Disney Calls for Reparations

 

This little rap from the new Disney+ series “The (New) Proud Family” is causing a stir. It demands reparations for those of darker skin tone on the grounds that “slaves built this country.”

If the current prosperity of the USA is built on the labour of slaves up to a hundred and fifty years ago, why is it that, even at the time of the Civil War, the South, where there were slaves, was far poorer than the North, where there were none? How did nations like Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, or Japan also get wealthy, without slaves; while any other country you might mention in which African slaves were a large part of the labour force remains relatively poorer: Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, the other islands of the Caribbean?

Why isn’t black Africa rich?

The “slaves built this country” concept is Marxist: it sees manual labour as the only form of labour and the only source of value. And then black slaves as the only labourers.

Remove this materialist assumption, and it makes better sense to say that folks like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson built the USA. And maybe Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Walt Whitman, the Wright Brothers, Stephen Foster, Mark Twain, and the like.

It looks as though the US suffered, rather than profited, from slavery. Enslaved workers, perhaps, do not do a very good job of it. And then the US paid a heavy price, in lives, money, and property destruction, to rid itself of slavery. Perhaps more than the profit slavery ever generated, for anyone.

And of course, it only generated profit for a small number of people, perhap one percent of the US population at the time. Poor whites necessarily suffered, as the jobs taken by slaves were not available to them, and their labour was devalued. They too were victims of slavery.

So perhaps we should trace family lines back to the actual slaveholders? Then their descendants could pay the reparations

If we did so, it is likely that many of their descendants would turn out to be the very blacks demanding reparations. Most modern “African Americans” are of mixed race. Much of this mixing surely occurred on the plantations, with plantation owners taking full advantage of their ownership for sexual services. It all has nothing to do, on the other hand, with the probable majority of “white” Americans whose ancestors arrived in America after the days of slavery.

Of course, there are other reasons to see the demand for reparations as nonsensical. It requires the sort of “blood guilt” that led to the persecution of the Jews for centuries. Everyone who was ever enslaved is now dead. Everyone who enslaved them is also dead. Far from being discriminated against, modern American blacks can point to many laws and “affirmative action” programs that discriminate in their favour.

One might counter with the “lingering effects of slavery.” Then what about the lingering effects of the Holocaust on the Jews? That was worse, and more recent. The lingering effects of the Great Famine and indentured servitude on the modern Irish—now apparently the richest nation per capita in Europe? The lingering effects of the Holodomir on modern Ukrainian-Americans? The Armenians? The Chinese?  Why are they not suffering economically as blacks are, and why are they not also deserving of reparations?

One reason these other groups are more successful, perhaps, is that they have never learned to depend on handouts. The result, not of slavery, but of progressive Marxist "Great Society" programs.