David Brooks And Er ... I ... Uh ... Eh?
We are telling you to CLICK on a David Brooks article? We just don't know anymore.
David Brooks is for reparations now? He IS? We ... go ahead and CLICK.
Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic article "The Case for Reparations," with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind. What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron?
But I have had so many experiences over the past year — sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 — that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.
Back never, our eyeballs clearly need fixing.
Reparations may be easier to "budget and implement," especially they can be budgeted however the implementers want. But I think you're vastly underestimating the political resistance it would face.
The only problem would be racists in the progressive movement, and I concede there are way WAY too many of them. Hopefully we can get them in line.