[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
The ‘Victimhood Sweepstakes’ carnival is sweeping the nation, soon to come to a city near you. In Philadelphia, the sweepstakes carnival arrived last year when the formation of the Reparations Task Force was announced in November 2023. City Council approved the resolution on June 22, 2023. Councilmember Kendra Brooks (At-Large), a member of the Working Families [socialist] party was happy with the vote, declaring, “Every day we see the ongoing imprint of slavery and racist policies on the people of Philadelphia.”
Brooks’ statement is a mouthful, since “racist policies” in a city that, according to 2021 census, has a black population at about 40% with whites registering at 33.8% is tantamount to a myth. Philadelphia City Council is nearly all black; the mayor is black; blacks if anything have a smoother escalator ride to “success” in Philadelphia than at any time in history.
The black population also continues to grow exponentially. A mere 16 years ago my Old Richmond neighborhood was predominately white. Local businesses were all staffed by whites and blacks rarely had a presence here. Today, those stats have been turned around. Whites are increasingly becoming the minority. Ride the Market-Frankford El to the 69th Street Transportation Center and you’ll see that 90% of the riders are black.
Philadelphia is a black city. To call the city racist is tantamount to calling it self hating and masochistic.
With that said, because Council member Brooks said what she said, I felt a need to examine my conscience and search for overt racism in the City of Brotherly Love. I must report, however, that any evidence of racism in the city’s institutions or streets was so hard to find despite my donning a mental Sherlock Holmes hat and carrying a magnifying glass.
Yes, even in that imaginary get-up, I found nothing. Whites in Philadelphia, if anything, bend over backward to do and say things to their fellow black residents to prove that haven’t a racist bone in their body. I see this sort of thing on a daily basis.
A black homeless guy asks for money and is accorded a softer treatment from whites—he gets the cash—than a homeless white Irishman would get—because, you know, the latter is supposed “to know better and get a job.”
Sexism and misogyny-obsessed twenty something white girls in revealing skin tight shorts and minimalist tops “tolerate” or smile back when a black man whistles at them or makes sexy comments. Those smiles evaporate quickly when a white construction worker adopts this sort of behavior. To correct a black man in public is a racist act.
Not so long ago, I heard a story about how a white progressive millennial neighborhood woman discovered that a black homeless man had broken into her car and was attempting to steal it, but rather than call the police, she asked the man if he was hungry and when he said he was, she brought him out some food and fed him.
One thing is perfectly clear: there is no inherent or “systematic” racism in Philadelphia, at least the way people like Kendra Brooks are claiming.
But it’s not only Kendra Brooks. Councilmember Jamie Gauthier (3rd District), announced in 2023 that, “Until we look into our past with the determination to uncover the entire truth—no matter how ugly or scary that truth may be – our nation’s original sin will continue to toxify the present and future. This work is for our people, by our people.”
Gauthier then urged black Philadelphians to apply to join the Reparations Task Force “as we examine our past and shape the future.”
Shape-shifting the “future” will not be settled by Reparations. The “original sin of slavery,” as ‘race card’ progressives like to say, will always demand further correctives. If reparations ever become the law of the land, after that we will see additional demands put on municipal and state governments to eradicate the nation’s “original sin.” The progressive agenda is a living, breathing entity that requires constant feeding—a bottomless Venus Fly Trap– because its work is never done.
As it is, Philadelphia joins California, New Jersey, Amherst, MA, Wilmington, Chicago and Detroit in the reparations sweepstakes.
In 2023, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors appointed a panel to consider whether reparations should be paid to that city’s black residents (California never had slavery, by the way.) The panel decided that every eligible black resident of the city would receive 5 million dollars each and get an additional $97,000 a year for life with the added bonus of being able to buy any house in the city for one dollar.
The Hoover Institute at Stanford University reported that if San Francisco adopted the panel’s recommendation, the cost for individual non-black families in the city would be $600.000 each.
Brendan O’Neill, in writing about reparations in The Spectator, noted what Frederick Douglas said when asked what should be done with black people post-emancipation. Douglas replied: “Do nothing with us. If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”
And yet support for reparations for the descendants of slaves continues to infect left progressive organizations like the ACLU despite widespread disapproval from the American public.
According to a 2021 poll from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a 2022 Policy Pew Research Center poll, two thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, while two-thirds of Californians indicated that they were in favor of some form of reparation.
Most Americans, however, take a dim view of cash reparations, something that Michael Regan, the son of the former president, called a “cash and grab scam” in an article for Newsmax, and that columnist George F. Will called a “plague of solemn silliness.”
Unlike gender, poll numbers really are fluid, which is why woke cities like Philadelphia are working overtime to normalize the idea of reparations so that in time citizens will come to accept reparations as “just” and “inevitable.” Or, of course, the public may just grow sick and tired of the whole argument and throw in the towel just to be done with it.
May 2024 saw the reintroduction of a new and improved Philadelphia Reparations Task Force with a staff that includes people like Rashaun Williams, a self described “humanitarian rights justice and law convener,” and Breanna Moore, a Ph.D candidate at the (forever woke) University of Pennsylvania. The Reparations Task Force staff list, in fact, reads like a faculty listing at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ironically, the Philadelphia news media reported that the reparations task force hosted a public hearing session in City Hall so that the public could share their perspective on the issue. As a journalist who gets regular press emails from City Hall, I can tell you that at no time did I receive notice that an open forum on reparations was taking place.
Perhaps it helps not to advertise (too much) an open public forum on the issue of reparations because, you know, you might get…opposition. The lack of oppositional voices in City Hall chambers would certainly go a long way in helping to get a majority approval in City Council, proof yet again that there’s not a racist bone anywhere in the city’s “municipal institutions,’ and that Kendra Brooks’ and Gauthier’s claim that William Penn’s city is steeped in racism is nothing but stale woke sauerkraut.
As O’Neill wrote in The Spectator:
“The idea that modern-day blacks are shaped and haunted by the crimes of yesteryear is deeply demeaning. Randall Robinson, in his influential tome The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, said reparations are necessary because slavery ‘debilitated a whole people psychologically, socially and economically’. Such thinking presents black people as marionettes pulled this way and that by dead events over which they have no control. Their self-esteem, their opportunities (or lack thereof) – all are apparently moulded by the terrifying force of history. This is ahistorical, apolitical and patronising.”
The reparations movement was founded by Audley ‘Queen Mother’ Moore, a native of New Lberia, Louisiana. Audley called for reparations from 1955 until her death in 1997 at age 98. Moore believed that black people were due recompense for the denial of their 13th, 14th and 15th amendment rights during the Jim Crow years.
In the early 1960s, Moore attempted to present a petition to then President John F. Kennedy to address the idea, but Kennedy wasn’t having it. Moore, who was then living in Harlem, became a follower of black activist Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers and then befriended Malcolm X. Although born a Catholic, she left the Church when she objected to Pope Pius XII’s support of Italy during the Second Italo-Ethopian War. She later became a “bishop” in the Apostolic Orthodox Church of Judea.
In 1972, she was given the title ‘Queen Mother’ by members of the Ashanti People in Ghana.
In one of her last public speeches, Moore said, “Reparations, reparations … keep on. Keep on. We’ve got to win!”
As far as Ghana is concerned, history is rife with examples of how many wealthy black Ghanaian families owned slaves years before the trans-Atlantic slave trade.