Provocations: Read Dave Neese’s take on reparations
Slavery reparations? Seems a little late. Like 156 years late. But better late than never, the Democratic presidential candidates apparently figure.
They say the idea deserves study and serious consideration.
I don’t know what a study commission will say.
But I say the first question regarding slavery reparations is: Who has to pay?,
And the second question is: Who gets paid?
It seems to be way more complicated than simply black and white.
Democratic excitement over slavery reparations got me to thinking over the idea from a perspective of pure and simple self-interest. Selfishness, you might say.
Given my status as a pale face, I’m not expecting to wangle a reparations check for myself. But I am hoping to wangle an exemption from having to pay into the reparations fund. If not an exemption, then at the very least a deduction.
Here’s my pitch: Nobody in my branch of the family ever owned slaves. That is, unless you count the wives and children who had to help clear forest land for farming and pitch in to eke out a hardscrabble living out on the then American frontier of the Midwest.
My people may have had the racial prejudices common to the times. But all the same, they were adamantly anti-slavery, the papers and stories they handed down say.
They were backers of Abe Lincoln. And even before him, they were supporters of Gen. John C. Fremont, first Republican presidential candidate.
Fremont was a sort of antislavery loose cannon who upstaged Lincoln by issuing his own Emancipation Proclamation, more than two years before Lincoln’s, out in Missouri. His move caused cautious Abe to say, in effect, “Whoa! Hold on there, general.”
My forbears, I’m guessing, were in many instances most likely not motivated by any noble sense of brotherhood regarding the inhuman nature of racial slavery.
More likely, their politics, grew out of calculations of common-sense self-interest. If some people could be forced to work for nothing, what were the chances that other people — wage-earning working stiffs — would ever be able to get ahead? Slavery hardly “privileged” whites, other than rich plantation owners. It had the effect of driving down workers’ wages. How could it not have?
Many of my forbears worked physically brutal jobs and scrimped to put away enough money to buy a piece of forest and sweat it into a farm. They worked jobs that, in theory, you could force an African to do for nothing.
Fortunately, a provision of something called the Northwest Ordinance prevented slavery from ever coming into the territory now known as the Midwest and thereby undercutting wages.
So then, is there any chance Sen. Cory Booker et al. might be willing to offer a deduction on reparations taxes, if not an exemption, to folks with ties to states the Northwest Ordinance created? The states include Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, the heart of the old Big Ten turf.
The Northwest Ordinance emphatically outlawed slavery from an area that doubled the size of America at the time, an area that came to encompass those five states.
And the Northwest Ordinance did so two years before the U.S. Constitution was drafted. The U.S. Constitution, of course, in its original version, made an accommodation with slavery.
Not the Northwest Ordinance, though. No slavery, it declared high up in the text. Absolutety no slavery. Period.
The Northwest Ordinance case aside, I’m angling for a special reparations tax exemption or deduction in the name of my great-grandad and his younger brother.
Great-Grandad, at the relatively advanced age of 32, up and joined Co. E, 11th Regiment, Indiana Volunteer Infantry. He went off to the Civil War, an engagement that finally eliminated the moral scourge of slavery at phenomenal cost in life and limb.
He left behind a wife, a brood of kids and a farm the family had wrestled out of the wilderness. The older children and adult relatives nearby took over the farm tasks, while Great Grandad, locally acclaimed as a sharpshooter with a rifle, went off to fight the slavery- supporting Confederacy.
Lucikily for him, the war was over after a short enlistment. He was mustered out in Baltimore and came home alive, with all his limbs intact, and stories to tell of the adventure.
His younger brother, who joined the Union Army at age 24, was less fortunate. He died a no-doubt agonizing death from smallpox in a Confederate prison camp near Nashville, Tenn. He left behind a widow and one child. His fate, the family stories go, was what drove Great Grandad to enlist despite his family and farm responsibilities and his age.
War death from disease was hardly an uncommon outcome. Far more soldiers succumbed in the ranks to disease than to rifle or cannon shot. And those who died of disease probably would have preferred a quicker dispatch by bullet or cannon ball.
In either case, some 360,000 union soldiers fought, in Lincoln’s phrase, until every drop of blood drawn by the lash was paid with another drawn by the sword.
That was a bloody toll some 100,000 greater than America’s later losses in World War II. In terms of today’s population, it was the equivalent of an unbelievable 3 million deaths.
In the Northwest Ordinance’s anti-slavery Midwest, volunteers from Wisconsin and Indiana, later joined by volunteers from Michigan, formed what became famously know as the Iron Brigade, the Black Hats.
It fought in major battle after major battle — more battles than any other outfit in the Civil War — and suffered the highest rate of casualties of any outfit in that war — meatgrinder casualties of 61 percent at Gettysburg, for example.
Surely arrangements should be made for the great great grandchildren of the Iron Brigade to be exempted from having to cough up slavery reparations. How about it, Sen. Booker?
I have a feeling, though, that when the Democrats’ start promulgating their reparations regulations, they’re not going to be able, much less inclined, to accommodate requests for special consideration. Especially not mine.
There will simply be too many others ahead of me in the line demanding exemptions or deductions — and justifiably so.
For example, the forbears of probably half or more of today’s U.S. population arrived on these shores after slavery was abolished. Those immigrant forefathers had no role in U.S. slavery whatsoever.
At the time of the Civil War, many recently arrived immigrants, in fact — mostly Irish boys — were conscripted into the Union cause.
Surely there should be an exemption, or at least a deduction, for their great great great grandchildren, no?
But how sympathetic can the champions of slavery reparations afford to be, when you take into account that each exemption or deduction cuts into the revenues of the reparations handout jackpot?
Slavery reparations sounds like the mother of all administrative nightmares. Surely even progressives will concede that the administrative impediments are daunting.
What about, for example, a Sudanese-American or an Ethiopian-American, immigrants who’ve just barely unpacked? No slaves came from their part of Africa.
Do they get a full reparations share anyway? Only a partial share? Or none?
Will reparations be confined strictly to those African-Americans who can prove their ancestors came from one of the Western African nations that kept the holds of slave ships packed with human cargo?
And what about possible descendants of African tribal chiefs who captured blacks from opposition tribes and held them in cages for delivery to the slave-trading ships?
Surely measures must be crafted to prevent such recipients from drawing down the reparations largess.
Then there’s President Obama. What about him?
He’s now a multi-millionaire. But does he get in on the reparations gravy train, anyway? And if so, does he get a full share? Or just a half share, reflecting his actual racial makeup?
What about the multimillionaire golfer Tiger Woods?
Would he qualify for reparations despite his wealth. If so, would he receive a full reparations share or just a quarter share in accordance with his racial composition?
What about Sen. Booker himself, he of Stanford, Oxford and Yale Law? Will he get a share of the benefit he’s championing? Or do ethics obligate him to recuse himself from the issue?
And what about the guy who inevitably tries to pull an Elizabeth Warren fast one? As you’ll recall, she famously attempted to bill herself as an American Indian, despite her being blindingly whitey white white-looking, a blue-eyed pale-face squaw.
What happens when some hustler as white as she declares himself to be an African-American and submits an application for slavery reparations?
It sounds like investments in DNA testing firms may be the wave of the future. Criminal cases may have to be set aside, clogging up the justice system, while authorities address a massive backlog of DNA testing for reparations.
Then there’s the question: Who’ll make these decisions on reparations? Will there be a new U.S. Commission on Ethnicity and Racial Verification, a CERV, or whatever?
Would such an agency be able to declare who makes the reparations cut and who doesn’t without inciting nasty racial animosity and turmoil in the streets?
Government “entitlements” tend to grow, grow, grow.
Would a bureaucracy such as a CERV wind up promulgating regulations allowing slavery reparations even for applicants found to have a mere 1,024th African ancestry — Liz Warren’s actual American Indian percentage?
With reparations now center stage, maybe one of the rappers will be persuaded to throw his hat into the Democratic presidential ring. The rappers, after all, were agitating for reparations long before the notion struck the current crop of Democratic candidates as a heck of an idea.
One rapper rapped some years ago:
“Forty acres and a mule, Jack.
“Where’s it at? “Why you try to fool the black?”
Another rapped: “Where’s my mule? “Where’s my 40 acres “Mr. Emancipator?” Spike Lee, come to think of it, dubbed his movie-making company “Forty Acres and a Mule.”
Actually, the 40-acresand-a-mule version of reparations was originally the brainchild of Republicans. The very thought of that might well give Democrats pause.
“Radical Republicans” of the post-Civil War
Reconstruction Era — so dubbed owing to their unbending opposition to slavery — advocated land redistribution for freed slaves.
Such initiatives were thwarted by …. can you guess which party? (Hint: It was the party that was the die-hard supporter of slavery, the stick-in-themud party that even after the Civil War bequeathed the nation such institutions as the “Black Codes,” the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. Further hint: Starts with a “D.”)
At the end of the Civil War, in 1865, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman advanced the first version of reparations. He issued a field order setting aside land in South Carolina and Georgia “for the settlement of the negroes now made free by acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.”
The order didn’t throw in a mule. But it did suggest government assistance in enabling freed blacks to rent one with an option to buy.
Sherman’s order mostly came to naught, thanks largely to Democratic footdragging resistance. Gradually, instead of reparations, the impoverishing institution of sharecropping took hold and shackled blacks in a new, postslavery bondage in the South. The rest, as is said, is history.
You’d think the ugly history would at least somewhat tamp down racial sanctimony among today’s Democratic presidential candidates. No such luck, however.
At least back in the days immediately after the Civil War, reparations along the lines of Sherman’s field order were administratively doable.
Today’s proposal to levy reparations, nearly eight score years after the end of slavery, is so loony you have to wonder: Is this some sort of dirty-politics plot cooked up by a colluding Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to make the Democratic Party look like center-ring circus clowns?
Maybe a major investigation of this is in order. Anybody got Bob Mueller’s phone number?