Legal scholars want UN to order America to pay trillions of dollars in reparations to blacks

Legal scholars want UN to order America to pay trillions of dollars in reparations to blacks
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African-American law professors and critical race theorists are urging the United Nations to order America to pay millions of dollars to each black citizen, reports the London Daily Mail. That would cost America over $200 trillion, many times the size of its economy. Some left-wing legal scholars claim reparations are required by international human-rights treaties signed by the U.S. or by customary international law.

Their effort reflects the reality that reparations are very unpopular among American taxpayers, so there is little chance that the federal government will pay reparations, unless it is ordered to do so by the UN. 63 percent of Americans oppose reparations, although 57% of voters age 18 to 29 support them.

“Justin Hansford, a professor at Howard University School of Law, led the charge for $5 million payouts to black Americans at the UN this week, flanked by colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University,” says the Daily Mail:

‘I come to you today with a novel proposal, that we…propose our own vision of justice, and implement that justice,’ Hansford told UN racial justice talks in New York City this week. He called for a ‘process of apology, and reparation — not on their terms, but on our terms.’ Hansford, a rising star of the critical race theory movement…spoke at the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, a group that was created in 2021.

Hansford told the Daily Mail that many African and Caribbean nations supported the reparations plan. “Hansford said US diplomats at the mission had been ‘supportive overall'”, reports The Daily Mail. It said the “Biden administration’s mission to the UN” was “supportive” of the reparations plan behind the scenes, but that it has not formally endorsed the plan.

“Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the Biden administration’s UN envoy, seeks to ‘dismantle structural racism'”, it reports. “Thomas-Greenfield also spoke at the event,” at which the call for reparations was made, “saying African-American families often lived in polluted neighborhoods. ‘Let us dismantle structural racism, brick by brick,'” she said.

As the Daily Mail reported:

The UN General Assembly in 2005 created a five-point legal framework for reparations for victims of slavery and other abuses, which can lead to payouts, apologies, and demand policy changes.

But like much of the UN system, decisions are not legally binding, and it remains unclear whether a tribunal could do anything other than add some external pressure to buoy racial justice activists in the US.

In an interview, Hansford said a UN reparation tribunal was only one route to push the US federal government, as well as state and city officials, to address racial inequalities dating back to the slavery era.

Howard University gave legal advice to Evanston, Illinois, which in 2021 became the first US city to make reparations payments to black residents, with $25,000 grants to those affected by racist housing policies before 1969, he said. From California to Massachusetts, newly-formed panels are grappling with what a reparations scheme should look like

Sums of $5 million would be “on the low end of what’s appropriate” for black families that have endured generations of racism in the U.S., Hansford said.

Reparations activists want blacks to receive enough reparations to eliminate the gap in wealth between blacks and whites. They mistakenly assume that gap is the result of racism. But it isn’t. Racial gaps in incomes and wealth exist for reasons other than racism.

Slavery and discrimination are not the cause of 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 did not cause 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.”

Left-wing politicians tend to 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.

Reparations would likely be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, if it retains its current conservative majority. 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 California 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 occurred too far in the past to be the basis for a race-based handout; moreover, it mostly involved discrimination by private people, not government agencies (the Supreme Court declared racially restrictive covenants unenforceable in 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer, so the government was no longer complicit in such discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s). 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 adopted in response to discrimination that occurred over 20 years before the affirmative-action plan, because that’s too long ago. For example, a federal appeals court 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). Another appeals court struck down an affirmative-action plan for women where the discrimination occurred 14 years before the plan, in Brunet v. City of Columbus (1993).

If reparations violate the U.S. Constitution, then they cannot be imposed pursuant to an international treaty, either. In Coalition for Economic Equity v. Wilson (1997), a federal appeals court upheld California’s ban on state affirmative-action programs against legal challenges, even though briefs filed in the case argued that the ban violated international human-rights treaties.

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.

Hans Bader

Hans Bader

Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law. He also once worked in the Education Department. Hans writes for CNSNews.com and has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” Contact him at hfb138@yahoo.com

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