On May 21, Portland, Ore., activists and the nonprofit Brown Hope hosted a “Reparations Happy Hour.” The premise was simple: White Portlanders were supposed to kick in $10 to pay for the drinks of the black and brown attendees. The website instructs, “This event is for white people, too. (But don’t show up physically! Instructions are below.)…White people can show up and support by GIVING reparations.”
They continue, “Instead of physically attending, your presence will be felt through your active financial support for healing, leadership, and community building within Portland’s black, brown, and indigenous community.” Around 40 people showed up to the event in total.
The organizers explain, via the website, “Living in Portland, the whitest major city in the United States, it is impossible to go through a day without interacting with whiteness. Hosting an event that takes place for two hours a month does not separate us from white people.”
According to them, it’s not reverse racism, but the creation of a space free from racism, even subtle forms. They explain that it’s like a support group and “you wouldn’t host an Alcoholic’s Anonymous group with a Tequila manufacturer in the room.” (A fair analogy!)
As much as the cordoning off of people along color lines strikes the wrong chord with conservatives, we should tone down our outrage. After all, this is an event organized by a private organization, not taking government funds. They’re doing this voluntarily, and it’s more than fair to make the intellectual case for reparations (free speech, everyone). There’s no indication that if a white person showed up at one of their events, that they would throw them out. It’s not necessarily a discriminatory event, legally speaking, and it would be in pretty bad taste for a white person to pointedly antagonize people who are trying to build an intentional community by showing up.
But there are still some aspects of social justice craziness that permeate throughout the rhetoric surrounding the event. The website mentions how organizers have received criticisms for the alcohol-oriented connotations of the phrase “happy hour” (which can be exclusive to those who are sober or in recovery for alcoholism). They will soon be changing the name to “Reparations Power Hour.” To me, this seems like yet another instance of overly sensitive speech-policing.
On the FAQ page, the group addresses whether Asian people are invited to the event. The organizers respond that “some communities who identify as ‘brown’ have benefitted from light skin privilege, and as a racial demographic, are better off than the average Black family. However, Asian Americans have been the targets of racial exclusion, repression and exploitation throughout US history. They deserve reparations, too.”
That’s absolutely true that Asian-Americans have experienced hardship and racism — but do all groups from different racial backgrounds now deserve reparations, in the logic of the organizers? The case has been made for giving reparations to black Americans who have slave ancestors. But it seems like this activist group believes most or all nonwhite people living in America are owed reparations — so about 38 percent of our country is owed money by about 62 percent of us. This seems logistically impractical, not to mention the fact that, according to 2016 polling, around 68 percent of Americans believe reparations should not be paid to descendants of slaves. To be fair, that number is higher with millennials — around 40 percent of the younger generation (roughly people who are between the ages 22 and 35) believes reparations should be paid, with around 49 percent saying they shouldn’t.
Still, it’s fine to make the intellectual case for this practice, but it might be worth sorting out which groups would receive reparations, and why, before trying to sell it to vast swaths of the voting population (or having your event covered by the New York Times).
All in all, it’s a relatively harmless event, with bits of logical inconsistencies and overly sensitive verbiage strewn throughout. Conservatives should support free speech and voluntary private assembly, but we can still shake our heads at the trend of people fixating on identity, victimhood, and who has it worst. We simply can’t create a society where no one is offended or where power structures are entirely even or where unfairness doesn’t permeate in some way, no matter how hard we try to dismantle it. We should also be wary of creating accidental new hierarchies that we must then repair in the future — something I’m surprised more social justice-oriented folks aren’t talking about more.
Liz Wolfe (@lizzywol) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is managing editor at Young Voices.
