The Reparations Success Story That Isn’t – The American Spectator

On Jun 17, 2023

On June 7, I was one of five panelists, two of us white, to participate in an American Public Square discussion on the subject of reparations for African Americans. The discussion will air multiple times on the Kansas City PBS station KCPT.

The producers chose me because I have a book coming out on a related subject, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight From America’s Cities. They figured my self-interest would overcome my sense of self-preservation. Finding a second panelist to challenge reparations in an era as fraught as our own took a good deal more effort.

If this were Hollywood Squares, the middle square would have gone to Robin Rue Simmons, a congenial black woman in her mid-40s from Evanston, Illinois. Having flown in for the occasion, Simmons was the event’s star attraction. In 2021, it was she who, as an alderman, prodded the City of Evanston to adopt the nation’s first reparations program to go by that name. (READ MORE: The Ignored Reason Reparations Make No Sense)

In its essence, the reparations scheme pays out $25,000 grants to black people alleged to have suffered housing discrimination or whose family members lived in Evanston during the years when the practice of “redlining,” banned in 1968, was still in place.

For the record, redlining was a byproduct of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The newly formed Federal Housing Administration outlined certain urban areas in red that the Federal Housing Administration deemed too risky for mortgage support. The argument that the practice was racist doesn’t bear much in the way of scrutiny.

Citing a major study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, black scholar John McWhorter observed, “The researchers found that white people accounted for 82 percent of individuals living in the lowest-rated areas. White people also owned 92 percent of the homes in these areas.”

The City of Evanston, however, fully ignored any whites whose homes were redlined. The grants were limited to people who could confirm both their residential history and their blackness. The official mechanism set up to prove the latter moved the United States one step closer to the apartheid model pioneered by our friends in South Africa.

As projected, grant recipients would use the money for home repairs, down payments on homes, or mortgage payments. Simmons suggested, however, that no real effort has been made to confirm that the money has been put to the use as projected. For many people, I suspect, it was pure Lotto.

As I pointed out in the discussion, what happened in Evanston may just stay there. The affluent Chicago suburb of 78,000 bears little likeness to any other city of size in America. As the home of Northwestern University, it has attracted a diverse, progressive population that begrudged Donald Trump no more than 7 percent of its vote in either of his two election runs.

Some 16 percent of its residents are black, and I suspect they are faring much better in general than their peers in neighboring Chicago. That said, they are not progressing as Simmons thinks they ought. “I was looking at some data,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I was learning that we were among the highest percentage of Black home ownership in the nation at one point. Then, I saw that our wealth trajectory was on the decline — and that was before we had COVID-19.”

My argument throughout the evening was that the decline in the urban black community was due not to institutional white racism but to institutional white guilt. In the last 60-plus years, the guilt era, the black community has seen a decline in just about every metric of significance.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Lyndon Johnson’s undersecretary of Labor and later a Democratic senator from New York, predicted this outcome in his remarkably prescient 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.

Despite the “full recognition of their civil rights,” argued Moynihan, blacks were increasingly discontented. They were expecting that equal opportunities would “produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups,” but he added, “This is not going to happen.”

Nor did he think it ever would happen “unless a new and special effort is made.” In explaining the primary cause of the already widening achievement gap between blacks and whites, Moynihan went where few elected officials have dared to go since:

The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.

At the time Moynihan wrote this, some 25 percent of black children were living in fatherless home. In the years since, the numbers have continued to increase. In a surprisingly honest Father Day’s speech in 2008, Barack Obama affirmed this trend.

“We know that more than half of all Black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children,” he told the congregants of a black Chicago church. “We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.”

When I quoted Obama during the panel discussion, the audience booed. For the past 60 years, “civil rights” leaders have evaded the truth about the subsidized collapse of the black family. Three weeks after Obama’s Father’s Day speech, for instance, Jesse Jackson was caught on a hot mic threatening “to cut [Obama’s] nuts out.” White enablers in the media buried the story, and Obama dropped the subject.

Moynihan all but predicted the rise of CRT, BLM, and the reparations movement. “The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow,” wrote Moynihan at his most prophetic. “If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.”

The Evanston reparations scheme bears out Moynihan’s warning. Historically, the average income for households headed by divorced women was 40 percent that of married couples; for unmarried women, it was only 20 percent. As the numbers suggest, many of these women could not manage homes of their own.

By 2021, the homeownership rate for blacks — 43 percent — was nearly 30 percentage points lower than that for whites — 72 percent. More troubling, but not unexpected, the homeownership rate among blacks was trending down. Not surprisingly, the black-white differential in single parent homes was also 30 percent — 51 percent for blacks and 21 percent for whites.

From her perch in tony Evanston, Simmons may not see the deeper irony of her argument, namely that redlining may have saved poor blacks and whites from financial disaster. Liberal programs have encouraged fatherlessness, and when fatherless children cluster in a given neighborhood, homeowners suffer the consequences.

I saw this phenomenon up close in my hometown, Newark, New Jersey. The only time I ever kept a journal was the year I worked for the city’s housing authority. This raw entry from June 16 of that year speaks of the perils faced by black homeowners in a city crumbling under the weight of white guilt:

Malcolm Ellington, gentleman, unmarried, buys house on Hunterdon Street for 6 or 7 K right after the war. Watches it dwindle to nothing. Unsellable. Unrentable. People breaking in 2 or 3 times a week. Wait for him to take the bus, watch him, then go in.

In a pricy suburb like Evanston, residents may have built wealth through homeownership. In Newark, as in most inner cities, they lost it. Malcolm Ellington was not an exception. If the State Highway Department had not bought my parents’ home, no one would have.

Jack Cashill’s Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight From America’s Cities will be published on July 4. It is available for pre-order.

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