David Horowitz
Monday, April 29, 2002

"With a landmark state study on slave-era insurance policies about to be released, Gov. Gray Davis addressed the issue of possible reparations to California minorities yesterday, saying, 'Clearly, we want to right any wrongs and do justice to people who were taken advantage of.' "

Gray Davis, governor of the largest state in the union, has joined the bomb throwers of the racial left in supporting reparations for slavery, an institution that was destroyed throughout the Western Hemisphere and across the Atlantic over 100 years ago primarily through the efforts of Great Britain and the United States.

California was a free territory and entered the Union as a free state in 1850, 11 years before the war on slavery. In this war Californians of course were on the side of freedom. Yet the governor of California now wants to punish California consumers for being on the right side of a battle against slavery that was won over 100 years ago. What is going on? The reparations movement can only be understood as an attack on America by a hard left that hates it and a soft left that needs the support of the America haters to win elections.

The occasion of Davis' race bomb is a report to be released by the insurance commissioner of the State of California under a bill authored by '60s radical Tom Hayden. The intellectual justifications and legal arguments for reparations are laughable. The insurance companies under attack bear no relation to companies that existed over 100 years ago. The parties being sued are living stockholders, living employees and living customers among whom are tens if not hundreds of thousands of blacks and other minorities.

The crimes allegedly committed were not crimes when they were committed – not in the United States and not in Africa, where black people were enslaved for 1,000 years before whites ever set foot on the continent. The life insurance policies on slaves generally stipulated that no payment would be made if the slave was lynched or worked to death – in other words, they were beneficial to the slaves themselves, providing added incentives to owners not to mistreat them.

The legal movement for reparations is not only preposterous; it is itself a form of white-collar crime. No court will hear a case that is 100 years old, and the reparations lawyers know this. Their clear and often overt agenda is to create a public relations nightmare for the companies involved so they will settle to protect their stock values. This is blackmail, pure and simple.

The reparations movement is not a movement for justice. It is a movement designed to perpetrate a monstrous injustice – no less than, say, a movement to claim reparations from African-American inhabitants of South Central for the L.A. riots which destroyed billions in property and in which more than 50 non-blacks were murdered in racial attacks indistinguishable from lynchings.

The reparations movement is the spearhead of an anti-American radicalism that has been building momentum for 30 years. Its aim is to ratchet up the smoldering resentments of America's minority communities and Balkanize – i.e., divide and conquer – the Republic itself. Standing at Gray Davis' side was the racial extortionist Jesse Jackson, who incited Asians and Hispanics to join the attack and get reparations for themselves. Why not Native Americans and Pacific Islanders as well? Why not give California back to Mexico, Governor Davis? Don't worry; these demands are on the way.

The radicals' divisive assault – now apparently a Democratic Party agenda – is being pushed at a moment when America is under siege by Islamic terrorists whose rationale conforms pretty faithfully to the "social justice" rhetoric of Hayden, Jackson, Davis, et al. Ten days before the 9-11 attack, Cynthia McKinney, Randall Robinson, John Conyers, Julian Bond and other leaders of the reparations left were in South Africa joining hands with the Iranians and other members of the Islamo-fascist U.N. bloc to condemn Britain and America for slavery (and Israel for merely existing), despite the fact that Britain and America are the two countries most responsible for the freedom of blacks in the world today. Meanwhile blacks are still enslaved in Africa – a fact that the American leftists easily ignored.

Davis' announcement makes it clear that the reparations movement is not going away. It will have to be defeated. The question is: Are Republicans, conservatives and those Democrats who love their country up to the task? And if not now, when?

David Horowitz is the author of "Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery" and editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com.

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