The reparations task force set up by California’s legislature has proposed paying each black California resident up to $1.2 million. This is an increase over prior reparations proposals discussed by the task force, which economists had estimated would cost around $800 billion — more than twice California’s $300 billion annual budget.
Even if this monumental sum were paid, activists would just come back for more. At the reparations task force’s most recent meeting, activists called the $1.2 million “nowhere near enough,” demanding $200 million direct cash payments to individuals instead. That would cost California taxpayers around $400 trillion, a sum many times larger than the entire world’s economy.
The reparations task force cited various harms allegedly suffered by black residents, such as $2,352 allegedly lost per person per year due to the supposed “over-policing” and “mass incarceration” of black communities.
But incarceration occurs because someone committed a crime, not because of their race. The fact that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, and get arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate, is not a reason to give blacks reparations. In United States v. Armstrong (1996), the Supreme Court ruled that a higher black arrest rate didn’t show racism, since it might just reflect a higher black crime rate, and statistics show different groups have different crime rates. The black crime rate is much higher, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. It found that for homicides, “the offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005. (See BJS, Homicide Trends in the United States).
The higher black arrest rate is not due to racism. A 2021 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at more than twice the rate of people in general, this is not due to racism. Instead, arrests are correctly “proportional” to the actual crime rate, and to the crimes actually reported to the police, which often are committed by black offenders. As it noted, in 2018, “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018).
Moreover, if racism pervaded the criminal justice system, that would make blacks distrust the police, which would reduce reporting of crimes against blacks, which are overwhelmingly black-on-black. Most crimes against black people are black-on-black, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. So lower rates of reporting due to racism would cut black incarceration rates, not fuel “mass incarceration” — as black conservatives have pointed out.
Testimony to the task force claimed that the “persistence of extremely punitive sentencing laws and policies, not increases in crime rates, sustain the nation’s high rate of incarceration.” That is quite wrong. As criminology professor Justin Nix notes, “Given its level of serious crime, America has ordinary levels of incarceration but extraordinary levels of under-policing.” America incarcerates fewer people per homicide than countries like Australia, Japan, Switzerland, and Austria. While sentences are often longer in the U.S., this is offset by the fact that more offenders elude detection in the U.S. than in Europe, due to less cooperation with the police in places like inner cities, where many witnesses to crimes don’t tell the police what they know. There are many U.S. neighborhoods where a “no-snitching” mentality is common.
Moreover, sentences in the U.S. are usually not “extremely punitive.” As a Wall Street Journal article noted,
in only 3% of violent victimizations and property crimes does the offender end up in prison. Far from being prison-happy, the criminal-justice system tries to divert as many people as possible from long-term confinement….In 2009, 27% of convicted felons in the 75 largest counties received a community sentence of probation or treatment, and 37% were sentenced not to prison but to jail, where sentences top out at one year but are usually completed in a few weeks or months. Only 36% of convicted felons in 2009 got a prison term.
While California did increase penalties for crime in the 1980s and early 1990s, it did so to deter crime — which disproportionately harms black people — not to harm black people. Crime in California fell significantly after California voters adopted Proposition 8, which mandated longer sentences for repeat offenders who kill, rape, and rob others. A study found those longer sentences deterred many crimes from being committed. Similarly, a 2008 Santa Clara University study found that longer sentences for three-time offenders led to “significantly faster rates of decline in robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.”
No country has successfully pursued a policy of race-based reparations. The African nation of Zimbabwe pursued a policy of reparations. It wrecked its economy by doing so, resulting in hyperinflation and leaving even its black population worse off.
Reparations may not fix the racial “wealth gap” anyway. Many people just spend windfalls they receive from the government, rather than saving or investing the money. When Uganda seized the businesses of Indian immigrants without compensation and gave them to blacks as reparations for colonialism, the businesses did not last for long afterwards, and Uganda’s economy collapsed. When Uganda let Indians come back to Uganda and set up businesses again 14 years later, Indians once again ended up dominating Uganda’s economy, even though they had to start from scratch.
Slavery and discrimination, moreover, are not the cause of most present-day racial disparities in wealth. Most wealth is not inherited, and most of the wealth gap between whites and blacks is not due to inherited wealth. Non-white immigrants from Africa and Asia commonly earn more than whites do, showing that racism is not a barrier to success. Asian Americans have the highest average net worth and highest average income, despite harsh discrimination against Chinese and Japanese Americans in the past.
Past discrimination does not explain present-day racial disparities in wealth or income. Asians once experienced far worse housing discrimination than blacks in California, yet they have much higher incomes and more assets. As the New York Post notes, “several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. Take Japanese Americans, for example: For nearly four decades in the 20th century (1913 – 1952), this group was legally prevented from owning land and property in over a dozen American states [including California]. Moreover, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II,” which forced many interned Japanese people to sell their businesses at fire-sale prices, ruining them. “But by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores, and incarceration rates.”
Reparations are also likely unconstitutional under existing court precedent. Giving people money based on their race generally violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause, even when the recipients are a minority group. The Daily Mail notes that a reparations task force report cited how “in the 1950s and 60s racially restrictive covenants and redlining segregated [black people] in many of California’s largest cities.” But that discrimination is way too long ago to support a race-based handout, and mostly involved discrimination by private people, not government agencies (the Supreme Court declared racially restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer). The Supreme Court ruled in Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989) that governments can’t hand out benefits based on race in response to private or “societal discrimination,” as opposed to discrimination by government officials. It also emphasized that the government cannot provide race-based “remedies that are ageless in their reach into the past.” So courts have struck down affirmative action programs that were designed to remedy discrimination that occurred over 20 years before the affirmative-action plan, because that’s too long ago. For example, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an affirmative-action plan for black people where the discrimination occurred more than 17 years before the plan, in Hammon v. Barry (1987). The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an affirmative-action plan for women where the discrimination occurred 14 years before the plan, in Brunet v. City of Columbus (1993).
Left-wing politicians support reparations. “During the 2020 presidential primaries, nearly all the Democratic candidates were favorably inclined,” notes the National Review. In 2019, Joe Biden said he was in favor of paying reparations to American Indians, not just blacks, if studies find that to be workable.
If reparations are awarded to black people, other groups will line up to demand reparations, too. For example, reparations may also end up being paid to sexual minorities, as left-leaning governments have already done in foreign countries. In 2019, Argentina’s Neuquén province provided pensions to transgender individuals over 40 as a form of reparations. Uruguay and Argentina reserve some government jobs for transgender people as a form of reparations.
