March, 2003

Dalton Conley is associate professor of sociology and director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University. I'm sure he's a nice guy. Sociologists, if nothing else, mean to be nice guys.

Dalton looks deeply into his sociological crystal ball and finds there, a plan to compensate black American families for the 150 years of deprivation they presumably suffered from slavery. It's not enough that we fought the bloodiest and most costly war (in terms of white deaths) in our history in order to free them. Now, we're going to pay them as well. $35,000 per black family by Conley's figures and he reaches deep into his sociological bag to explain just how he arrived at that number. Money is the healer in America, whether you spill a cup of McDonalds coffee in your lap or your antecedents were slaves.

He argues that "the argument for reparations lives on nearly 140 years later." I don't know who the argument "lives on" with, other than among professors of sociology. It certainly doesn't live on with me, although I'm white and my ancestors were freed from their particular servitude by the Magna Charta. That was some 600 years prior to the Civil War and I guess I'm too late to sign up. Dalton's sociology probably has a statute of limitation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it seems I remember taking America away from the American Indian tribes, decimating them by the original biological warfare of smallpox-infected giveaway blankets. Then, if memory serves me right, we abrogated treaty after treaty with these Indian Nations and shuttled them off to one reservation after another. The reason for this is that the American government kept on finding valuable stuff on treaty reservations and as soon as valuable stuff was discovered, the Indians had to move. Those who didn't move were massacred. Indian society today is far more injured, more destroyed, more unjustly treated than black culture.

But they've both been hurt by association with white society, there's little doubt of that.

By Dalton's standards, I guess we give the country back to the Indians. By government standards, if the past is any measure, we'd merely give them the national debt.

Equitable restitution to Indians, Blacks, Holocaust Jews, Palestinians, Vietnamese and (you name the injured party) cannot be made with money. Attempting to pay our way out of our own historic blunders, so everyone can feel good about themselves, is such a contrived and useless solution that it makes me wonder if universities like New York University can longer justify having departments of sociology at all. Wrongheadedness is fast becoming institutionalized.

Achieving any sort of social progress in our country or the world can only come from treating people as if they mattered. Paying them proves they don't matter, except as an annoyance that we can afford to fix, like paying for screens on windows in fly country. The idiot woman who dumped coffee in her lap was paid off---an annoyance that could be afforded---where is any hint of justice in that? All she could do was blush deeply, take the money and run. Done, finished. My social contract and obligation to you is settled, now get lost.

Indians, Blacks, Holocaust Jews, Palestinians and other injured parties want a dialog about how they are perceived in the world. They'll take care of their own making-of-livings, thank you very much. They don't want condescension, they want to be taken seriously.

If the white majority (and it's a thin majority now) in the United States wants to restitute anything of value for the crime of slavery, let them take Black America seriously as builders of and contributors to American society, because they are. All else will come from that. Blacks don't need $35,000 per family and a look-how-good-we've-been-to-you smirk, they sorely need the equality of thought whites regularly give to one another.

Wake up, Dalton, your condescension is showing.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today