East Bay Insiders wrote yesterday that the Alameda County Reparations Commission is set to release its “long-awaited final report” soon, so that the full report can be “presented to the Board of Supervisors on June 23.”
You’re forgiven if you can’t remember exactly how many reparations plans are out there, or what they say. In Oakland, we’re dealing with at least three: the county’s, Oakland’s, and California’s. There may be more: who knows? When it comes to doling out free money, there are a lot of grifting people waiting for their share of the loot.
We don’t yet know the specifics of the county’s plan but we do know why the plan will lack all credibility: it will not represent the will of the residents of Alameda County. Its backers—the traditional Black lobbying organizations—stated they would hold “listening sessions” across Oakland to find out what “the community” really wants, even though they knew from the start that what they wanted is precisely what their “listening sessions” would reveal. The next one is scheduled for March 28 at Oakstop, downtown: the poster for it shows six young Black people, three men and three women—and, of course, the Reparations Commission’s official logo is a Black clenched fist, Black Panther style, as if this were 1968.
Preceding that there was a “feedback session” on Zoom on Dec. 31, its poster again featuring the same six young Black people and the clenched fist. The same day there was one at the Santa Rita Jail, of all places, entitled REPARATIONS NOW, depicting five young Black militants wearing black berets and military-style uniforms, uncannily similar to Huey Newton and Angela Davis at the height of their off-the-pig glory.
There have been several additional “listening sessions” over the past year and each has been held in a Black-majority environment (like Santa Rita Jail) with posters featuring Black faces. (For a Feb. 20 listening session at Sankofa Sanctuary, a Black-oriented, for-profit therapy center in Fife’s District 3, the website featured a woman who appears Latina. Sankofa itself is a word of Ghanian derivation, signifying the spiritual connection reparationists feel towards Africa.)
Would I, a White man with no affinity for Africa and certainly none for the Black Panthers, feel comfortable in such a place? Yes, because I’m comfortable anywhere. But would a Black person be comfortable in an all-White space, or would they see evidence of racism? For the answer, consider the fact that the three or four candidates for Governor of California who are people of color recently caused a Los Angeles candidates’ forum to be canceled when they complained about having been excluded, allegedly due to their race, when in reality they were uninvited because their poll numbers are so low as to be non-existent. Crying “racism” is, sadly, all too common among sore losers of the left. Instead of in Black-dominated environments, why didn’t the reparations warriors have their listening sessions at a Jewish synagogue, or the Oakland Hills Country Club, or at the Alameda County Republican Party headquarters in San Leandro, or a sports bar in Livermore? Answer: because the reparations cult doesn’t care about any constituency, particularly a White one, beyond their own: Black, angry, and hungry for reprisals and, if they can get it, money. They’re not sampling public opinion, they’re imposing their scheme on us by force, against our will.
The Alameda County Reparations Commission is a farce. It was never intended to be objective: as they say on their website, “We are not here to debate whether harm occurred—we are here to define how it will be repaired.” Arrogant? Yes. Bullying? Yes. Undemocratic? Yes. Contemptuous of your views? Yes. And if you don’t like it, you know what you can do.
This is the flavor of all of these reparations schemes: run by and for Black militant cranks anxious to get their snouts into the public trough. They’re all terribly unpopular with the general public, but the politicians and hacks (hello, Carroll Fife and Nate Miley) don’t care what you or I or anyone else thinks. In their megalomania, racism and demagoguery, they’re quite sure they’re correct about everything, and in their anger (and with the power they hold) they’re going to make you—White, Asian, Latino, even Black if you think this is ridiculous—subservient to their desires. After all, you and your White ancestors made Black people suffer for 400 years, and turnabout, as they say, is fair play: a phrase “used to say that it is fair for a person to do something to harm someone who has harmed him or her,” according to the dictionary.
“But wait!” you say. “I never owned slaves. I never profited by racism. I gave money to the NAACP and voted for Obama and Hillary. Why punish me for something that happened a long time ago that I had nothing to do with?” Why? Because they can, foolio. You’ll pay the price, and go on paying for a long time, and if you don’t like it—well, like I said earlier, you know what you can do.
In the end, reparations of any kind is going to be a political death sentence for politicians who support it, which Gavin Newsom fully comprehends. Maybe not in a place like Oakland, where voters long ago sacrificed their sanity at the idolatrous altar of “equity.” But Alameda County is a lot bigger than Oakland, and I doubt that all those hard-working, tax-paying, fair-minded citizens in the suburbs are going to welcome yet another expensive infestation of the welfare state into their lives.
Steve Heimoff