Vol. 35, No. 15
August 5, 2019
Correction, Please!
Reparations Won’t Mend the Past, but They Might Buy Some Future Votes
Item: The New York Times for June 18 reported that “with the support of a string of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates,” the idea of “reparations for African-Americans is gaining traction among Democrats on Capitol Hill, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi backs the establishment of a commission that would develop proposals and a ‘national apology’ to repair the lingering effects of slavery.
On the presidential campaign trail, noted the Times, “most of the leading Democratic candidates — including [Senator Cory] Booker; Senators Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren; and Representative Julián Castro — have embraced [some type of reparations]…. But even backers of reparations acknowledge that there is no set definition about what it actually means, and that creating a plan for reparations on a national scale would be extraordinarily complicated.”
Item: On May 23, Patricia Cohen wrote in the New York Times that the attaching of “a dollar figure to a program of reparations resembles a ‘Wheel of Fortune’ spin, with amounts ranging from the piddling ($71.08 per recipient under [James Forman’s 1969 “Black Manifesto” plan] to the astronomical $17 trillion in total.”
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