The History of
Victimhood
November 30, 1999
Should the
United States pay reparations to black Americans for slavery and
its “lingering effects”? Such is the proposal of John Conyers
Jr., aptly described by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington
Post as “the Democratic congressman from Michigan who,
after a long career as political hack and power broker, has made a leap
onto the moral high ground.” Conyers himself is black, and he is
taking the politics of victimhood to new heights. Or depths.
Yardley, whose liberalism is tempered by
common sense, opposes the idea. He concedes “the injustice and
brutality and horror of slavery,” adding: “That a nation
founded upon a commitment to freedom and liberty could have permitted
the enslavement of human beings is a stain that can never be removed; it
is central to our history.”
He reflects: “The labor of slaves
went uncompensated, so why shouldn’t their descendants,
struggling for justice and opportunity, be compensated in their stead?
After all, weren’t Japanese Americans interned during World War II
compensated only a decade ago to the tune of $20,000 apiece?”
But here Yardley makes an appropriate, but
usually overlooked, distinction: “Yes, but those payments were to
the survivors, not their heirs. There are no surviving slaves, so there is no
one with a just claim on reparations; probably reparations in some form
should have been paid in 1865, but this is 1999 and the case is closed.
There are, by the same token, no surviving slaveholders, so there is no one
upon whom blame and responsibility can be fixed.”
Only one qualification needs to be added.
White Americans didn’t invent slavery; they imported it —
from Africa. In fact slavery is the only African institution this country
has ever adopted, and it persisted there (and still does, in some places)
long after it was abolished here. Sentimentalism about Africa,
encapsulated in the phrase “African-Americans,” blinds us to
these obvious facts.
So why aren’t today’s
Africans charged with responsibility for slavery? When it comes to
“injustice and brutality and horror,” the African brand was
far worse than the American version. African slaves were mutilated,
turned into eunuchs, even cannibalized by their fellow Africans. The
luckier ones survived the ghastly voyage across the Atlantic and wound up
in the New World, where slavery was far milder, tempered by the
Christianity of most slaveholders.
Should the descendants of the Africans
who enslaved other Africans pay reparations too? Such a notion has never
occurred to Congressman Conyers, who is obsessed with race and with
punishing the white man.
American slavery was bad enough, and it
was widely condemned by whites when the United States was founded. But
slavery already had a toehold in the South, and the Framers of the
Constitution were in no position to do much about it beyond setting a date
for the termination of the importation of slaves. If the sovereign states of
the South were to be induced to join a new federal union, slavery had to be
tolerated. Otherwise the Southern states would have formed a separate
confederacy long before the Civil War, and the United States of America
would not exist today.
But for the likes of Conyers, history
means only a moral melodrama, of which all we need to know is that all
blacks are the helpless, innocent victims of the evil white man. By this
logic, everything blacks feel entitled to should be taken, by the
government, out of the hides of whites.
Conyers, a voluble fellow who never
stops talking long enough to listen to himself, seems not to realize that
he is actually in agreement with white supremacists. He assumes that
only whites have free will and the capacity to act responsibly, and that
blacks are only what whites choose to make them. All the problems of
blacks thus become the “lingering effects” of what whites
did centuries ago.
This is not to deny that history does have
“lingering effects.” We still live in the shadow of the Roman
empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the
Enlightenment, and Communism, not to mention several devastating wars.
But sorting out hereditary victims and oppressors would be an impossible
task.
How about a bill to pay reparations to the
descendants of medieval serfs?
Joseph Sobran
Archive Table of Contents
Current column
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information.
|
