A New Strategy for Reparations

A New Strategy for Reparationsby Charles Bane, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
During the election of 2016, no Presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, addressed directly the issue of Reparations, just as no candidate had the courage to admit that police killings of unarmed Black males was evidence of an impulse to murder in which all Caucasian are complicit.
The Republican Party now seems hell bent on rolling back the enfranchisement of African Americans, and is in multiple ways, hostile to the aspirations and concerns of the minority community.
Equally, it would be foolhardy to ignore the ability of this powerful party to advance a primary goal of Black America as national Republicans desperately seek ( misguided) ways to attract ethnic voters.
African Americans are alone. They have always been alone. Both Democrats and Republicans have left them so. Democratic statements and photo ops are fractionally comforting to families whose loved ones- cherished, looked up to, and promising- were cut down by police revolvers.
There are two favorite games in Washington: one is the pretense that the budget must be balanced. The other game is the more deceptive of hiding a pea beneath a shell so that favorite programs can be financed without appearing as direct taxation.
The cause of Reparations can be comfortably adopted by a party determined to balance ledgers even as its hypocrisy continues unabated in its fundamentally racist outlook.
Call a Republican a racist. He bridles and sputters. Why, his is the party of Lincoln. He does not, he says, see color ( a lie, of course). But this expedient soul may be induced to engage in one - upmanship with the Democrats he utterly loathes on even so costly an initiative as Reparations if the pea can be hidden under a large shell. And Democrats as a result will be put on notice that actions are what matters, not words.
Would ( I won't call him President) Trump sign such a sweeping bill? I believe he would for two reasons: he needs the approval of Congressional Republicans of his extreme measures and in the back of his mind, knows they are essential to staving off charges of corruption. Secondly, he is so unknowing of racial issues he may believe he is executing nothing extraordinary. He cannot discern differences because he doesn’t study or even read memos. He may repeat that "Frederick Douglass is doing a good job." And for once he would be right.
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Charles Bane, Jr. is an author and activist currently at work on a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.