Oh Uh-Uh: The Wall Street Journal prints a pretty racist piece on Reparations

I talk about a lot of things in this space, and I am pretty open to dialogue with informed people who have various opinions. As long as things stay respectful and opinions are actually informed and not based on biases, we should be good. 

That being said, as both a Black person and a Woman, I am able to pick up on coded language that attempts to undermine not only my intelligence but the intelligence of my people or my gender. I take it very seriously when folks attempt to talk about things that, truth be told, do not understand, but feel, dare I say, entitled to discuss like the experts they are not.

Case and point, the opinion piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal recently that not only gave me but others who read it serious pause. 

Screenshot of WSJ

Michael Harriot of The Root did an amazing take-down of the article written by Lance Morrow, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an institute dedicated to “applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” Marrow, who honestly, no one even asked him for his opinion, decided to offer it and, for whatever reason, a typically brilliant paper such as the Wall Street Journal decided to print it, something you would expect on a supremacist website.

Morrow offers his opinion in the same way that bbq restaurants offer that coleslaw that nobody eats, and quite frankly, nobody even wants, beginning his piece by explaining that Democratic candidates who freely discuss reparations need to cool it because "the notion may be too volatile to indulge in a campaign year," and that even the discussion of reparations might "help re-elect Trump and make race relations worse." This "not-the right-time" argument is the unfounded attempt at stagnation that has been used to slow down or impede every single discussion of equal rights. It’s the same lame argument used to delay abolition, battle segregation, help voting rights, and institute women’s suffrage, so it is unsurprising that this argument would show up here.

But what is interesting is that, at least in this piece, Morrow is not saying that he is against reparations, just discussing them. Morrow continues his belittling essay by describing how Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most prolific writers on the topic of ethnicity and identity of our time in my own opinion "plumbs the ancient rages" in “The Case for Reparations," and explains that Coates "may be a little too eloquent for his own good."


via GIPHY
Yeah, that sounds a little racist.

Morrow says that reparations "It would push the country to angrier extremes on either side, stimulating fresh antagonisms." Morrow's entire point is hidden within overly fancy language and faux politeness, but to a Black person, it reads plain as day: we shouldn’t even talk about reparations because not only would it make white people too uncomfortable, it might "reconstitute America’s old racial conflict along new 21st-century lines." Instead of the healing and repaying the debt that this Nation (not White People, as Morrow suggests, there is a difference) owes to people of color for hundreds of years of free labor and that is the tip of that iceberg, Morrow feels that the discussion (not actual reparations, just the simple discussion) would "throw open a trapdoor out of which all manner of bigotries and bitterness, all the black bats of American history, would fly." Morrow continues, saying "It would push the country to angrier extremes on either side, stimulating fresh antagonisms...reconstitute America’s old racial conflict along new 21st-century lines."

I would say to Mr. Morrow, tell that to the congregations of the three Black Churches that were burned down by a white terrorist mere weeks ago. Those "black bats of American history" Morrow refers to are already flying, in the daily antagonisms, microaggressions, violence, and terror still experienced by Black Americans to this day.

Michael Harriot in his piece sums up the overwhelming response to this rhetoric:

"Lance, in his patronizing, bigoted benevolence, explains that this gutter conversation about reparations is too undignified for public debate. And, when he says that “people” are not civilized enough to have it, we know about whom he’s referring..."

"After being kept in chains, hunted like wild animals, raped, beaten, having our babies ripped from our arms to be sold down the river, hung, imprisoned, falsely accused, starved, shot and killed in every conceivable way and some our brains could not even imagine, Lance is reluctant to discuss reparations because he wants to protect us from the “candor” of prejudice and discrimination. Don’t worry, Lance. I think we can handle it." 

And indeed, we certainly can.