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SINCE MARTIN Luther King’s march on Washington for civil rights in the 1963, fringe activists have slipped in behind him, exploiting the great man’s legacy to lend their goofy ideas an air of legitimacy—and massive press attention—they couldn’t hope to gain on their own.
The latest stragglers are the organizers of the Millions for Reparations march, who hit the National Mall yesterday demanding trillions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury be paid to America’s 34 million blacks to compensate for “the African labor that has built the ‘super power’ that is the United States.”
With the rallying cry of “They Owe Us,” organizers say they will continue such protests until money is delivered. In the long history of victimization politics among “leaders” of the black community, this movement takes the prize as the one most worthy of ridicule. But the impulse to laugh is tempered by the fact that the reparations movement has made very real progress in the last several years.
When U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan 15 years ago began annually introducing a bill to pay reparations, the issue was entirely ignored. Yet in the last two years, major media outlets like National Public Radio, USA Today, The New York Times, CNN, and the Associated Press have treated the subject seriously—in large part because Ivy League schools have conducted well-attended seminars on the subject, and reparations (paid exclusively by the United States, of course) was a major topic of last year’s well-covered United Nations World Conference Against Racism.
“The reparations debate within black America is not the slam-dunk [against it] that you might believe,” says Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil-rights group that rejects the politics of vicitmization. “There's a little rebellion that’s taking root.”
Indeed, the rebellion seems to be growing. A CNN/Gallup poll conducted in February found that 55 percent of African–Americans support the idea that the government should make reparations for slavery. And in March, a lawsuit was filed against dozens of American corporations demanding they pay billions for the “illicit profits” they gained through “stolen” labor.
Forget the fact that many of these corporations—CSX, FleetBoston Financial, Aetna—weren't even around when slavery ended in the United States 137 years ago. Their “corporate predecessors” are guilty. The heirs—entirely innocent executives and stockholders—must be made to pay.
If you think this lawsuit—or its sister shakedown of the government—won’t ultimately succeed, you’re probably right. But the idea of making tobacco companies pay billions to smokers once seemed laughable, too. As did suing the makers of junk food for making us all fat. When it comes to exploiting the legal system and milking the collective guilt of the American people, anything is possible.
So if all these news outlets, at least one U.S. congressman, and perhaps even a civil court is going to take this issue seriously, let’s take a look at the facts.
In the recent past, the U.S. government paid reparations for rounding up Japanese–Americans into interment camps during World War II, for the racial experiments on blacks in Tuskegee, and for the racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust have also been compensated for the genocide of the Nazis.
These were legitimate payments of reparations, since they were made directly to the injured parties. What possible claim can black Americans in 2002 have to demand compensation for an institution that ended, thanks to the blood of 350,000 mostly white Union soldiers, in 1865?
According to the organizers of the Millions for Reparations march, “the policy of entrenched racism” in America, which began with the slave trade, has never abated as Uncle Sam has “relentlessly held on to [his] white-supremacist ideology.” In other words, a movement that is gaining legitimacy in the eyes of major media outlets hinges on a paranoid racist conspiracy.
Never mind the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Never mind decades of affirmative-action programs. Never mind that millions of blacks have overcome this sense of victimhood to make “Black America” the 10th most prosperous nation in the world. Never mind that only one in five whites in the antebellum South was a slaveholder, or that immigrant families like mine had absolutely nothing to do with “the white power structure.”
“They Owe Us,” maintain the leaders of this racket.
Thirty-nine years ago this month, Martin Luther King marched on Washington and dreamed of a day when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.”
Today, King’s self-appointed successors dream of a day when people who had not even a tangential connection to the slave trade pay billions to people who, while historically oppressed, nonetheless live in a country that offers more opportunities for “the pursuit of happiness” than anywhere on Earth.
I have a dream, too: that these hucksters go back to the intellectual ghettoes from whence they came and that the politics of hope and opportunity replace the politics of victimization and division.
Wake me when we get there.
JAMES G. LAKELY is an editorial writer for The Free Lance–Star.