Where's My Cheque?

 

The US Supreme Court decision that “affirmative action” programs for university admission are unconstitutional racial discrimination also makes a case that a great number of whites are entitled to reparations.

The left has long demanded reparations be paid out to blacks for slavery. San Francisco’s city government recently proposed giving each black citizen of the city $5 million. Yet nobody who suffered under slavery is still alive. Nobody who perpetrated the peculiar institution is still alive. Almost all American blacks have some European blood, quite possibly from slaveholders taking advantage of their position. Fewer than one percent of the US population, even during slave times, owned slaves. Most white Americans probably descend from more recent immigrants. Accordingly, the average black American is the individual most likely to owe himself or herself reparations, if anyone does; not the innocent general public who just happen to have the wrong colour of skin.

One might argue that, aside rom slavery, reparations are due for Jim Crow laws, for segregation in the US South. But the last of that was overturned by the civil rights acts in 1964-65. To have been personally subject to it, you would have to be over 65 or so now. And it would have affected you only for a brief period at that. To have been discriminated against in college admissions or for a job, you would have to be about 75.

By contrast, affirmative action in college admissions, systemically discriminating against whites and Asians, was introduced in the mid-Sixties and has continued until today. This means that every white native-born American alive today has suffered from systemic discrimination for most or all of their lives, and is justly entitled to reparations, if there is any argument for reparations at all.