When Vice President Kamala Harris repeated on Oct. 15 that she thinks the idea of racial “reparations” should be studied further, she evinced a radicalism she just can’t hide.
Radical leftism is Harris’s milieu. It is what she came from. It is what she has practiced. It is her guiding light. Her parents were members of the University of California, Berkeley’s Afro-American Association, which was a key forerunner of the radical Black Panther Party and which, as one sympathetic account bragged, was “inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric of Malcolm X.” After her parents divorced, most of the people who helped her mother raise her were from that organization. Her father, Donald Harris, was described (admiringly!) by the Stanford Daily as a “radical prof” and a “Marxian economist.”
Obviously, parents’ views are not automatically transferred to their children. In the vice president’s case, however, her whole career followed the leftist arc. A protégé and paramour of powerful, leftist politician Willie Brown, who once admiringly introduced cult leader Jim Jones as a “combination of Martin King, [Communist] Angela Davis, Albert Einstein [and] … Chairman Mao,” Kamala Harris ran for the Senate as by far the more leftist of the two Democrats, who made the non-partisan, general-election runoff. In the Senate, she infamously sported the most left-wing voting record of all 100 members, outflanking even the avowed socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
While running for vice president, even as innocent shop owners saw their businesses looted and burned in the post-George-Floyd riots, Kamala Harris said the protests should continue all year while she promoted an organization that provided bail money for rapists and murderers. It is the vice president’s radicalism that keeps her, even now, from admitting that letting 6 million illegal immigrants into the country was a mistake, and that leads her to champion leftist gender ideology at the expense of parental rights.
All of which leads to reparations, a hair-brained, racist, manifestly unjust, radical idea from its very conception. No matter how it is couched, every version of reparations for slavery, by definition, involves giving benefits to people today for sins perpetrated against their ancestors. The benefits would be apportioned not for any particular claim by any particular descendant but on the basis of group identity — in this case, race. Likewise, those who finance reparations, usually taxpayers, would be being bilked, not for any wrongdoing of their own, but because of long-past transgressions of their ancestors or their government.
By any decent Enlightenment standard, this is immoral. The American tradition, in particular, rejects the notion of collective guilt, and its Constitution, especially through the 14th Amendment, rejects disparate treatment based on race. This is even before addressing the extreme impracticality and unaffordability of any reparations scheme. How would the nation afford it? To whom would it go? How would racial identity be determined? Would a black heritage of one-sixteenth qualify? One-thirty-second?
As has been said by my friend and fellow conservative columnist Deroy Murdock, who is black, his ancestors (who came from Costa Rica) were never enslaved here, while second-generation Italian-Americans never had forebears who owned slaves.
So, Murdock asked, why should those innocent Italian-Americans pay, directly or indirectly, for benefits for him?
The vast majority of Americans understand this intuitively. The reliable Pew Research Center reported in 2022 that by a 68-30 margin, the public opposes reparations. A YouGov poll a year later confirmed the findings, with only 31% of Americans in support.
Harris, though, is a long-standing supporter of reparations. In 2019, she supported a bill to establish a federal commission to study reparations “and develop proposals” to enact them. This was not, in other words, an “if” study but a “how to” study, with the “if” already assumed to be in the affirmative. In developing “remedies,” the bill demanded adherence, not to this nation’s own laws, but to “international protocols.” So much for American sovereignty.
Harris also told infamous race-baiter Al Sharpton that she would sign the bill if she were president.
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All of this is prologue for her Tuesday interview with radio host Charlamagne Tha God, in which, even in the midst of a campaign in which she otherwise tried to feint to the center, she still said reparations “has to be studied. There’s no question about that.”
This is anathema. There is no good reason to study it. The idea of reparations is facially unjust and irresponsible. So, too, is any presidential candidate who pushes reparations as worthy of even the slightest attention.