Reparations Advocates Unmoved by SCOTUS Ruling on Affirmative Action
“the task force presumes every Black person is a powerless victim who deserves compensation”
Our own Professor Jacobson is quoted in this piece from the New York Sun:
Slavery Reparations Advocates Are Undeterred by Supreme Court’s Colorblind Ruling, Denying Proposed Payments are ‘Race-Based’
Last month, on the same day the Supreme Court declared college admissions based on race unconstitutional, the head of the California task force at the forefront of the national reparations effort, Kamilah Moore, announced on Twitter that her cause is not affected by the decision: “Our reparations recommendations are not race-based, but rather are based on lineal descent.”
It’s a subtle distinction stemming from the California Reparations Task Force’s razor-thin 5-4 vote last year to restrict eligibility for reparations only to California residents who qualify by lineal descendant — either from an enslaved African-American or from a free African-American person living in America prior to the end of the 19th century. That eligibility criterion will exclude several hundred thousand Black people living in California — namely Caribbean, African, and South American Black immigrants who arrived in this country in the 20th century…
A clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School William Jacobson, who is president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, which runs conservative websites, said the task force presumes every Black person is a powerless victim who deserves compensation — precisely the sort of crude stereotyping the Supreme Court majority has rejected.
Mr. Jacobson further said that calculating only harms without considering “the other side of the ledger” — like government assistance or other benefits someone’s parents or grandparents may have accrued over a lifetime — is dishonest.
“Reparations of this kind will likely lead to inter-racial and inter-ethnic strife — just the opposite of what California’s leaders should be trying to do,” said a University of San Diego law professor, Gail Heriot, who helped lead the movement to defeat racial preferences in 2020 as co-chairwoman of the Californians 4 Equal Rights/No on Prop 16. “It’s unlikely to go down well with the people who are paying the taxes for this.”
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Comments
“Our reparations recommendations are not race-based, but rather are based on lineal descent.”
“either from an enslaved African-American or from a free African-American person living in America prior to the end of the 19th century.”
But absolutely not race-based, you fucking liar.
“ It’s a subtle distinction….”
The term of art is that it is a distinction without a difference.