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If reparations are implemented they will create a new industry: excuse-making for failure to change the culture of Black America and making only a temporary change in the average economic status of Black families. The handiest excuse, planted in the article, will be that too little was done to eliminate discrimination. Hannah-Jones argues that this is not the root cause of the "wealth gap" because she wants to focus on reparations. But, if reparations eliminate the "wealth gap" only briefly, that will be offered as proof that discrimination, after all, was the problem.If Hannah-Jones were not in the grip of a postmodernist/Marxist historical framework-dismissing any explanatory power of ideas, including philosophy-she might see the paradox in the claim that only an economic foundation can fully potentiate civil rights, enfranchisement, and political power. The decisive change in the philosophy of Black advancement and leadership came around 1900. At the birth of a civil rights movement, a new leader, W.E.B. Dubois, wrested leadership from the older, towering post-Civil War Black leader, Booker T. Washington. Washington, a former slave and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, steadily and eloquently advocated that those freed from slavery must strive first, and above all, for economic independence, partly by mastering agriculture and low skill jobs. That was the bedrock. That would win the respect, trust, and resources to bid for the full reality of U.S. citizenship.Washington was hugely influential with whites and Blacks. He understood that the political battle for citizenship would succeed upon the foundation of the economic power Blacks would achieve.The much younger leader, W.E.B. DuBois, always a leftist who latter became a member of the Communist Party and ardent defender of Joseph Stalin, became Washington's ideological adversary. And won. He attacked Washington for consigning Blacks to "lowly" occupations and denying that they must demand immediately full civil rights and political power. He became a leader and influential editor at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His views prevailed as the civil rights movement became identified with protest and Black programs with political power. Such as the intellectual heritage of Martin Luther King, Jr., almost a Marxist whose chief white advisor, Stanley Levison, had been at the top of the Moscow-directed American Communist Party, which Levison left to join King's movement. (This probably was why the Kennedy administration tapped King's telephone conversations.)The paradox, here, is that now we are told, at excruciating length in Hannah-Jones's article that justice, rights, equality did us (Black Americans) no good-because we did not have solid economic foundations. Booker T. Washington had said: "No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges."By wealth. But Washington could not in the throes of his wildest dreams imagine this meant not earning economic independence but being handed a fortune taken from other Americans. It took the communist worldview of DuBois, and a century-long collapse of the American perspective of individualism, to bring a reparations bill in Congress. Not "Reparations," Economic FreedomThose who truly would lead Black Americans should demand America's return to economic freedom. That would level the playing field for Blacks. Because the interventionist-welfare state (emphatically not capitalism), always favors the majority, the politically connected, the informed. And makes permanent the underdog.Entry into a multitude of occupations of unskilled labor requires a license, medallion, certificate, compliance with zoning, apprenticeship, special occupational safety training, and, of course, bribes.
