THE SOLUTION TO A LACK OF WEALTH IS WEALTH:

Readers of what has become the most compelling intervention in the contemporary reparations debate, Ta-Nehisi Coates' 2014 article, "The Case for Reparations," indicts local and state governments, north and south, as well as the Federal government, for many decades of racist legislation. He maintains that a great part of the persistent income gap between whites and blacks is a direct result of this legal discrimination. He argues that actual restitution should be paid, not only to the descendants of African slaves brought to America, but also to blacks injured by unjust enrichment at the hands of governments and corporations since the end of slavery. By so doing America will right a great wrong and allow African Americans, at long last, to lay aside their just resentment and integrate into American society as full members. It will allow white Americans aware of the evils in our past to feel that justice, at long last, has been done.

Coates' argument is almost Burkean in its appeal to intergenerational moral responsibility. He might well agree with Burke's famous dictum, "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." Yet he is often attacked for being a radical Marxist, making demands that are unrealistic, divisive, and destructive of civil society. Many are eager to discredit his argument for reparations by equating it with the demands of the social justice mobs now on the streets, the activists calling for defunding the police and for a guaranteed minimum income, free health care, and housing for all African Americans--reparations through racialized socialism. Despite the sanction shamefully bestowed on such demands by media organs and many public officials, most Americans still have the good sense to recognize that enacting these measures would wreck the lives of both black and white citizens.

Yet many Americans continue to feel that we as a people need to make some kind of restitution for past discrimination. The difficulty with the reparations argument has always been practical, not moral. It lies in the questions, by whom? to whom? and how much? Who has the obligation to pay, who has a just claim to be paid, and how much of the relative poverty suffered by modern black Americans can be traced to the discriminatory practices of the past?

Educating young black men and women so that they can better profit from college is a much wiser use of public funds than educating future baristas in subjects of small value to society.

Most people who reflect on these questions thoughtfully will conclude that we as a people can never really make restitution for slavery and the racial discrimination of the past. The damages can never be calculated in monetary terms. Nor will we ever be able explain to the Chinese businessman in my neighborhood, a man who came to this country in 1956 to escape communism, why his taxes should go up to compensate African Americans, some of them now well off and college educated, for discriminatory housing policies in 1940s Chicago.

What we can do is consider policies that will both close the wealth gap between white and black Americans and increase the prosperity of all Americans. What holds poor African Americans back more than any other circumstance is the wretched quality of public schools in the inner cities. 

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