David Brooks must have slept like a baby after sending in his column on reparations for black Americans. It checked all the right boxes required for a condescending, liberal, white person to continue feeling morally superior without lifting a finger.
Credit where it’s due, though. For his piece in the New York Times, Brooks did at least talk to a southern black lady.
Brooks wrote Thursday that he’s had a spiritual awakening and now supports reparations for blacks in order to compensate for slavery’s “collective debt that will have to be paid.”
He describes his conversion from reparations opponent after “traveling around the country for the past few years studying America’s divides” and finding, “The racial divide doesn’t feel like the other divides. There is a dimension of depth to it that the other divides don’t have. It is more central to the American experience.”
He wrote that he “had so many experiences over the past year — sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 — that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.”
Brooks doesn’t name the woman who was blessed to meet a rich, white man who wants to give her money on behalf of America. Not directly out of his pocket right now, mind you, but perhaps she’ll get some from everyone else some day.
He goes into no detail about why “kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953,” but I have some guesses that have nothing to do with slavery, like the breakdown of the nuclear family and the sprawling welfare state that has only weakened black communities.
Policies that relieve the most vulnerable people of any sexual responsibility result in tangible consequences, including food stamp entitlements for children, prolific birth control, child support for single mothers, and on and on. All of these delights were ushered in after 1959. The birth control pill was introduced as a contraceptive in 1960, and President Nixon expanded federal subsidies for the pill in 1970. Food stamps were made permanent in 1964. The child support system came in 1975, and though it was intended for the children of divorced parents, nonmarital births increased to about 20 percent within a decade of its passage.
These are all programs sacred within the Democratic Party today, though they were ushered along with the help of Republicans, too. And they’ve done more to wreck the futures of blacks today than the aftermath of slavery did then. If we’re trying to repair the lives of blacks Americans, look at the policies that put them where they are.
But if the main concern is monetary compensation, how much money, how it would be distributed, and who precisely should receive it, Brooks doesn’t know. He concludes his column, however, declaring that at least “the very act of talking about and designing [reparations] heals a wound and opens a new story.”
Blacks should presumably be thankful to Brooks for all of his help.
