Reparations NOT

Philadephia Daily News Feb 1, 2000

The Daily Views ~ OP/ED

Mount Airy, reparations and me. Forget slavery. Today's biggest problem for blacks is alienation from the mainstream.

by John McWhorter

Though I have lived in California for 12 years now, I will always be a Northeasterner at heart. I grew up in Philadelphia, West Mount Airy to be specific.

As a child, I was under the impression that Mount Airy was the most wonderful place on the planet, and in many ways I still am.

I still miss living at the top of the tidy little cul-de-sac known as Marion Lane. To me, all is still right with the world on the wide, maple-shaded block of West Ellet Street, which still seems to somehow shut out all of the world's sounds except the bell at Henry School down the street. And, to this day, there are few things more soothing to me than a walk through Carpenter's Woods.

I led a comfortable middle-class life as a child. I can make no claims to having "struggled" to get where I am today, nor is mine a story like Henry Louis Gates' of growing up sitting at the feet of wise, working-class elders at the barbershop.

Although most of my friends as a child were black, if I grew up at anyone's feet besides my parents', it was those of wise, white private-school teachers in the Montessori and Quaker schools I was fortunate enough to attend.

Contrary to popular belief, I was by no means extraordinarily "lucky" or "unusual" as black Americans go. There are today legions of black adults in the United States who grew up as I did - I never had trouble finding peers as a child - and in fact, there are more middle- class blacks than poor ones nationwide. This is what the civil rights revolution helped make possible, and I am eternally grateful.

Yet today, we are often told that black Americans who led lives like mine are "owed" checks in the mail to compensate for the racist oppression the race has suffered. Indeed, my ancestor John Hamilton McWhorter the first (I am the fifth) was a slave. However, for me to reap a windfall from his suffering to stash in a mutual fund would be a trivialization of his existence.

For one, paying African-Americans for the suffering of relatives who lived too far in the past to even be known by name to most of us would be more a matter of blood money than "reparation." If I were paid for injustices wrought upon my slave ancestors - almost none of whose names or stories I or any of my family members know - I would feel as if I were profiting from the suffering of a stranger.

Yes, these slaves were "blood" to me; yes, what was done to them was unthinkable. But just as unequivocally, the intervening 150 years have rendered my tie to them biological and historical rather than spiritual in any substantial sense. My great-great-grandfather spent a life in chains. So I should get paid because every now and then I get trailed by a salesclerk? Or even stopped on a drug check by a policeman?

Many argue that reparations would be a form of compensation for the latter-day effects of slavery - a century of disenfranchisement and segregation. OK, but ideally an "apology" is accompanied by an effort to undo the offense. But if each living African-American were given a few thousand dollars of such "compensation," it would make no difference in the overall condition of black America.

As the pitfalls of Section 8 vouchers in South Philadelphia show, a nice house cannot undo deeply ingrained cultural patterns etched by racism of the past, but that today are self-generating. Money to attend good schools alone is of little use in a culture that has inherited from the black power movement a tendency to equate scholarly commitment (beyond black-related topics) with "acting white."

This is by no means an inner-city phenomenon exclusively - I was teased in this way occasionally right in West Mount Airy. In general, while many black kids in the neighborhood are now successful, I saw a sad few never amount to much despite growing up in such a paradisiacal setting, having adopted as teens an opposition to mainstream achievement.

This is because racism and inequity are no longer the most serious obstacles to black advancement. Racism is not completely dead, but it has spawned a sense of alienation from the mainstream among many blacks that becomes as serious an obstacle to advancement as racism itself.

"Reparations" must be seen in this light. A house and car are only window-dressing for a culture, many of whose members are driven by a wariness of the mainstream into equating authenticity with "the street."

Income alone will not solve our problem: Even after the vast increase in the numbers of black Americans who attend college and beyond, the tendency remains for black Americans to see the mainstream as a place to visit rather than to live. I saw ample testimony to all of this in the middle-class black neighborhoods I grew up in, where I saw all too many young black people hobbled by a contradictory relationship between cultural identification and taking advantage of opportunity.

As such, one might propose that reparations be of an amount intended to improve the lives of recipients: for black inner-city residents, money for a down payment on a house, or for new cars for people living long distances from promising employment; for other blacks, money for four years of college or a generous loan or subsidy for same.

Yet even this would leave us right where we are, for a reason all of us can presumably agree upon: Both racism and its effects are systemic. As long as American cities are stained with violent inner cities populated by blacks devoid of hope, "the color line" will persist regardless of the rapid growth of the black middle class.

This is especially true, given the tendency of whites and blacks to suppose that most blacks are still mired in such conditions (although as of 1995 only one in five blacks lived in ghettos). To rise above the symbolic, any reparations worthy of the name must address this urgent tragedy.

Rather than being doled out individually, reparations would be best granted in the form of efforts toward undoing systemic problems that dilute the inner strength of people who deserve better.

If black members of Congress can move their colleagues to grant large sums toward reparations, the money should go to programs that will truly effect progress, as opposed to sustaining the status quo.

Day-care centers by the hundreds must be built and staffed in inner cities to allow single mothers to work. The auto lobby must be limited in favor of increasing public transportation from inner cities to suburban workplaces (or subsidies must be given for residents to purchase reliable cars).

Racial profiling and police brutality are the issues most central to interracial resentment today, so police forces ought be trained out of these practices and taught to work with, rather than against, the communities they serve. (This can work - it has in Boston, for instance.)

And, finally, this country must pay teachers more and continue emergency takeovers of ossified urban school boards to prepare black students for academic competition without veiled set-asides and lowered bars.

Affirmative action in admissions, once necessary, today fuels resentment among whites and leads them to underestimate the achievements of blacks. And, in depriving black students of the incentive to strive for the highest notes, helps to keep alive the inability to fully embrace schooling that history has saddled black America with.

Reparations is a useful concept if aimed at rescuing the black underclass and freeing our race from the shackles of a historically conditioned sense of separation from the world of the book.

A check in the mail, while more dramatically satisfying, would accomplish neither. While slaking a natural desire to deliver one more rebuke to "whitey," reparations of this kind would fan the flames of interracial resentment while leaving black America precisely where it is today.

But most counterproductive of all, a mantra would immediately arise in the black community that "They think they can treat us like animals for 300 years and then just pay us off" - while nonblacks would concurrently begin to grouse, "They got reparations - what are they still complaining about?"

Whether those mantras would be valid is beside the point, which is that they would arise, be passed on to young people and further poison interracial relations in this country.

John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Berkeley and the author of "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America."

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), February 01, 2001

Answers

Take the amount that has been agreed upon for reparations. Subtract the billions in subsidies, welfare, headstart, and various other outreach and community programs. Subtract the value of affirmative action (or expect lawsuits by victims of it, asking for reparations). Very importantly, subtract the blood reparation of tens of thousands of dead white boys, and lifelong injured boys, who died in the war to free the slaves.

It's only fair that such accounts be credited against the reparation amount.

How much net is left for reparations?

-- scarecrow (somewhere@over.rainbow), February 02, 2001.

Are we adjusting for inflation, scarecrow? I'll hold off on crunching the numbers for now.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), February 02, 2001.