Reparations or Liberty?

Among many telltale signs of the tectonic fissures dividing the nation, perhaps the most telling is the near universal call by prominent Democrats and others for reparations. This refers to a compensatory payment made to the descendants of African slaves brought to America through the Atlantic Slave Trade. It is unworkable, but it speaks loudly of the state of our politics and culture.

Proponents of reparations argue passionately of the stain of slavery, the long, dark shadow cast by this cruel institution across the American soul. This great evil, the original sin of slavery, has cursed the nation at its inception, at the founding, and in our founding documents. The country is thus irredeemably marred and defective, and the blot of that dark inheritance is fixed in our moral DNA. This insidious legacy lives on in America, in the systemic racism that pervades the nation, and the disparate outcomes of blacks and whites in all sectors of society today.

But there are counter-arguments. We begin with the obvious: slavery ended in America 150 years ago by something known as the Civil War; roughly 750,000 soldiers died in that cataclysm, a great and bloody cleansing of the nation over that mortal sin. Furthermore, no one alive today in America is a slave or slaveholder, and sons and daughters are not responsible for the sins of their parents, let alone of distant ancestors from more than a century ago

More