Friday, June 10, 2005
Pay For Your Unwarranted Guilt
I heard about this a few days ago and could not quite believe it.
Here is what really bothers me -- in an attempt to assuage our collective guilt over slavery, blacks find themselves in a continued state of dependency, and in a real sense, slavery to the government teet. Does not sound like justice to me. Obviously reparations will not help.
AS SOON as he learned the ugly truth, the chairman of financial-services giant Wachovia Corp. issued a remorseful nostra culpa. "We are deeply saddened by these findings," Ken Thompson said last week. "I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans." Wachovia acknowledged that it "cannot change the past or atone for the harm that was done." But it promised to make amends by subsidizing the work of organizations involved in "furthering awareness and education of African-American history."Civil rights activism has, in many cases, been almost purely extortion for quite some time now. But at least it has been on the QT. But now it is becoming institutionalized in the form of the reparations movement.
Clearly Wachovia committed some shameful racial crime. What could it have been? Did the nation's fourth-largest bank holding company rob its black depositors of their savings? Charge exorbitant interest rates on loans to black customers? Segregate its branches?
Worse: It owned slaves.
Well, not exactly. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, and Wachovia wasn't founded until 1879. The slaves for which Thompson was so apologetic were owned decades before the Civil War, when slavery was still lawful throughout the South. They were owned not by Wachovia but by the Bank of Charleston and the Georgia Railroad and Banking Co. -- two of the approximately 400 financial institutions dating back to 1781 that over the centuries merged with or were acquired by other institutions that eventually became part of the conglomerate known today as Wachovia.
Ordinances like Chicago's are the cutting edge of the slavery-reparations movement, which insists that black Americans today are owed billions of dollars in compensation for the slavery of centuries past.Here is what I am wondering -- is the reparations movement a result of the welfare state? Think about it. Blacks, as a percentage of their total population, have benefitted from welfare and other social assistance programs disproportionally. Thus the skill most developed by the black community in recent years has been collecting money from the government. Therefore, it is natural that they would turn to something like the reparations movement.
Here is what really bothers me -- in an attempt to assuage our collective guilt over slavery, blacks find themselves in a continued state of dependency, and in a real sense, slavery to the government teet. Does not sound like justice to me. Obviously reparations will not help.
