Asheville, North Carolina’s local government became the first to approve reparations last night, and the city council explained that they would reveal the shape these reparations will take over the next year [here is the resolution]:
Over the next year, a ‘community reparations commission’ will be created ‘to to make short, medium and long term recommendations that will make significant progress toward repairing the damage caused by public and private systemic racism.’ Among the specific issues mentioned in the resolution that the commission would have budgetary authority to tackle are increasing minority homeownership and business ownership, as well closing gaps in health care, education, employment and pay. Councilwoman Shaneika Smith says that shows the resolution is more than just flowery language. “This would mean any report generated by a commission or anyone tasked within the Asheville city staff will come back with tangible programs that have real line-item monetary resources,” Smith said during Tuesday’s meeting.
[…]
The group called for 50% of the city police budget to be diverted to Asheville’s Black community, including grants for Black businesses and entrepreneurs and money toward the city school system to close its racial achievement gap, which is the worst in North Carolina. City council put off finalizing a budget for the next fiscal year until September to address those concerns. Black AVL Demands also called for the removal of Confederate monuments in downtown Asheville.
Taxpayers pay the police department’s budget and it’s wrong to demand that people pay for a service under threat of criminal penalty while taking the funds for those services to pay down the debt of progressive policies.
I disagree that “systemic racism” exists in America. This isn’t to say that racism doesn’t exist, it does and this is important nuance, but I don’t believe that racism is systemic in our country, a country which paid two percent of its population (750,000 lives — over a six million lives by today’s numbers) to free American men and women and rectify its participation in the global horror of slavery. As I’ve said on my radio program, I do believe in systemic leftism. Case in point — this short graph at the bottom of the original local report on Asheville’s resolution:
The reparations resolution approved Tuesday also contains a formal apology from the city of Asheville for its participation in ‘the enslavement of Black People’ and for enforcing ‘segregation and its accompany discriminatory policies.’ It also apologizes for the city’s urban renewal program from the 1960’s the decimated Black communities in Asheville, particularly the South Side neighborhood.
Asheville’s own urban renewal program was part of Democrats’s national effort last century to control housing via “revitalization” which had a disastrous effect on minority communities:
Established by the Housing Act of 1949, the federal initiative aimed to clear blighted areas. In the process, however, it displaced millions of predominantly African American individuals and families between the 1950s and the 1980s, according to Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s 2004 book Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It.
This systemic, far-left, Democrat monopoly on dangerous cities creates a generational cycle of hurt-and-rescue: manufacture a veneer of help to hide sometimes well-intentioned and poorly thought out/poorly intentioned and well thought out policy that somewhat surreptitiously penalizes residents and then blames the problems on the people who want government to stop doing this precisely because of the problems these policies create. The ideology that created the idea of one person’s supremacy over another is the same ideology that blames “racism” for economic disparity instead of its own ruinous policies. It’s abusive.
“Generational wealth”
Supporters of Asheville’s resolution cite generational wealth as a reason for their support. The idea that the wealthy all inherited their money, or that even a majority of the wealthy inherited their money, is a myth. The majority of rich people made their own fortunes but this truth is a threat to the party driven by an ideology of disempowerment which says you are stuck in whichever socioeconomic status you’re born — unless the mighty hand of Uncle Sam helps you get to a better life. In reality, Sam’s hand holds you down while offering bait. It’s the mighty hand of government that rocks the cradle … and holds your hand all the way to grave if you let it, and this systemic, political oppression is seen in major American cities across the country. In my hometown of St. Louis, I haven’t known any other party but Democrats in charge of that city. Despite decades in power, businesses have disappeared, revitalization efforts appear and fail, my beautiful, beloved city is a ghost town when the sun sets. This isn’t racism, it’s Democrats. It’s systemic leftism.
Reparations are unjust. The blood shed by 0ver 700,000 Americans in the Civil War is the reparations. Injustice is suspending due process and punishing innocent people for choices they didn’t make, sins of an ideology they didn’t and don’t support and weren’t even alive to oppose at its inception. Just as one cannot sin oneself to virtue, so can you not committ injustice as a way of achieving justice — especially involving an a practice that neither party to the debate personally committed or experienced. Progressives can’t even clearly explain how they would collect money or figure out how each “culpable” American owed. There are people living here today whose ancestors did not live here before the Civil War or after. Some of my ancestors appeared in documentation counting them as traveling the Trail of Tears, so they’re responsible? My Irish ancestors — and the Irish were notoriously discriminated against and oppressed, they owe? My husband’s family didn’t own slaves and his great-great-grandfather, Charles Loesch, fought for the Union and was held as a POW in Andersonville.
If Democrats insist on paying reparations, fine, they can pay reparations. After all, they are the party and the ideology that dug in on the wrong side of history for every big battle: Native Americans, slavery, women’s suffrage, and Second Amendment rights. Perhaps it’s time they make amends.
*UPDATE:
I discussed this on air today. Watch below:
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