How We Can Finally Put the Reparations Question Behind Us

“With that in mind, what I want to do below is to advance a proposal that, I think, lets everyone concerned out of this conundrum gracefully.”

In the latest installment of this nation’s long-running conversation about race and racism, the complex, confounding subject of reparations for slavery is the talk of the town yet again.

This time, its most prominent advocate is Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning lead author of The New York Times “1619 Project”—an effort repeatedly panned even by liberal fact-checkers and historians, which aims to convince Americans that their nation was founded in sin. For its proponents, the founding was not in 1776, when our ideals were forged in the Declaration of Independence, but in 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on our shores. Now, despite Jones’ having expressed rather questionable views of white people—those “barbaric devils” and “bloodsuckers”—The New York Times recently featured her case to rehash much of the case for reparations that Ta-Nehisi Coates had notoriously made in The Atlantic in 2014. Other recent takes in favor of reparations have surfaced in The Washington Post, Forbes, MarketWatch, and USA Today, among others, with more where these came from certain to come.

The idea, in other words, is that talk of reparations is not going away anytime soon. With that in mind, what I want to do below is to advance a proposal that, I think, lets everyone concerned out of this conundrum gracefully.

It is important to understand first, however, that despite the proselytizing media’s effort to normalize the idea, reparations for slavery are wildly unpopular (enjoying a meager level of 26% support in the general population, with even 35% of African Americans opposed). The protests, thus far, have not changed that fact. As The Washington Post recently reported, “Some opinions about race haven’t changed since the protests began…Interestingly, Americans have steadily failed to support reparations for descendants of slaves. Throughout 2020, only around one-quarter favored reparations to African Americans.”