On June 7, I was one of five panelists, two of us white, to participate in an American Public Square discussion on the subject of reparations for African Americans. The discussion will 
air multiple times on the Kansas City PBS station KCPT.
The producers chose me because I have a book coming out on a related subject, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight From America’s Cities. They figured my self-interest would overcome my sense of self-preservation. Finding a second panelist to challenge reparations in an era as fraught as our own took a good deal more effort.
If this were Hollywood Squares, the middle square would have gone to Robin Rue Simmons, a congenial black woman in her mid-40s from Evanston, Illinois. Having flown in for the occasion, Simmons was the event’s star attraction. In 2021, it was she who, as an alderman, prodded the City of Evanston to adopt the nation’s first reparations program to go by that name. (READ MORE: The Ignored Reason Reparations Make No Sense)
Written by:
