Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

Today, I speak to you as an old white man, on the subject of racial justice.

There, that intro has cleared out the room. Now, under your seats, you’ll now find a copy of Mein Kampf. Please turn to page 122.

I kid, I kid. Seriously, relax. I just wanted to point out a few flaws with certain proposals to advance the “equity” in society.

What the hell is “equity,” anyway? I know what “equality’ is, but since that’s a bad word now, it’s been replaced with equity. Which I always thought was a financial term. From the way people use the word, it seems that equity means “Seems totally unfair, but it’s okay since you screwed us over a hundred years ago.” Feel free to correct me.

I recall that, on occasions in my work as a border officer, I encountered native people who were angry with me, and sometimes they told me to “Go back to your own country.” I always found this a curious statement to make. (By the way, it’s not racist when you say it to white people. Fun fact.)

Towards the end of my career, when I no longer gave a shit about getting complaints, I started to try and address the logical fallacies inherent in such statements. I feel the time is right, since I’ve recently seen “go home” graffiti scrawled at the scene of the most recent old white guy statue removal at Ryerson University in Toronto. This was our first Prime Minster, who has recently been declared an unperson for not having 21st Century views in the 19th Century.

Consider my own personal situation, should I be forcibly de-immigrated. (Remember: NOT racist.)

My family on my father’s side has been in Canada since 1816. On my mother’s side, since the 1880s. I have never been to the places “my people” are from. Not Glasgow, Belfast, Perth, or Country Antrim. I would be completely lost, and since the people speak something only officially described as “English,” unable to communicate.

But! Some would say, “Just like West African slaves when they got off the ships. Serves you right!” (See, that’s “equity” in action.) Of course, this also raises the question, “Who the hell is ‘you’ anyway? Who’s to blame?”

The first Patterson to arrive in Canada was a British Army officer who’d fought at Waterloo. Perhaps he oppressed someone, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t own any slaves, since by that time slavery was illegal in the British Empire.

But, the subject of slavery brings me to my second meandering point: reparations.

The recently gone insane party formerly known as “The Democrats” have a number of prominent adherents of white people paying kajillions of dollars to black people to apologize for slavery. Curiously, though fantastically large, let’s settle Mars type figures are bandied about, one thing is notably absent from reparations plans:

Any sort of idea of how, in this mixed-up mess of a society caused by everyone getting jiggy with everyone else, and waves of mass immigration over time, you would figure out who paid who. Consider the following:

According to one statistic, only 5% of the current Caucasian population had an ancestor present in the United States prior to 1865. There’s one hell of a lot of Irish, Italians, Swedes, Poles, and Jews who will be none too happy to get a bill for something that happened before their great great great etc got off the steamship with his cardboard suitcase. Add to that this problem: Of that 5%, perhaps 5% at most actually owned slaves at any point in history. Nobody was giving slaves away; they were expensive, and usually only the wealthy could afford them. Even most Southerners didn’t own slaves. So basically, anyway you cut it, America will be paying en masse for the crimes of .05% of the population. I know Marxists love collective guilt, but this is ridiculous.

Then, there’s the messy little problem of people who don’t look like me who owned slaves. Like native people. Or rich emancipated blacks. Are they victim, or villain?

Let’s look at one rather prominent, and ridiculously wealthy American as an example. His name is Barack Hussein Obama, and he used to be the President. Though he is half black, millions of white people in the systemically racist USA must have forgotten or not noticed, since he actually got elected twice.

His mother was white. His father was a black African immigrant whose family was not enslaved. Hmm. Does he cut a cheque, or get one? Personally, I don’t think he needs the money, but I could be wrong.

To most reasonable people, including a lot of economists and historians, the practical difficulties of such a boondoggle would seem to preclude its imposition. But if you think that, you’re not a very good Marxist. In fact, the vagaries of such plans are, to Marxists, a strength. As one pro-reparations advocate expressed it, “There is almost no end to the projects that could be funded as reparations, if there were the political will to do so.” Sounds like a recipe for endless money printing to me, and the kind of State-directed social engineering the left salivates over.

Marxists, (Let’s face it, that’s a good new name for the Democrats.) don’t worry about such issues. To them, cost is not an issue. Money can be endlessly printed, because it’s not made of gold, just paper, which is cheap. This works everywhere, like in Venezuela. I mean, people do eat out of dumpsters there, but hey, isn’t that a form of recycling? Also, Marxists believe that government, not business, creates jobs.

And boy, will reparations create a lot of jobs. If you think the taxation bureaucracy is big now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Simply figuring out who pays and who gets will be the work of millions. They probably haven’t made a supercomputer yet that can figure it out.

And if the simplest solution is implemented, the one where everyone pays more tax but only some get it back, I’d be willing to bet money that some black people, particularly the ones who’ve managed to overcome “structural racism,” and are now wealthy, will wind up paying much more. I’m sure somebody on CNN will explain why that makes sense. Once they explain why they continue to pay Chris Cuomo a salary.

Or maybe President Biden will tell those people “You ain’t black.” Problem solved!

And meanwhile, America bankrupts itself addressing the sins of the past, while China conquers the Solar System and becomes the dominant power on Earth. Again, though, maybe that’s part of the point. For people who hate America so much they can’t even bear to look at the flag, this may be the preferred outcome.

Speaking of points: My point is that justice delayed is justice denied. If America was ever interested in soaking the slave owners, the time to do it was in 1865. But in 1865, most of the slaveowners, thanks to General Sherman, didn’t have a pot to piss in.

But adherents of reparations point out that, it’s not just slavery, it’s 400 years of white supremacy that reparations are intended to address. I’m sure the question of how fair it is to tax the relatives of someone who died repelling Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg has not occurred to these people. Why the sons and daughters of white Freedom Riders should have to pay is also a question to me. But collective, racially based guilt is not intended to be fair. “Equity” might mean a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean fairness.

America, for all the shrieking of the recent university grads who think Hitler was a fashion designer back in the olden days, is not Germany in 1945. The crimes are not fresh, the evidence is not evident, and the original perpetrators are long ago converted to worm food.

It’s too late for revenge, and that’s exactly what reparations are. They will only serve to deepen already widening fissures of racial division, and further hobble an economy already sagging under massive debt loads and a trade imbalance.

In short, belated racial justice is as stupid an idea as replacing the term “mother” with “birthing person.” But it’s an age of insanity, where logic and moral courage are practically extinct.

So, I guess it’s going to happen anyway. Where do I pay?