapting a long-oppressed people to the demands of the modern world."

"In segregation we had longed for a freedom grounded in democratic principles. In the ’60s we won that point. But then suddenly, with the ink still wet on the Civil Rights Act, a new voice of protest exploded onto the scene, a voice of race and color and atavistic longing: “black power.”

To accommodate, we shifted the overriding focus of racial protest in America from rights and laws to identity. Today racial preferences are used everywhere in American life. Identity is celebrated almost as profusely as freedom once was.

It all follows a simple formula: Add a history of victimization to the identity of any group, and you will have created entitlement. Today’s black identity is a victim-focused identity designed to entitle blacks in American life. By the terms of this identity, we blacks might be called “citizen-victims” or “citizens with privileges.”"