{"id":748675,"date":"2021-09-13T17:06:09","date_gmt":"2021-09-13T21:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=748675"},"modified":"2021-09-13T17:06:14","modified_gmt":"2021-09-13T21:06:14","slug":"opinion-reparations-a-bad-idea-based-on-fake-history-from-the-1619-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/opinion-reparations-a-bad-idea-based-on-fake-history-from-the-1619-project\/","title":{"rendered":"OPINION: Reparations: A Bad Idea Based On Fake History From The 1619 Project"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fopinion-reparations-a-bad-idea-based-on-fake-history-from-the-1619-project%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=748675&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/GettyImages-515381262-scaled-1.jpg?w=1200&amp;h=800&amp;ixlib=react-9.0.3\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p><span>In 1932, when journalist George Schuyler traveled with Roy Wilkins to report on abuses of black levee workers in Mississippi and Louisiana for the NAACP, he stopped to consult with \u201cDr. Dumas\u201d in Vidalia, Louisiana. Dumas was later described in Schuyler\u2019s 1966 autobiography, <\/span><i><span>Black and Conservative<\/span><\/i><span>, as \u201ca former president of the National Medical Association, . . . a distinguished, courtly, and wealthy mulatto who owned a large white mansion atop a double terrace, six blocks of downtown real estate and a big plantation. He was one of a considerable number of Negroes in the vicinity who were planters and slaveholders before the Civil War. . . .\u201d&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>During the Great Depression, Dr. Dumas was doing quite well, thanks to inherited wealth from slave ownership.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Those like Dumas and his descendants, however, do not figure in calls for reparations, which, according to Robin Rue Simmons, are needed to make up for \u201cthe massive intergenerational economic devastation inflicted by slavery.\u201d Simmons, a former alderman in Evanston, Illinois, helped usher through legislation that allocated cannabis tax revenue as reparations to residents or descendants of a redlined district. She <\/span><span>wrote<\/span> <span>in the <\/span><i><span>Washington Post <\/span><\/i><span>that such payments were still \u201cinadequate,\u201d a mere \u201cdown payment on what is rightfully owed to millions of African Americans.\u201d&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Is Simmons thinking of the over 10,000 slaves owned by free blacks in 1830, in Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia? As David Lightner and Alexander Ragan show, with black slaveowners constituting about two percent of the free black population of the South, and white slaveowners constituting six percent of whites, \u201ca southern white was just three times more likely to own slaves than was a southern free black.\u201d On a national level, \u201ca white American was not even <\/span><i><span>twice <\/span><\/i><span>as likely as a free black American to be a slaveholder in 1830.\u201d&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Today, however, histories that ignore black slave ownership and the role of African slave merchants, and wildly exaggerate the economic contributions of slavery, are used to argue for reparations.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Listed among the \u201c<\/span><span>resources<\/span><span>\u201d<\/span><span> at Simmons\u2019s new nonprofit FirstRepair that advocates for \u201cLocal Reparations, Nationally\u201d is The 1619 Project, the special issue of the <\/span><i><span>New York Times Magazine <\/span><\/i><span>published for the 400<\/span><span>th <\/span><span>anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans at Jamestown.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>A<\/span> <span>collaborator <\/span><span>of The 1619 Project\u2019s creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, <\/span><span>Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/span><span>,<\/span><span> testified for reparations before Congress in June 2019, claiming that by 1836, \u201cmore than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves.\u201d This comes from <\/span><i><span>The Half That Has Never Been Told <\/span><\/i><span>by Edward Baptist, a member of the neo-Marxist New History of Capitalism school.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>A couple months later, in <\/span><i><span>The 1619 Project, <\/span><\/i><span>Hannah-Jones similarly wrote, \u201c[Slaves] grew and picked cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation\u2019s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world\u2019s supply.\u201d One of the Project\u2019s longer essays, by sociologist Matthew Desmond, advanced Baptist\u2019s claims.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Baptist\u2019s wildly inflated numbers had been exposed widely. Trevor Bernard, writing in <\/span><i><span>Slavery &amp; Abolition <\/span><\/i><span>in 2015, called Baptist\u2019s claims largely \u201cmade up.\u201d Economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode in 2016 cast them \u201chocus pocus.\u201d Economic historians Peter Coclanis, Philip Magness, and Gavin Wright have charged Baptist with innumeracy.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But Hannah-Jones, in her June 30, 2020, <\/span><i><span>New York Times Magazine <\/span><\/i><span>article, \u201c<\/span><span>What Is<\/span> <span>Owed<\/span><span>,<\/span><span>\u201d asserted that \u201cwhite Americans\u2019 centuries-long economic head start\u201d and \u201ctheir generational wealth and higher incomes\u201d nullified antidiscrimination laws. They maintained \u201ccaste.\u201d \u201c[T]he racism we are fighting today,\u201d she repeated, \u201cwas originally conjured to justify working unfree black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for European colonial powers, the white planter class and all the ancillary white people from Midwestern farmers to bankers to sailors to textile workers, who earned their living and built their wealth from free black labor and the products that labor produced.\u201d Therefore, cash reparations should \u201cgo to any person who has documentation that he or she identified as a black person for at least 10 years before the beginning of any reparations process and can trace at least one ancestor back to American slavery.\u201d&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But a black American could have ancestors from both the enslaving and enslaved camps, or have ancestors that were both at different times. Even those from disadvantaged backgrounds overcame racism to accrue fortunes on their own. Hannah-Jones, like <\/span><span>Howard Zinn<\/span><span>,<\/span><span> promotes the Marxist narrative that black Americans are exploited proletariat.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>She ignores <\/span><span>Frederick Douglass\u2019s<\/span> <span>charges against \u201csavage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage,\u201d and promotes the fiction that Europeans \u201ckidnapped\u201d Africans.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>She and other reparations agitators ignore the <\/span><i><span>Wall Street Journal <\/span><\/i><span>article, \u201c<\/span><span>When the<\/span> <span>Slave Traders Were African<\/span><span>,<\/span><span>\u201d by Nigerian writer, and descendant of slave traders, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, who reminded in 2019 that \u201clocal collaborators,\u201d \u201cmiddlemen and merchants,\u201d sold slaves to the Europeans. Contrary to Hannah-Jones\u2019s claims, slaves were captured by Africans.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Nwaubani posed \u201cquestions of historic guilt and responsibility\u201d to fellow Africans. But because agitators know that reparations are not forthcoming from Africa, they use fake histories like The 1619 Project.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>Mary Grabar is author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Debunking-1619-Project-Exposing-America\/dp\/1684511771\/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&amp;keywords=debunking+1619+project&amp;qid=1631049117&amp;sr=8-3\">Debunking The 1619 Project<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The Daily Wire is one of America\u2019s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/subscribe\">member<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1932, when journalist George Schuyler traveled with Roy Wilkins to report on abuses of black levee workers in Mississippi and Louisiana for the NAACP, he stopped to consult with &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-748675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}