Here's how "public broadcasting" works in America -- take a policy that two-thirds of the public oppose, and lecture them that they're all willfully ignorant. What? Then they do pledge drives asking for money from the public? Clearly, they think NPR listeners are in the intelligent minority.
On Monday, Jennifer Ludden’s All Things Considered report on the Left's nationwide fight for slavery reparations was carefully curated to make the controversial issue palatable, even desirable. After all, Ludden's bio explains she "covers economic inequality, exploring systemic disparities in housing, food insecurity and wealth."
The Monday morning report on tax-supported NPR made no mention of the angst emanating from San Francisco, where a city advisory panel is touting the ridiculous figure of $5 million for qualifying recipients (only a photo from a pro-reparation rally there) and the tone was supportive (“renewed hopes”).
Local reparations programs -- in about a dozen cities and the state of California -- have renewed hopes for an eventual national policy to compensate for slavery. But after decades of lobbying and three years of a national reckoning over race, Americans overall remain strongly opposed to the idea.
When Tatishe Nteta began polling about it several years ago he expected money would be the biggest issue. Or perhaps the workability of such a complex undertaking. It turns out those are the smallest concerns among the two-thirds of Americans who say they're against cash payments to the descendants of slaves.
"A plurality of Americans," Nteta says, "don't believe the descendants of slaves deserve reparations."
The political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, plans more research to get at exactly why people think that…..
The reporter found an interviewee who cited the importance of individual effort, then loaded the rest of the story with leftist experts to dismiss the very idea as ridiculous.
Terry Keuhn….does not like the idea of a targeted program that would only help some people. "We're all immigrants at some point, whether it was voluntary or forced," she says. "And nobody needs a handout anymore. Everybody, you know, pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps and works for a living and makes their way in this world."
That conviction -- that hard work pays off -- is a core narrative of the U.S., says Yale social psychologist Michael Kraus, and the notion of a persistent racial wealth gap clashes with it. He's surveyed people about this and thinks his findings help explain the broad opposition to reparations.
"A majority of our sample tends to think that we've made steady progress towards greater equality in wealth between families, so between black and white families," he says. "That is totally inconsistent with reality."
Most of those he surveyed thought that today, for every $100 dollars white families have, Black families have about $90. In fact, the racial wealth gap is exponentially larger. Given its magnitude, and the recent intense focus on racial justice around the country, Kraus calls this disconnect a kind of "collective willful ignorance."
National Review pointed out that if the racial wealth gap was the deciding factor in issuing "reparation" funds, then Hispanics would also deserve reparations -- and, that if the nation adopted San Francisco’s sum to send to every black American, it would be a $200 trillion dollar program. (Yes, trillion.)
Under the proposed radical, unprecedented scheme of national reparations, the same federal government that once discriminated would now be relied upon to save the day:
Supporters of reparations for Black Americans consider a national program crucial. Explicitly racist federal policies were key in creating the wealth gap, and only the federal government could come anywhere close to compensating for harms that some have calculated at as much as $14 trillion. Brown sees local reparations as part of an education campaign for a national push, but others aren't sure whether they'll help or hurt.
This National Public Radio news story pushing for you to pay taxes for reparations was funded in part by....your tax money. Convenient, isn't it?
