Collective racial guilt was, at one time, scoffed at in America. How can you hold a “race” guilty for the sins and crimes of past generations?
The racialists came up with a brilliant workaround: every bad outcome for blacks could now be attributed to the original sin of slavery. It didn’t have to have anything directly to do with the practice of slavery. As long as you can statistically show (or state emphatically enough in front of a camera) that slavery is responsible for low grades in schools by black children, high divorce rates for black couples, high drug use, high unemployment, and a stratospherically high murder rate in the black community, you can “prove” a case for reparations.
Now, it’s Boston’s turn to be enlightened about why blacks are owed billions and billions of dollars.
“Today we call upon this city, its financiers, and its white churches to stop the shirking, stop the lying, tell the truth, and pay what is owed,” the Rev. John Gibbons of Arlington Street Church in Boston said at a press conference.
“We call on the white church in Boston to join us in supporting a black reparations movement,” Rev. Kevin Peterson, founder of New Democracy Coalition, said. “We demand from Mayor [Michelle] Wu full monetary compensation for wages and lost lives through slavery and anti-black institutional oppression. Today, we call on a full and robust reparations process.”
We should get out our abacuses and start counting. Perhaps 50 years from now, we’ll have a nice, round number.
The group demanded that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu support their proposal for $15 billion in reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. They proposed that the fund would be split three ways: $5 billion in direct cash payments to black Boston residents, a $5 billion investment in new financial institutions, and $5 billion to address the racial educational achievement gap between black people and white people, along with supporting anti-violence measures.
Peterson reportedly said, “Many of the well-known white churches in downtown Boston are connected to the slave trade and the proliferation of what was a ‘slavetocracy’ in our city.”
“We point to them in Christian love to publicly atone for the sins of slavery, and we ask them to publicly commit to a process of reparations where they will extend their great wealth, tens of millions of dollars among some of those churches, into the black community,” Peterson added.
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Some “white” churches have begun to research their history to see who they’ve offended in the past.
“That is not enough,” said Rev. John E. Gibbons of Arlington Street Church. “Somehow we need to move with some urgency toward action and so part of what we’re doing is to prod and encourage white churches to go beyond what they have done thus far.”
Yes, some Boston churches were no doubt funded, in part, by slaveowners. And some northern banks did business with slaveholders, and some northern stores sold goods to slaveholders. Where does it end?
Reparations will never completely balance the scales. Making the attempt is foolish and self-defeating. But this isn’t about making things right or balancing the scales or any other form of paying what’s owed to black people.
This is about the power to extort money from simple-minded, guilt-ridden white people who don’t dare question their black brethren on matters of race or racial discrimination.