Harvard Study Says There Is 'Historical Precedent' For Paying Slavery Reparations – PJ Media

No radical left public policy proposal can gain any traction with radical left lawmakers without an academic study of the radical left to back it up.

Harvard professors Linda J. Bilmes and Cornell William Brooks have published a study in the “Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences” titled “Normalizing Reparations: US Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans” . For the radical left professors to say that reparations need to be “normalized” suggests that reparations are not “normal” and should not be attempted. This is especially true when you consider that the word “normal” does not exist in the usual academic lexicon.

They must be pretty desperate.

The purpose of the paper is to twist logic and facts to show that the federal government does things like pay reparations all the time.

“The categories of injured that have been compensated include coal miners; farmers whose crops have failed; workers whose companies have gone bankrupt; victims of terrorism and natural disasters; people exposed to nuclear radiation; military veterans; people unjustly convicted in the legal system; people denied gains on tribal lands; fishermen facing depletion of fish stocks; people affected by pesticides, toxins, vaccines or medical devices; workers and businesses affected by US trade agreements; depositors in banks; and many other categories,” according to the study.

Many of us would argue that some of these compensatory deals should never have happened. But even if you accept all these arrangements as legitimate, in all these examples there is no collective fault compensation.

“The existence of these programs demonstrates not only the federal government's creativity in devising compensation methods, but also the government's ability to structure and administer programs, define eligibility standards, and monitor the distribution of profits”. the study.

Try as they might, the two authors cannot square a circle. Just because the government has been able to “define eligibility standards” for fishermen who have stripped a school of fish or people injured by pesticides does not mean that the government can decide how much “slave blood” a black person must have. compensated

Should a black person who arrived from Africa within the last decade be eligible? What about slaves who immigrated to the US from Haiti or other Caribbean islands? It was different countries that enslaved these people.

Washington Examiner:

Throughout their study, the two professors state that the inaction of slavery reparations could be solved by measures already in place and argue that black citizens are one of the few groups that have not received reparations from the government.

“The number and diversity of reparative compensation programs makes it clear that reparations for non-racial harms are regular and routine,” they state. “The juxtaposition of the audit of reparative compensation programs with the taxonomy of racial harms without reparation makes it clear that America provides reparations to almost everyone but black Americans, even for comparably serious harms.”

Maybe part of the reparations bill will be for all white people to wear sackcloth and ashes on Independence Day and fast on Thanksgiving.

Reparations advocates know they are in a generational battle. They have the patience to wait until the time is right. That they succeed saddens me because I know that when they do, the United States, as it has been constituted and understood for three hundred years, will no longer exist.