June 25, 2020
Reparations and Rioters
By Taylor Lewis
Somewhere along the way, outrage over George Floyd’s slaying turned into a larger plea for more recognition of African-Americans in areas ranging from the arts to corporate boards to the big screen. Demands for policing reform and greater accountability were only ploys to extract something more from society, like a diversion used in a casino caper. The narrative of police punishment unfairly meted out on minorities became a tail used to wag the dog for a loftier goal. That goal is vengeance mixed with monetary restitution. In a word, reparations.
Popularized by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, the bumptious James Baldwin epigone, reparations are less a racial subsidy and more of an ideology fixated on abstract compensation for the historic mistreatment of blacks. Citing the ‘68 case of Contract Buyers League -- an assembly of black homeowners who brought a suit against suburban, mostly white real-estate predators -- Coates broadened reparations to mean more than cutting a check for financial damages. “[Contract Buyers League] were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such…[a]nd they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders.†The cause was “no longer appealing to the government simply for equality,†Coates reasoned, but for the grander recompense of “reparations.â€
For a quarter century, Detroit-area Rep. John Conyers Jr., introduced a bill every congressional session that convoked a commission to study the lingering effects of black bondage and issue a list of “appropriate remedies.†This was colloquially viewed as a reparations bill. After being chased from Congress due to sexual harassment allegations, Conyers’s once abstruse campaign was relayed to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. Now it’s au courant with progressive lawmakers. Corey Booker, the genial New Jersey senator and also-ran presidential hopeful, introduced his own reparations edict in the Senate, with nearly half the Democratic caucus as cosponsors.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/reparations_and_rioters.html
