On December 30, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson called for reparations as a way of reducing Chicago’s high crime rate. But reparations have never succeeded in reducing the crime rate. Crime increased in nations such as South Africa and Zimbabwe after they began redistributing wealth from whites to blacks.
The New York Post reports:
Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson insisted to CNN that funding for reparations in his new budget will help get to the root of the city’s record violent crime epidemic.
While speaking to network anchor Poppy Harlow on “CNN This Morning” Wednesday, Johnson acknowledged the high crime rate in Chicago and declared that the “full force of government” is required to solve it, including the city throwing $500,000 at reparations programs….
He then spoke about city funds being diverted to providing reparations for its African American community. “I’ve added a half a million dollars for restoration and reparations to address, again, the cycle of violence…”
Chicago had the highest number of homicides of any U.S. city in 2022. Chicago had 697 total homicides in 2022, higher than New York City, which has three times as many people as Chicago. New York City had only 438 homicides in 2022. Chicago has led the nation in murders for the 11th straight year,
Reparations do nothing about violence, however. South Africa has handed out more reparations than Johnson is proposing, yet South Africa has one of the world’s highest crime rates. It has the world’s highest rape rate, the third-highest murder rate in the world, the world’s highest robbery rate, and the world’s highest burglary rate.
South Africa effectively instituted reparations years after the end of its apartheid regime, passing “black economic empowerment” legislation in its overall economy in 2003, and in government contracts in 2000. For example, Time Magazine notes, South Africa passed laws “mandating minimum Black-owned stakes in businesses” and requiring “affirmative action.” Reparations did not bring prosperity: South Africa now has “an unemployment rate of more than 30%.”
South Africa’s homicide rate in 2021 was slightly higher than in 2003, when South Africa passed its BBBEE (primary reparations) legislation, and only a bit lower than in 2000, when it enacted affirmative action in government contracts. By contrast, the world homicide rate has fallen since 2003, and fallen even further since 2000.
The African nation of Zimbabwe pursued a much more expansive policy of reparations than South Africa, seizing essentially all white-owned farms (80% of Zimbabwe’s agricultural output was from white-owned farms) and giving them to blacks. It wrecked its economy by doing so, resulting in hyperinflation and leaving even its black population worse off.
It also did nothing to reduce crime. In Zimbabwe, the homicide rate doubled from 1990 to 2001, the period when the government decided to seize the country’s white-owned farms. In 2021, its homicide rate remained slightly higher than it was in 1990. By contrast, the world homicide rate fell from 1990 to 2020.
Mayor Johnson may think that reparations will reduce crime by cutting poverty. But even if reparations did cut poverty — rather than increasing poverty, as happened in Zimbabwe — that would not cut the violent crime rate. Crime is higher among the poor not because poverty causes crime, but because irresponsible behavior leads both to crime and to poverty. In poor countries, where most people can’t help but be poor even if they are responsible, the crime rate is often lower than in the United States. India has both a lower crime rate and a lower murder rate than the United States, even though more than 14% of all Indians don’t get enough to eat, India has one of the worst child malnutrition rates on Earth, and India’s per capita income is only about $2,500, compared to over $75,000 in the U.S.
There is a simple “roadmap out of poverty” that works for poor Americans of any race, according to the black economist Walter Williams: “Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.” People who don’t follow that roadmap are more likely both to become poor, and to turn to a life of crime.
But people who can’t help but be poor — like recent immigrants from very poor countries — often have low crime rates. Impoverished refugees from Communist China had very low crime rates. As Professor James Q. Wilson, an authority on public administration, once noted, “During the 1960’s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing. That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.” See Crime & Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime (1985).
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 were subjected to massive discrimination, yet today, they have higher incomes than whites. 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 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.
Eventually, reparations payments to blacks will be ruled 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. Chicago did discriminate against blacks in the distant past. But that discrimination occurred too far in the past to justify a race-based handout. 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 city affirmative action programs adopted in response to discrimination by the city 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).
Blacks do have lower average incomes than whites in Chicago. But such racial disparities are not something that Chicago can use racial preferences to remedy. It can only use racial preferences to remedy the city government’s own intentional discrimination against blacks, according to the federal appeals court in Chicago — not racial disparities it did not intentionally create. (See Builders Association of Chicago v. Cook County (2001)).
