From the right: Why Reparations Won’t Work

“Reparatory payouts” for slavery like those proposed in California, thunders Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness, “are dangerous” in our “multiracial, intermarried, assimilated, and integrated postmodern America”: They’d require “the sort of sick rules of past racialized societies such as the Old South” or “Hitler’s Germany” to determine who is black. Also: “Are whites with Confederate ancestors more culpable than Michiganders or Ohioans” for the evils of slavery? Slavery “did not enrich generations of subsequent Americans”: The Confederate states were “far poorer” than Union ones. And the “lesson from the $22 trillion record of Great Society compensatory payouts” is “that massive infusions of federal money are more apt to ensure social disruption and dislocation than alleviate them.”