In no sane part of this great country are reparations really due, but no one has ever accused California of undue sanity. Last week, as Kurtis Lee of the New York Times reported with a straight face, a California panel approved recommendations “that could mean hundreds of billions of dollars in payments to Black residents to address past injustices.”
By “injustices,” Lee means things like slavery, Ku Klux Klan violence, and Jim Crow. As unjust as they were, these Democratic institutions did not cause the wealth disparities between blacks and whites that reparations boosters like to cite. No, the real damage was done much later by still another Democratic invention, the so-called “Great Society.”
Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, I had a ringside seat on the change the Great Society wrought. In my forthcoming book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, I describe what I and others saw.
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