Do you consider yourself responsible for someone else’s mistakes? Well, some presidential candidates seem to think you are to blame for the actions of your ancestors.
Democratic presidential aspirants Beto O’ Rourke and Marianne Williamson want to impanel a committee and spend well over $200 billion to provide reparations for slavery. During the second round of democratic debates, Williamson’s line about reparations was met with thunderous applause. There’s only one problem: No one genuinely interested in fighting racism should support her proposal.
“It’s… payment of a debt that is owed. That is what reparations is.”
Author Marianne Williamson earned applause and cheers when she mounted a defense of her plan to offer $200 billion to $500 billion in reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans in the US. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/MCCtLWcZ45
— CNN (@CNN) July 31, 2019
The horrible financial logistics of this proposal aside, it unwittingly perpetuates the culture war of racial division, which has deeply divided America along racial lines and created modern-day boogeymen such as “systemic racism,” “microaggressions,” and other grievance studies concepts, all while politicizing the entire concept of racial justice. And the very idea of reparations reduces the past struggles of African Americans to a cash payment, and falsely suggests that horrors akin to slavery still haunt modern African Americans generations later.
We should reject this defeatist gospel and move toward greener pastures.
And who is going to pay for these reparations? We’re already set to run a $1 trillion deficit in 2019, and reparations would only make this worse. After all, during last night’s debate, Williamson said anything “less than $100 billion is insulting.” All in all, the price tag for some reparations proposals similar to those both Beto and Williamson support has exceeded the trillions.
Efforts to fix phantom problems that no one today was alive to experience cannot justify ignoring the well-documented effects of a burgeoning national debt, which include diminished buying power, reduced economic growth, and an unstable economy. By continuing us down this path of fiscal fantasy, O’Rourke and Williamson are making all of us liable for future reparations for continuously robbing the next generation’s wallets.
Part of Williamson’s argument for reparations claimed it would heal ills such as a “dark, psychic force,” “emotional turbulence” and “toxicity.”
Funnily enough, the desire for reparations unwittingly exemplifies all of those things (minus the psychic gibberish) which fall under the umbrella of deep, painful cultural divisions. Between Black Lives Matter, a collective that supports reparations and whose protests have shut down roadways, to the pessimism many blacks feel about their standing in life, do we really need to add to the inferno that is America’s obsession with race?
Williamson says reparations would heal America, but they’d actually be incredibly divisive.
After all, it is quite divisive to convince someone to apologize for actions committed by people related to them by skin color only. Yet, Williamson happily did that — quite literally asking white people to offer a “prayer of apology” to the nearest black person at one of her events. Wouldn’t this broken logic require all Germans to personally repent for the Nazi’s atrocities, or all dark-skinned Africans to apologize for war criminal Joseph Kony?
We need to relinquish our obsession with the false doctrine of race and see people for what they are: individuals with skills, talents, desires, and passions. Not faceless people in a sea of color.
Anyone who wants to seriously tackle issues of race in America should not endorse Williamson’s pessimistic solutions. They rely on a world that is long past, one where hatred and ignorance were powerful institutional forces. We must adopt a new vision of healing that relies on progress, not punishment.
Christian Watson is a Young Voices contributor and college student. He can be found on Twitter at @OfficialCWatson.
