One-time reparations beats continual affirmative action

Ross Douthat

Last week, I promised a series of columns making deliberately unrealistic policy proposals, on the theory that the Trump era has overturned a lot of basic political assumptions (my own included), making it a reasonable time to entertain unusual ideas.

This week’s proposal is directly related to one of those overturned assumptions: the theory that a multiracial society requires both parties to compete across lines of ethnicity and color, and that white-identity politics is a path to the political wilderness.

Not so. Instead, the demographic transformation of America has given us a Democratic Party more attuned to racial injustice or committed to ethnic patronage (depending on your point of view) than ever, and a Republican Party that has exploited white racism or ridden a white backlash against ethnic patronage (again, depending on your perspective) on its way to control of the House, the Senate and the White House.

At one end, you have the liberal acclaim that greeted Ta-Nehisi Coates’ case for reparations, his argument that the debt owed by “the people who believe themselves to be white” to the descendants of African slaves is vast and essentially unpaid. At the other end, you have the fears of those white Trump voters who feel like the new liberalism offers affirmative action for everyone but them.

These views are worlds apart, but it can be simultaneously true that slavery and Jim Crow robbed black Americans on a scale that still requires redress, and that offering redress through a haphazard system of minority preferences creates a new set of reasonable white grievances in its turn.

Maybe reparations should be considered as an alternative — one that directly addresses a unique government-sanctioned crime against part of the American people, without requiring a preference regime that makes lower-class white Americans feel like victims of a multicultural version of The Man.

So, this week’s immodest proposal: Abolish racial preferences in college admissions, phase out preferences in government hiring and contracting, eliminate the disparate-impact standard in the private sector, and allow state-sanctioned discrimination only on the basis of socioeconomic status, if at all. Create a reparations program — the Frederick Douglass Fund, let’s call it — that pays out exclusively, directly and one time only to the proven descendants of American slaves.

What would it pay out? Advocates talk in trillions. But right now, giving every African-American $10,000 would cost about $370 billion, modest relative to supply-side tax plans and single-payer schemes alike. The wealth of the median black U.S. household was $11,200 as of 2013; a $10,000 per-person annuity would more than double it.

What it would offer is a meaningful response to an extraordinary injustice, but a response that does not involve permanent discrimination.

There is no clear or easy path to becoming a multiracial nation that isn’t divided politically by race. But reparations for the descendants of slaves today, rather than affirmative action for nonwhites forever, might be a better path than the one we’re on right now.