New York’s racial reparations idiocy

Gov. Hochul, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and state Senate chief Andrea Stewart-Cousins last week named their appointees to the state “reparations” commission, launching a process that’s guaranteed to worsen race relations in New York.

Officially named Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, the nine-member panel is supposed to “examine the legacy of slavery, subsequent discrimination against people of African descent and the impact these forces continue to have in the present day”; it’s to hold public hearings and produce a report with recommendations on reparations and racial justice remedies within a year.

This, less than a year after California’s reparations panel issued its call for payments of $360,000 to $1.2 million for qualified “victims,” which Gov. Gavin Newsom rapidly rejected (as the total outlays could stretch to $800 billion) — leaving everyone unsatisfied if not furious.

And New York’s similar exercise will inevitably follow the same course, because “reparations” discussions have centered on cash payments ever since Te-Nehisi Coates revived the idea a decade ago: It’s all about collapsing the whole fraught and complex topic into a single number in service of Coates’ grim, radical worldview.

It’s perfectly fine to study our history, warts and all, and to highlight its injustices, but the idea that we can achieve justice by making good for all past wrongs is madness — a point made by Aeschylus and Sophocles back in the fifth century BC.

It’s a recipe not for civic peace but endless cycles of grievance and vengeance, because these wrongs can’t simply be righted by any mortal act, nor can any society function by obsessing about the past, rather than building a better future.