I am a Liberal Democrat, and have sympathized with blacks and their problems all my life. I have always thought we should do much more to help them than we are doing. We owe it to them because they are our fellow Americans, and they need our help. End of story. Now the idea of “reparations” has made itself into the news. This is a terrible idea, and Democrats need to avoid it completely.
It’s not that helping blacks is a bad idea; the problem is that the word “reparations” is a loaded term. If Democrats embrace the term “reparations” then voters will be turned off immediately — and they will not listen to anything else Democrats have to say on the topic. Republicans will have a field day attacking the term, and we could well lose the election over it. If Democrats want to talk about helping black people, that is fine, but the term “reparations” is a guaranteed loser. Come up with some other term, for Christ’s sake!
Reparations implies guilt. When someone hears the word “reparations” , they are immediately offended. Their attitude is that they themselves are not guilty of harming blacks, so why should they have to pay guilt money? I sympathize with this feeling. In fact, I share it. There is an old saying: “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.” This saying does NOT mean the children are guilty of their father’s crimes, but they do have to address the legacy of their parent’s transgressions.
Slavery has left a terrible legacy that we have not fully dealt with. We should help black people who have been disadvantaged by the legacy of slavery simply because it is the right thing to do. We should not be paying reparations out of a feeling of “white guilt” — which is what reparations imply. If Democrats try to market it that way, they will lose.
There are other technical issues with reparations — who qualifies? If you are half black do you get money? How about a quarter? An eighth? And do you give a rich black man like Michael Jordan reparation money when a poor white kid in Appalachia with no shoes and hookworm gets nothing? These are not trivial issues. However, the biggest issue is the word reparations itself. It is toxic politically.