The Reparations Bait-and-Switch

New York’s toxic “reparations theater” continues apace: Now the City Council is considering a bill like the one the Legislature just passed, creating a commission to look at payments to descendants of slaves.

These commissions can only bring in poisonous posturing. (When California’s commission presented its $800 billion demand, even ultra-woke Gov. Gavin Newsom gave a thumbs’-down on actually paying anything.)

The whole “debate” is an ahistorical mockery: New York outlawed slavery in 1827, decades before the Civil War was fought to end it.

And why on Earth should, say, a Gothamite child of Chinese immigrant parents be on the hook for harms done by white slaveowners more than a century ago in other states?

All any commission can do is stoke racial divisions (a favorite pastime of power-hungry progressives) for nothing of any material use to black New Yorkers.

Worse, the reparations nonsense is part of a package of woke nonsense. Another bill would tear down statues and public art of anyone remotely connected to any kind of historical injustice.

That’s right: Whatever the lefties don’t like goes straight down the memory hole. No more confronting the ugly, complicated truths of history. What happens when they try (again) to tear down the statue in Columbus Circle?

Another demands a “truth, healing and reconciliation process” to deal with the city’s history of slavery, a prescription for handout to politically connected “experts.”

How about legislation focused on the real problems plaguing black New Yorkers — rising crime with a vastly disproportionate effect on minorities; public schools that fail them year after year? Well, because that would require progressives to confront their own ideology and their own special interests.

So they use their power to push attention to more abstract grievances. How’s that for systemic privilege?