The California Assembly will vote before Monday on a state Senate bill that creates a task force to look at the question of slavery reparations. The measure passed the state Senate in a bipartisan vote.
The radical left is getting ready for a Biden presidency and a Democratic Party takeover of the U.S. House and Senate by laying the groundwork for their agenda at the state level. Slavery reparations will be close to the top of the radical’s wish list if Biden wins.
“Let’s be clear: Chattel slavery, both in California and across our nation, birthed a legacy of racial harm and inequity that continues to impact the conditions of Black life in California,” said Democratic Sen. Holly Mitchell of Los Angeles.
She cited disproportionate homelessness, unemployment, involvement in the criminal justice system, lower academic performance and higher health risks during the coronavirus pandemic.
This is a surprise. California was a free state when it entered the Union in 1850 as a result of the Compromise of 1850. But now we’re told there was “chattel slavery” in California.
Well… sorta.
Although California before the Civil War was officially a free state, Mitchell listed legal and judicial steps state officials took at the time to support slavery in Southern states while repressing Blacks.
But what about the fact that white people alive today had nothing to do with slavery?
Sen. Steven Bradford, a Democrat from Gardena who supported the bill, said he only wished it was more than a study.
He noted that Friday marked the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington and The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
“If the 40 acres and a mule that was promised to free slaves were delivered to the descendants of those slaves today, we would all be billionaires,” Bradford said. “I hear far too many people say, ‘Well, I didn’t own slaves, that was so long ago.’ Well, you inherit wealth — you can inherit the debt that you owe to African-Americans.”
Reparations are inherently unfair and no proposal is workable. They are unfair because they assign guilt to an entire race of people. That’s absurd on its face and turns our concept of individual responsibility on its head.
It will be impossible to fairly, not to mention intelligently, divvy up reparations in any rational manner. The questions don’t end with who gets what. How much do the descendants of former slaves get compared to families that arrived from Africa in the last 10 years? More prosaically, how “black” do you have to be to get your money? Will we go full Nazi and start looking at “pure blood” and “half breeds”? Should someone who is only one-quarter black get the same amount as someone who has a higher percentage of “black blood”?
These aren’t idle questions. We’re talking about trillions of dollars in the most massive transfer of wealth in world history. It would be nice if we knew what we were doing before expropriating that kind of cash.
We may get lucky and see the radicals — as radicals are wont to do — blow up their own proposal by squabbling over the details. But this is an issue that won’t go away. Logic doesn’t matter to these people. In fact, it makes them angry when you try to apply logic to the problem. And manipulating street violence to get their way will always be an option for them.
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