March 14, 2024 - 10:00am
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last year to prohibit race-based affirmative action in college admissions, some advocates for race-based social policy are opting for a new standard of eligibility for reparations and other compensation claims: one’s lineage as a descendant of slaves.
The latest example of this shift is New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, best known as the architect of The 1619 Project, which argued that the United States was established in 1619 as a white supremacist ethnostate, the year that the first Africans were brought to the English colonies.
In a sprawling 10,000-word New York Times piece that will appear in this weekend’s Sunday Magazine, Hannah-Jones concludes that “race-based affirmative action has died,” and the fight for “racial justice” must continue under a new rubric: “descendants of slavery”.
Hannah-Jones doesn’t elaborate on her proposal — it appears at the very end of her lengthy historical essay, which argues that conservatives and racists (operating as synonyms) have co-opted the concept of colour blindness to thwart racial justice.
The question of eligibility is a touchy issue, to say the least, as the switch from race to lineage would have the practical effect of excluding a growing US demographic — immigrants from Africa, South America and the Caribbean and their children — from benefitting from race-based programmes in the country. One of the longstanding frustrations of affirmative action advocates is that African Americans who desperately need a leg up are being sidelined by middle-class white women and affluent immigrants in the affirmative action spoils system. As Hannah-Jones states in her article: “At elite universities, research shows, the Black population consists disproportionately of immigrants and children of immigrants rather than students whose ancestors were enslaved here.”
Can lineage save affirmative action? That question was put to the test in 2022, when the nine-member California reparations task force decided by a narrow 5-4 margin to restrict reparations to descendants of slaves. Requiring applicants to prove their ancestry would necessitate professional genealogists, critics said, and would disqualify victims of American racism based on the accident of birth.
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SubscribeMy suggestion to Hannah-Jones and her fellow travelers is that if they find the US so terrible, why don’t they simply immigrate back to Africa. Perhaps then, and only then, will they realize just what a beacon of freedom the US really is, and just how good they have it in the US. But of course Hannah-Jones won’t do that because she’s too busy making a fortune out of playing the victim card.
Maybe it should be the other way round and they should be paying reparations?
Indeed, I have little doubt that an unbiased academic study would show that most of the blacks living the US are markedly better off than their equivalents back in Africa.
The difference is that blacks in the US are making the comparison with other ethnic groupings in the US. That is not to deny that blacks in the US have faced slavery (and severe discrimination until comparatively recent times). But it makes no sense to tax one set of citizens who have not had slaves to pay another set that have not been slaves simply because some of their ancestors might have been slaves.
The descendants of those who enslaved and made money by selling the slaves reside in Africa. Why do we not hear calls for reparations from them? Not, of course, that I am suggesting there is any more logic to such a call but at least it would show some intellectual coherence.
Arabs were the slave traders and are really rich now. Blacks should address their reparation demands to Mecca.
Blacks sold their conquered foes. Pretty well documented
It seems to me you have right do demand reparations from Africa. The product (Hannah-Jones) is slightly rotten.
Exactly,
They should be grateful to live in USA or wider West.
No one stops them going back to Africa.
There is not a single functioning African country.
I wonder why?
There was one called South Africa.
Strangely enough, this was actually attempted. The nation of Liberia is a result of various attempts by Americans from 1820 onward to repatriate freed slaves back to Africa. Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, was named after James Monroe, who supported this cause. Being just as racist as everybody else at the time was, many thought blacks were inferior, or just didn’t think blacks could assimilate and that blacks and whites could never live together peacefully. Given subsequent history even up to the present, I can’t honestly say they were wrong about the last part.
But blacks are statistically much inferior in terms of IQ to other races.
Not just Europeans but Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Japanese.
That is why they fail, again statistically, in comparison to other races.
That is why there is not a single functioning African state.
That is why we have BAME acronym.
To hide the facts that other n9n whites are doing great in the West.
Problem is with Africans and Muslims.
The view was also quite common during slavery that if slavery was abolished it would precipitate a race war. Hence, in part, the abolition of the slave trade long before the abolition of slavery.
The funniest thing about Liberia is the freed slaves ended up enslaving the local Africans. They are still a powerful separate caste today.
Something similar happened in Jamaica.
Every day on twitter I see another incident of b on w beat downs and many times it’s several against one. Perhaps my feed is skewed but I suspect if it were reversed it would be on national news.
There’s no question that black communities in the inner cities are doing badly. But Nicole Hannah-Jones ought to consider whether that is not due more to white liberalism than white supremacism.
All the research shows that in the immediate post-war years, before the Great Society and the systematic dumbing down of the education system, the black working class were progressing faster than their poor white neighbours.
It’s probably no accident that during those years blacks enjoyed more family stability than their white counterparts.
The basic rule is the same for both blacks and whites: kids do better with two parents.
Where are my reparations from the Italians, French and Scandinavians?
We could make a goodwill guarantee to pass on our reparations from the Romans, Vikings and Normans to slave descendants.
And the Vikings have never apologised for sacking Lindisfarne ! I feel traumatised !
My ancestor was press-ganged into the Royal Navy from 1802. A slave by any other name. Do you think I should ask for few bob?
He would have received pay. Not quite slavery.
The Barbary corsairs were enslaving Brits and Irish a lot more recently than the culprits you’ve named. We should have a statue of Admiral Edward Pellew on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, in commemoration of his bombardment of Algiers.
A good point. Particularly as I am unclear on whether these things are time barred or not.
With a surname like Dalton you are probably one of them, so you should be paying out to us.
Well, you learn something every day. I always thought it was Irish, but turns out it was Norman via Ireland. So, I guess the Brits owe me for their perfidious colonialism, who I in turn owe from my conquesting. However, I’m still owed money by the Italians.
I think an accountant is required.
And several lawyers.
Also, probably, a therapist.
Good luck getting that!
Have you expressed your grievances to them? If so, tell me where they can be contacted with addresses and phone numbers. I have a bone to pick.
There is no point in looking for logic here. The whole point is to be divisive and destructive.
The linked article is paragraph 6, about California, is genuinely worrying.
California is genuinely worrying.
The Leftist lunatics in California have destroyed that beautiful state. And their leader, Gruesome Newsom, is planning on running for president of the U.S. People will vote for him.
You can’t fix Stupid.
We’re hanging in there. It’s a boom-bust place.
These proposals are not going anywhere. Mayor Breed of SF disbanded the reparations task force. We (CA) have a 70B deficit last I checked and SF is in the same financial mess.
I can see the Hannah-Jones’s of the world turning on African immigrants. They threaten the narrative.
I think, but you can double check, the most successful immigrants to the US are Nigerians.
But, I also suspect that the screeching from the Hannah-Jones’s of the world is going to get increasingly desperate and angry. With each passing year, with each year that the US gets less white and more Latino and Asian, with each interracial marriage, with each year we move further from Jim Crowe, there is going to be increasingly less sympathy for DEI, Affirmative Action etc. They know this.
I think too that a lot of Black people who would have supported her position have just given up on the idea and have decided to stop wasting their time and move ahead.
‘ Any critique of affirmative action is just a mask for white supremacy and white power.’
Affirmative action could easily increase the number of Black medical students and Black dental students by 100%, if it was implemented properly.
Perhaps.
But would it improve the quality ? Presumably that’s a consideration when choosing potential doctors and dentists. It would certainly be top of my list.
It was implemented properly, but when you remove standardised testing you get useless morons hacking people apart
I suppose we’ll find out as DEI is now being implemented in the medical and aviation and scientific fields now. Every field except American sports.
It’s a fatuous argument but let’s take Ms Hannah-Jones’s reasoning at face value.
How would you administer such reparations? You cannot argue the principle as though it was merely a debating point, such a policy would require real-world application. If you somehow managed to win that argument you’d need to explain how reparations would be allotted.
No one can sensibly answer these basic questions:
Who do you imagine should pay these reparations – and to whom?
How should the monies be apportioned fairly?
If you’re mixed race, should you only receive half the money? – or as a sliding scale based on what proportion of your ancestry suffered under slavery?
Whilst investigating someone’s family tree to work out what they are “owed”, does one have to take note of those who are descended from Slavers as well as Slaves? Should the descendants of African slavers be receiving money? By what right?
Say you are descended from a long line of Naval men. The Royal Navy policed the oceans of the world to stop the Slave Trade. Once the British had outlawed the practice in the territories under their control, they set about dismantling the slave trade globally – and expended men and treasure to bring that about. Should you, as a descendant of those who fought to end slavery, be on the hook for reparations? Should the monies you pay in taxes go, in part, as payments to those whose African forebears might have profited from the slave trade?
Nearly 4000 freed slaves in the US went on to own slaves themselves. Should their descendants claim reparations equal to those descended only from slaves and not slave-owners?
But such logistical quibbles, although insurmountable, are moot.
The real questions remain – by what right should the 4th, 5th or 6th generation descendants of those who have suffered injustice claim reparation for that injustice? Would such a move help heal divisions or exacerbate them?
And why are the calls for reparations in the US only for African-Americans? There is plenty of evidence that ethnic Chinese slaves were treated worse than their African-American counterparts. Yet no one appears to be calling for reparations to Chinese-Americans – a group that now comfortably earns more than White Americans. A CLM movement would almost certainly be met with hostility from BLM supporters. It is because it has never been about achieving equality, it is down to the huge – and very lucrative – industry built up around grievance culture.
The arguments for reparations rest wholly on guilt, and cynically seek to exploit that guilt for financial gain.
BLM and the reparations advocates feed into a culture of guilt among Whites, and victimhood among the Black community. Rather than empowering those it claims to champion, it enfeebles them. It is frankly demeaning to suggest Black people are perpetual victims of systemic White racism. It removes the idea that any Person of Colour has agency. It absolves such “victims” of the need to take responsibility for their actions, their choices and their future. Such infantilisation of an entire racial community has been the principle behind much that has held them back.
For all the undoubted evils of the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery down through the millennia, there is no moral case for reparations to anyone other than those who directly suffered it. No such person is alive today.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is not, even remotely, in the ‘Equality’ business, she is in the ‘Grievance’ business.
And the racial grievance industry is enjoying a boom time. There are careers to be had and fortunes to be made. Who cares if we’re speaking the truth if we can make a buck from spreading falsehoods! No sense in trying to bring communities together when your lucrative career depends on stoking resentment on one side of the racial divide and feeding a sense of guilt to the other.
Hannah-Jones, along with fellow race hucksters like Robin Di Angelo, Ibram X Kendi and the Guardian’s Afua Hirsch, are basically just arms dealers in the culture war.
If you are in favor of reparations, it makes little sense to exclude Black immigrants from the Caribbean and other Western Hemisphere countries: they, too, are descendants of slaves. In any case, reparations are unworkable for a variety of reasons. Moreover, giving people, let’s say, $50,000 or even $100,000, is unlikely to definitively change their lives.
They should claim reparations from Spain, France, and the UK.
Honestly I would be happy to do it if they sign a contract to never gripe about it again, they or their descendants would now be wholly responsible for their success or failures in life. End affirmative anything and let everyone compete equally.
Blah, blah, blah. The woman is an empty vessel devoid of integrity, she insults her own. Empty vessels always make the most noise but rarely add to the discourse or edify anyone.
NHJ certainly doesn’t looked starved or deprived does she, she’s definitely living off the fat of the land.
Why not go to Haiti? I understand it was established by slaves who overthrew their captors. I don’t know much about the place but I imagine that those liberators would have set up a Constitution that reflected their emancipation and was fair to all.
Are you suggesting the US might learn something by cannibalising the Haitian Constitution?
Er, no.
Yes, Haiti.
It would be much more successful if run by colonisers.
Perhaps it matters not one fig to her whether her argument is grounded on evidence and built with logic: perhaps she just enjoys the fruits of the ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ – after all, there is no bad publicity so long as she stirs the pot and gets her name in the national conversation.
Grifters gonna grift. It’s what they do. The people once on the receiving end of Jim Crow policies now embrace DEI as their means of get evenwiththemism. They’re not against race-based discrimination on principle; they insist on it as if bad ideas somehow become good based on who is impacted. Jones is where she is for one reason and probably knows it. Instead of being grateful, she keeps playing the victim. If she and others want restitution, I suggest they go to Africa and look for descendants of the people who sold other Africans into bondage.
Yes it lays bare the movie myth that somehow they were better than whites to begin with.
Reparations will not solve the problem of inherited slavery. It seems the African American continues to play the victim card not realizing the harm it is doing to their ethnic group. It is obviously not racism because those who came as legal immigrants are doing so well in american society compared to those who’s ancesters came as slaves.
One of the problems with the 1619 project was that colonial Virginia and especially colonial Georgia, however racist they might have been, were not initially built on slavery. Free black people could pursue their rights in the courts, including the right to own other men as slaves – one of the first people to have his right to own a slave legally recognized in Virginia was “Anthony Johnson, negro”, who was commended by the courts for his service. He was from Angola. Colonial Georgia, which included much of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi, was conceived in the 1730s as a buffer of small white farmsteads protecting the southern flanks of English rule from Spanish America. Slavery was banned outright in Georgia for decades. Colonial America came late to slavery, buying many of their slaves from the Caribbean long after the moral objections to human bondage had been thoroughly aired.
Plantation commodities produced by slaves put racism on a paying basis. Sugar in Louisiana, “Carolina Gold” rice and cotton in Georgia made colonists “stark mad after negroes”. It’s shocking to read how good people subverted their own laws and morals. Slave Codes were introduced throughout the south that denied Black people the most basic human rights. Sumptuary laws against dressing like white people were designed to prevent any sense of guilt or cognitive dissonance. Two decades after its foundation, the colony of Georgia overturned its ban on slavery in the 1750s, just twenty years before the War of Independence. In a new nation that declared all men were created equal, you can predict the level of support for the abolition of slavery and the number of freed African Americans with extraordinary accuracy by looking at the type of crops that were grown in every part of the eastern United States.
We all know that the African American population continued to be oppressed through Jim Crow laws after Emancipation. Long after Slave Codes had lost their economic rationale, the legacy of slavery remained. It was illegal for a white man to marry a black woman in Virginia until 1967 – yes 1967 – three years before I was born. That level of insidious, persistent discrimination left its mark on generations of African Americans. It was entirely rational to have low expectations of a society that systematically kept you down, which made attempts to educate yourself nigh pointless.
Society as a whole may have moved on dramatically from the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, but the cultural impact on some of the most impoverished communities in the United States remains. IIRC the children of African immigrants outperform the general population academically in both the UK and the US, whereas Afro-Caribbean and African American students descended from slaves do not. The solution to endemic poverty in the twenty-first century may not be reparations, but we should be mindful of the ongoing impact of sedulous, soul-destroying laws and norms that crushed the hopes and ambitions of millions.
We’ve now had 60 years of bending over backwards and purposely putting whites to the back of the line. few of them have done anything with it except put more hands out or exact revenge physically. How many headlines I’ve read since st George Floyd died about how they believe ‘whiteness’(white people) should be eradicated or that we have no culture. I’m done with the guilt and suspect many others are reaching fatigue level.
Is it just me, or are posts taking longer and longer to appear on the site? I posted a long-ish piece several hours ago and I note it still hasn’t appeared.
Yeah, the comments are a mess. I keep getting the red captcha warning almost every time.
I tend to write pretty long pieces, which seems to be part of the problem, but it’s infuriating to spend time writing something, posting it at 9am for it to not appear until late afternoon, at which point no one will see it.
Some of my comments wouldn’t appear for days. Others disappear. I’ve all but given up commenting here.
Ex-slaves make cruel masters.
Meantimes, it appears that native Americans have completely ceased to exist? They must have. They are never even mentioned in any talk of reparations, structural racism, historical wrongs. Rendered invisible in a stunning display of Orwellian hypocrisy, I suppose.
They are 2-3% of the US population. They don’t figure in these discussions because too few of the survived to have political power.
Yes I believe we should offer help to them over broken treaties but we must remember they fought hard and doled out savage punishments to their foes.
My grandparents came to the United States to at the turn of the 20th century to escape the pogroms perpetrated against them by our new best friends, the Ukrainians. Can I put in for a piece of the action of the money President Zelinsky is skimming off of Western aid to his country and putting into his Swiss bank account, or should I contact the Swiss bankers directly?
Your claim should be against the Russian state – the progroms occurred under Russian rule.
Hannah-Jones’ piece may be a backhanded compliment to Coleman Hughes, a young black intellectual who recently published The End of Race Politics: Arguments for Colorblindness in America. Featured by the “paper of record,” Jones’ essay sounds like a way of firming up orthodoxy and motivating the orthodox in the face of a heresy that is likely to be all too popular. A heresy that was at one time, after all, celebrated as Martin Luther King’s famous dream.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is Black-passing.
Is that enough to qualify her?
Obviously, her mother shouldn’t get a penny. She is white-passing.
More like gas passing.
Interesting by what measures injustices are established. In 1850 the life expectancy of a mill-working family in Manchester was roughly half that of a slave in the USA. (See Engels). The slaves had an economic value to their owner greater than the mill worker. Long terms studies of family health issues show that malnutrition in its various forms continue to blight the lives of descendants over a hundred years later. Who to blame? Who to be compensated? Who to pay?
Dear oh dear … I don’t like where this is going … this all leads to the fleeting thought that the “privileged” slaves in the US were inadvertently enabling exploitation of the “less privileged” white labourers in Manchester by producing the cotton that fed the dark satanic mills !
Of course, it’s all nonsense. Just like the insane proposal in this idiotic woman’s article.
Slavery is an evil in itself. But in terms of material disadvantage the picture is much murkier. Also, in hard times workers could be laid off and left to starve. Owners generally had obligations to slaves. And in any case, to let them starve would be to throw away a large investment. Slaves are assets, workers are not.
How on earth is anyone going to prove any of this lineage stuff beyond reasonable doubt ? Are there reliable written records for every individual who might make a claim ? And who’s to decide who should – and should not – pay for all this ? If you’re rich and white and your descendents arrived in the USA after 1865 are you in the clear ? If you’re poor and white and your ancestors were subsistence farmers in the South before 1865, do you have to get your wallet out ? What if you had part slave and part slaveowner lineage ?
Stupid, Dangerous. Totally impractical.
“She remains true to her fatalistic view that African Americans can’t succeed on their own, without Government assistance and special programmes.”
People like Thomas Sowell – who has direct personal experience here – record that African Americans were doing significantly better (in terms of relative economic and social advancement) before the era of “Government assistance and special programme” with Lyndon Johnson. Which doesn’t surprise me at all. You don’t get very far in life sitting on your backside complaining how unfair the world is.
I shan’t be reading her 10000 word sprawl.
And what to do about the hundred plus black slave owners who worked in the Southern States. Are we to find their lineage and hunt them down?
How will she get round all the white people imported in the 16th and 17th centuries and enslaved as ‘indentured servants’? The fact that these usually Irish and English slaves do not fit conveniently into her colour-based thinking is no reason for them to be ignored, and to do so would invalidate any scheme she puts forward.
She has the white lib saviors to help parse out why they are special.
Reparations won’t fix the historical legacy of slavery, but it will anger a bunch of people of other races who see blacks singled out for sympathy and special treatment based on something that happened long before any of us were born. This opens a can of worms the size of a dump truck. Nearly every group has suffered at the hands of some other group at some point in history. Where does it end? Why not try to fix every injustice in history. If today’s black population deserves reparations, why shouldn’t the populations of Mexico or Peru get reparations from Spain? Why shouldn’t the Mongols owe basically everybody from China to Turkey a whole bunch of money? Why shouldn’t Russia be paying the former Communist bloc nations a stipend for running their countries into the ground? Why shouldn’t the Jews be getting reparations from basically everyone? Technically, shouldn’t all Americans black and white be shipped back to Europe or Africa or wherever because the land actually belonged to Native Americans long before any of our ancestors got here? It’s just so much rubbish. I find it sad that so many human beings are so utterly blind to basic human nature. Racism is a human characteristic. If you want to make a hostile machine intelligence, build a super powerful AI and tell it to end racism. If it’s halfway logical, it will immediately conclude the most efficient solution is to simply kill all humans.
you might enjoy Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell (the author of Cloud Atlas, not the light comedy panellist)
That’s the fear of the doomsday predictions
Interesting. Neither Barack Obama nor Kamala Harris would qualify as descendants of slaves. Michelle Obama, and her daughters Sasha and Malia, would qualify.
I have no problem taking money from the haves, and using it to give a leg up to the have nots – provided it is effective. In fact this is probably a necessary counterbalance to the tendency of the rich and privileged to keep their advantage in the family. It also frees up talent which might otherwise be lost.
But then use the money where it is actually needed, regardless of race. Wealthy people do not need a “leg up” whatever their race or lineage.
It also gets us away from the idea that if black people are poor it is white peoples fault, but if white people are poor it is somehow their own fault. And they can be left to rot.
Why would anyone work to become wealthy if they aren’t allowed to pass it to their children?
White women, middle class or not, do not benefit from affirmative action. Any college counselor will tell you this. White women and Asians of both sexes are discriminated against in the “affirmative action spoils system.”
Reparations to slave-descendants is a practical impossibility, however justified it would have been in the Reconstruction period.
Why do people continue to talk about this racist fantasist?
Grifter, capital-G.