I was surprised to learn during the current Ryan kerfuffle that Mr. Obama, who will probably be the next Senator from Illinois, is the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a white mother. Not the sort of heritage normally associated with Chicago's South Side. (Then again, he is from Hyde Park, where I spent too many years in the mid-1970s.) So, doesn't this tend to support Gates and Guinier's contention?

The first possibility that

Black America was done particularly intractable damage when it was deprived of an initial "immigrant" generation and therefore never had the chance to follow the classic immigrant pattern--where the first generation busts its collective hump to provide a better life for the second, inculcating a set of values in the process.

doesn't so much raise the second possibility that

reparations aren't such a bad idea

as directly contradict it. What values do reparations continue to instill in Black America? Certainly not those that are passed on to the children of immigrants.

It rectifies an ongoing harn and provides the kind of startup capital a second generation usually gets from the first. The values are harder.

I offer a third, or perhaps two and a halfth, possibility.

Whether or not the 'first generation' effect has any power or not, the condition of the actual slaves was so degraded that it is not so easy as saying, 'You're free' to civilize them, even to the n-th generation.

One reason, I think, that Jefferson doubted slaves could be successfully freed is that he -- well knowing the cultural level of his own field hands -- just could not conceive how they could operate out of slavery.

This was not racism -- though nowadays it's spun that way -- because he did not feel the same about pet house slaves.

One reason I interpret J. this way is that Booker T. Washington, in 'Up from Slavery,' made the same argument in a different fashion. If you read the book, you'll find an odd amount about the necessity of brushing teeth.

Well, that's because if you grew up in a dirtfloor shack in W. Virginia, dental hygiene wouldn't be part of your weltanschauung.(This is so whether your skin is white or black, as I learned years ago from a friend who was hired by liberals to travel the American outback with a minstrel show to try to get poor kids to brush their teeth. The kids were willing enough, but their parents and grandparents threw away the toothbrushes, on the grounds that 'everybody loses all their teeth by the time they're 40 anyway.' Not an irrational observation if you live in the hollers.)

Anyhow, throwing everybody in the pool and expecting them all to float at the same level is not, in the real world, a reasonable expectation.

I could multiply examples, but Jeff would tell me anecdotes are not evidence.

Fine. 40 acres, a mule, and a toothbrush.

These families, particularly the inner city ones, already have the necessary capital. As Bill Cosby noted, just look at the clothes those kids are wearing and ask how much they cost. I don't what reparations would do except cost a lot of money now and even more the next generation when it demands its reparations, since the first set didn't work.

The values are harder, yes, and made even harder when you undermine them with proposals like reparations.

dismissing the group rallying cry of victimization and racism would go hella further than reparations ever could.

djs:

It's never easier for a hungry man to maintain high values, ask Jean Valjean.

Poor people in this country are overweight.

Poor immigrants succeed where poor descendents of slaves fail. The difference is not in a government handout.

How are you going to reproduce the immigrant experience we deprived them of? You can't. But we have more money than we know what to do with. Give them the stake in society that we deprived their ancestors of, give them property.

Once you figure out who exactly to give property to (and what property? It would be amusing to see the fed gov't give a bunch of land away if only because the outcry from enviromentalists would surely shred the Democratic party to pieces), how are you going to prevent speculators from buying most of it from the people you give it to? It'll be theirs, and so they should be able to sell it. But then the point of giving them a property stake is ruined.

brian:

you can't guarantee it.

It is not, and has not been, a poverty of money. It is a poverty of values. All the money in the world will not, can not salve the fever. Money could, however, make it worse.

OJ, just deal with it. This article shows, one more time how pathetic our politics of racial gestures really is.

The traditional cure for a "slave mentality" is to wander for forty years in a desert.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

To that maybe we could add "or without having our immigrant experience reproduced to be instructed of them".

djs:

Isn't the point that if we'd allowed them, a normal immigrant experience they wouldn't have to think about values. That they are plagued by values problems is in large measure our fault--though they too bear personal responsibility for their own failures. Now equity requires that we recompense the damage done.

oj,

Of course Blacks in America would be better off now if they had come here as immigrants. But I believe it's also the case that they'd be better off today without the corrosive effects of 'leaders' like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

We all have to think about values whether they're passed on to us by immigrant parents or by school teachers or by politicians who refuse to pander to us with massive social programs.

You don't have to put someone on a boat in the West Indies and send them to America via Ellis Island to instill in them the need for hard work and personal responsibility. Policies like reparations undermine those principles which is a greater cost to Blacks and everyone in exchange for a short-term payoff.

American blacks recreated the immigrant experience all on their own when they fought in WWII and then moved north. By the late 50s and early 60s the results were becoming clear. Then the Great Society destroyed the black community.

*snickers* I have roots in the West Indies culture (haiti specifically): Their entire value system is markedly different from inner city blacks. They just don't have the politics to support the values. Which, of course, is the whole point of the culture wars.

The one problem no one has ever satisfactorily addressed with reparations is who receives them and how much is "fair".

Bear with me. My drivers license in my home state and my birth certificate call me White. No one who sees me on the street takes me for anything other than white. Occasionally, I may get a comment because I look vaguely Asian about the eyes, or because my skin stays sallow in the winter when the folks around me get all fish belly white, but seldom anything more.

Under the laws of Texas, Virginia and numerous other states, I am black--because an anthropologist or a geneticist could convincingly demonstrate that I have African ancestry--as well as Native American ancestry. My African ancestry comes from persons brought to this country as slaves whose descendants passed out of the African community in this country and goes through both my parents. My father looks Puerto Rican, my mother like a red-haired Lena Horne. Within the memory of my grandmother, members of her family were referred to as "those n----r Lastnames".

I have a friend, a programmer, who is whiter than I am. He has a black great-great-grandmother.

I know two local attorneys, one of a prominent multiracial family, one not--both of African ancestry, both descendants of slaves.

Do we all get reparations? If we do not, why not?

Do only the financially needy get them or do Michael Jordan and Snoop Dogg and Johnnie Cochran and Bob Johnson of BET get them too? Do all African Americans get them or just those with ancestors who were slaves? Is Colin Powell excepted because his family were West Indians and therefore only slaves under the UK?

Do biracial children get half a loaf? 20 acres and the ass end of the mule?

I've thought about it a lot...I don't disagree with the concept so much, if someone would tell me what method of working this promise out would be equitable and workable.

If we could have sent them back back after
the Civil War, then maybe a few of the best
and brightest could have trickled back in in
modern times.

Also, it is likely that those "bi-racials" also
get Affirmative Action perks. They are some of the biggest beneficiaries of
the post-sixties spoils system.

cornet:

Sure, means test it.

J.H.:

Or we could have just not acted like racist thugs.

What's the immigrant experience but poverty and nothing given to you but a chance to work hard and build something out of nothing?

That experience can be given right now, by taking away welfare and privileges. You are recommending giving the opposite experience - one of ease and obtaining something without the need to build.

Now, if one-time reparations are coupled with ending welfare and racial preferences, then I would support it.

pj:

Yes, it's a way of buying our way clear in one generation.

And the recipients will sign a release declaring that they won't seek any more benefits, reparations, etc? Fat chance making that stick.

Blacks don't suffer because of a lack of access to capital. There a variety of ways black entreprenurs or businessmen can raise capital. Either through traditional financing in the black community, or any number of existing government programs.

There is no guarantee reparations just won't be wasted and leave the next generation nothing. How many times do we see former rock stars or movie actors that have wasted all the money they earned through conspicuous consumption?

There is no doubt that centuries of slavery and Jim Crow infliced severe trauma on the black community. But the solution primarily rests within the black community. The truth is that both Booker T Washington and WEB DuBois were right. However, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, Washington was abandoned as a role model and it was thought that DuBois' ideas were the only ones that mattered.

Blacks are trapped in that traumatic legacy only as much as they choose. Hopefully the generation who was raised post-Civil Rights Movement and didn't live under segregation has produced enough quality leaders (Rice, Powell on Republican side; Obama, Ford on Democratic, plus various non-political leaders in business or arts) that the contemporary black community can point to new role models and make the necessary social changes.

The problem is not 40 Acres and a Mule, but the pervasive glamorized gangsta culture.

Well, you sure couldn't reproduce first-generation immigrant experience if you were a black person growing up where I did, not matter what your values.

I'm against reparations for the reasons cornet gave, and one other.

But I think the 'so's your old man' argument that the Irish did it, why don't you does not match events.

(The other reason I disdain reparations is that, although my grandfather owned a slave, he lost that and everything else during Reconstruction; the only material thing I inherited from him was a silver spoon worth about $4. I doubt that would help very much, divided 12 million ways.)

Should have given it to the slave.

OJ: Go read Lincoln's Second Inaugural.

The slave got the house in that divorce. And a nice plantation on the Peedee River.

My grandfather's mother had the spoon but nothing to put in it and starved to death.

Yup, the slaves made out like bandits, the carpetbaggers got rich, and the white man starved.

You think you are being funny, but until the federal troops were withdrawn in 1876, you're right. Then the world turned upsidedown again.

My grandfather's father was one of the "Glorious Eight," as they used to be called, who returned South Carolina to white supremacy at the cost of taking a loyalty oath to the national government.

Harry:

Not funny at all--every German family is the one that wasn't involved in Nazism, every Southern family the one that came out worse than blacks. It's a harmless enough myth.