California’s Reparations Panel Is Going How You’d Expect

The question of how much the white race owes the black race for enslaving a small fraction of them is preoccupying a task force in California this year. The group is supposed to put a dollar sign to the reparations that are being considered — the first serious attempt to quantify what reparations advocates believe to be “justice.”

Earlier this year, economic research conducted by the task force figured that each black person in California is owed $225,000 for housing discrimination. Now, Max Fennell, a 35-year-old businessman, has told the task force that all black Californians should get an additional $350,000 to help “shrink the racial wealth gap” and “right historical wrongs,” according to the Washington Examiner.

He also believes that black businesses should get a $250,000 grant and 15-20 acres of land.

“It’s a debt that’s owed, we worked for free … we’re not asking; we’re telling you,” he told the panel, the Daily Mail reported. “The tangibles of what I’m asking for is $350,000 per black American in California — that’s tangible, small business grant $250,000, and land 15-20 acres.”

I daresay that the value of “15-20 acres” varies wildly depending on where the acreage is. Who gets the beachfront property and who gets Death Valley?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill establishing the task force in 2020. Since then, it has spent over a year studying the issue and began public deliberations over how to quantify financially the debt owed to black Americans for historical injustices, such as slavery, housing discrimination, mass incarceration, and more. The panel has until July 1 to complete its report and send recommendations to the state legislature.

Some 60 people were in attendance at the meeting on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported . The meeting took place in the Oakland City Hall, in the city that served as the birthplace for the Black Panthers, a black power political group that was heavily active in the 1960s and 1980s.

There are two elements that make this plan — and others that will surely follow — unworkable and immoral. The idea that you can condemn an entire race of people for anything is unfair and immoral. I don’t care what kind of convoluted pretzel logic you want to use to justify it; the notion of collective racial guilt is an abomination of justice.

Of course, that’s not going to stop the race hustlers from looking to soak the American people for trillions of dollars. The generations of Americans who supported slavery or countenanced it are all long dead and buried. And while discrimination has been and still is a problem today, the U.S. courts are perfectly capable of judging the efficacy of individual cases of discrimination in employment, housing, and school admissions, in every corner of American life.

Related: West Coast, Messed Coast™ Report – Slavery Edition

In addition to being immoral, any plan to transfer wealth based on race is doomed to failure because it’s simply unworkable. Who gets how much? How “black” does one have to be to get the government goodies? Should a recipient of reparations have to be able to prove a slave ancestry?

That last will be difficult considering the paucity of official records. And if we’re giving reparations to the victims of discrimination, shouldn’t an individual have to prove direct harm as a result of a discriminatory act? Are we to throw out the law in the name of “racial justice”?

I am 100% behind any effort by any individual to receive compensation for slavery or discrimination — as long as they can prove in a court of law that they have been directly harmed by a discriminatory act.

We can’t have only justice or only the law. There needs to be both justice and the law, or the whole structure we’ve built over the last two centuries will come crashing down and anarchy will rule.

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