Why I support reparations — and all conservatives should

Black author and activist Randall Robinson has argued that even laws such as those on affirmative action “will never close the economic gap. This gap is structural. … blacks, even middle-class blacks, have no paper assets to speak of. They may be salaried, but they’re only a few months away from poverty if they should lose those jobs, because … they’ve had nothing to hand down from generation to generation because of the ravages of discrimination and segregation, which were based in law until recently.” In addition to the discrepancy in inherited wealth, even conservatives should be able to acknowledge that Whites enjoy generational associations in the business world, where who you know often counts more than what you know — a reality based not so much on overt racism as on employment and promotion patterns within old-school networks that Blacks lack the traditional contacts to consistently intersect... The cost can be debated, along with the mechanics of a compensation package. But in the current drunken haze of government spending, appropriating trillions for the noble purpose of bringing Black Americans who remain economically penalized by the enslavement of their ancestors closer to the fiscal universe of White citizens surely seems less objectionable than some recent spending proposals.