Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who withdrew from his Democratic primary challenge to President Joe Biden earlier this month to run as an independent, has expressed support for allocating federal funds to “rebuild black infrastructure,” such as banks and businesses, and also for providing “direct redress payments or tax credits,” rather than unconditional cash giveaways. At first, he filed these policy ideas under the category “reparations.” He even discussed providing “direct redress payments or tax credits.” He has since dropped that last phrase and refiled the ideas under the label “Targeted Community Repair.” (Here’s the most recent page from his campaign website.)
The corporate media has interpreted Kennedy’s “racial healing” plan and civil rights agenda as threatening Biden’s bid for reelection by carving out a road to the left of the President. Indeed, new polls show that Kennedy’s populist campaign is drawing votes away from Biden, which put Donald Trump well in the lead for the 2024 election, a development that has the establishment leaning into the lawfare being waged against the former president. Biden also has Cornel West (who recently left the Green Party to run as an independent) to contend with.
I have publicly expressed support for Kennedy’s candidacy. I’m a populist and a fan of the man for a number of reasons, not least of which is his advocacy for victims of corporate polluters and the medical-industrial complex. However, a few days ago, in a Facebook post, I said that reparations was a red line for me. It still is—as I understand reparations: a scheme to hold collectively responsible whites and other groups for actions for which they are not nor could be responsible, since these actions happened in the past, were perpetrated by others, and have carried no benefit for the vast majority of whites, who were and continue to be exploited and impoverished by the capitalist class.
I am frustrated by the way race talk is prioritized in the United States; it obscures the most important driver of inequality in the world, namely class struggle. It’s a little known fact, but twice as many whites live below the poverty line as do blacks. They’re approximately twenty million whites who live below the poverty line, with tens of millions more struggling to get by despite working full-time and at multiple jobs. What is more, there are millions of affluent blacks—artists, athletes, capitalists, managers, and professionals. The way the media covers inequality, one would think that race is a proxy for economic inequality. This is far from reality. (See They Do You This Way.)
Of course, Kennedy is focused on the race question because he accepts the legitimacy of capitalism. I suffer under no delusions that he will fundamentally transform the economic system. My support for his candidacy was rooted instead in my desire to see the restoration of the American republic, something about which the man has spoken eloquently. For centuries, the establishment has manufactured racial division to disunite the working class, Karl Marx’s optimism that “the red sea of civil war red tide of civil war” would lead to the “reconstruction of a social world” dashed on the rocks of corporatism. Kennedy risks perpetuating this division with the rhetoric of “targeted community repair.”
From the campaign website: “Communities that were specifically targeted for destruction need to be specifically targeted for repair. During Jim Crow, Black [sic] banks, businesses, hospitals, schools, and farms were targeted for destruction. Racists knew that without these, the Black [sic] community had no chance of building wealth. We must set federal dollars aside to rebuild Black [sic] infrastructure.” Sensing the divisive character of these words—Jim Crow was abolished nearly sixty years ago—his website goes on to state: “Targeted Community Repair will be available to devastated communities across the country, not just Black [sic]. The criteria will be around need, not skin color. However, because there are so many Black [sic] communities in need, this program will channel significant resources toward the rebuilding of these most devastated of communities.”
The website eliminated this language, which has earlier been reported by The New York Post: “These programs complement direct redress payments or tax credits to the descendants of the victims of Jim Crow and other victims of persecution.” It then emphasized that “RFK Jr. will find ways to offer this redress that are legal, fair, and win the approval of Americans of all races.” This language has been replaced by the following: “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. believes that this unacceptable situation is the result of the unhealed legacy of racism in this country. We must take direct action to remedy it—not only for the sake of Black [sic] people, but for the wellbeing of the entire nation. He will appeal not to guilt and blame, but to the conscience of Americans of all races who want to repair the wounds of history.” Better, but still rooted in an abstract group-based morality rather than on the reality of class dynamics and the humanist ethic of individualism.
In the video shared above, which is from the Math Hoffa show, Kennedy voices his support for the establishment of development projects like the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which his father helped establish in 1967 alongside then-Mayor John Lindsay and then-Senator Jacob Javits. Kennedy emphasized that these initiatives are “less likely to contribute to polarization between blacks and whites because it benefits everybody. Everybody, even people who are Trumpers…everybody wants business to work and to flourish.” I don’t like the pejorative “Trumpers,” but his argument here is more sophisticated than a lot of the arguments carrying the reparations label.
This past Thursday, I lectured on police-civilian encounters in my senior-level criminal justice class and discussed the problems of ghettoization and what Harvard legal scholar Randall Kennedy called “racially selective underproduction,” which I adapted to make a case against decarceration and depolicing. In his campaign literature, Kennedy talks about both prison reform and police reform in ways that indicate a disconnect between his understanding of the pathologies wrought by the historic underdevelopment of black communities and the need for prisons and police to protect those living in urban areas. The evidence makes clear that depolicing is associated with a drastic rise in violent crime in our urban areas. Last year, 53 percent of homicides were perpetrated by blacks, most of whom were males, with 57 percent of homicide victims black civilians—and 57 percent of robberies were perpetrated by blacks. Public safety is a human right.
However, Kennedy does understand what lies at the root of these criminogenic conditions, and that’s the social disorganization and lack of collective efficacy identified by such scholars as Robert Sampson and William Julius Wilson.
In the video shared above, a participant, Mecc, responds, “I must express with all due respect that, speaking for myself and likely for many in the black community, we aren’t primarily concerned with how others feel about the idea of cash reparations. If the notion of us receiving cash reparations makes others uncomfortable, that’s more on them. Furthermore, I’m not overly interested in what’s good for everybody when we discuss reparations. Our focus should be on what’s beneficial for the black people who have consistently faced systemic disadvantages due to the existence of a system that some deny. Some would tell you there’s no systemic racism and that you should pull yourself up by your non-existent bootstraps, even after they’ve taken your boots away. Frankly, I’m not even wearing boots.”
Mecc doesn’t speak for all blacks, of course, but this is a widespread attitude in the black population, one frequently heard since the 1960s. In a October 29, 1966 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, Stokely Carmichael thundered: “And they come into our ghettos and they Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and Upward Bound us into white society. ’Cause they don’t want to face the real problem. Which is a man is poor for one reason and one reason only: because he does not have money. Period. If you want to get rid of poverty you give people money. Period. And you ought not tell me about people who don’t work, and you can’t give people money without working, because if that were true, you’d have to start stopping Rockefeller, Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, the whole of Standard Oil, the Gulf Club [Gulf Corporation]—all of them.”
Mecc echoes Carmichael’s polemic: “I don’t want our path to financial restitution, or even more than that, to be dependent on how another group perceives it or how they might react negatively. Maybe if we confront the substantial issue that’s been overlooked and its ongoing impact, reparations wouldn’t be as painful. Perhaps they won’t be so difficult to accept if we stop attempting to rewrite history or pretending that these problems don’t exist. Denying systemic racism and telling people to work harder, or pointing to the existence of a black president as proof that things aren’t that bad, only hinders the path to reparations. Reparations wouldn’t feel like taking something away from others; it would be keeping a promise we’ve already made.”
But race-based reparation does in fact involve taking something away from others. If white people—again, more of whom are counted among the poor than any other racial group in America—are going to be enlisted in a project to repair that which they didn’t break, then any policy must include them in it. Moreover, if they are going to sacrifice the value of their time and labor to this project, they rightly expect accountability.
Mecc’s rhetoric is quintessentially black nationalist and rests on the essentialist fallacy of treating individuals as if they are personifications of abstract groups. The only real differentiations among human beings are those resting on physical and material grounds and these are three only: children, class, and sex (and class is a function of the prevailing mode of production). Beyond these objective categories, the American Republic was founded as a nation of individuals, not a nation of groups—however much the ideology of racial and cultural pluralism has confused popular consciousness. With the dismantling of de jure segregation, the continuing problem with racism is at its core the problem of identitarian thinking, and that problem isn’t solved by leaning into racism but by transcending it, that is by practicing colorblindness, i.e., race neutrality.
The man to the left of Mecc expresses sympathy for Mecc’s point, but then says, “I do understand what [RJK, Jr. is] saying about focusing on what will genuinely improve the community in the long term rather than it just feeling like a short-lived windfall followed by a return to the status quo. That’s where my understanding lies.”
And this is where all our understandings must lie. I am all for making investments in black-majority communities, as these are the very communities the Democratic Party has impoverished and disorganized with its progressive policies and identitarian politics. Disorganized communities are the source of the violent street crime that disproportionately impacts black people. However, because of this disorganization and the pathologies it has produced, cash reparations would be the worst investment possible Americans could make—indeed, it would be no investment at all. The money would be spent without any improvement in the neighborhoods. So, with all due respect to Mecc, your disregard for my opinion (my feelings don’t matter), don’t inspire confidence in the effort I would be asked to make.
I’m struck by this dialogue between Tucker Carlson and Vince Everett Ellison. Putting aside Ellison’s religious arguments and his confusing woke progressivism with Marxism (typical of conservatives), his analysis is spot on. In light of these points, it seems that cash reparations would be precisely the strategy one would use if the outcome was to produce more George Floyds. Such production would benefit Democrats, of course, the party of the slavocracy and now the corporatocracy, elites who want blacks to vote for a living instead of work for a living—a strategy for a type of systemic racism Stokely Carmichael internalizes in his speech, explicitly expressing the desire for blacks to be a kept race (Poor Mothers, Cash Support, and the Custodial State). But it would help neither blacks nor whites going forward, since sustaining the hegemony of Democratic Party will keep not only a large proportion of the black people trapped in crime-ridden and socially disorganized communities, but will also keep white people living in poverty and at risk for home invasion—both by the bearers of the pathologies of the neighborhoods in question and the thug forces of the federal police state.
So my enthusiasm for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been dampened but not broken. I’m hedging a little on the red line I drew in my Facebook comments. I will wait to hear more. That he walked back the crude language of the vulgar identitarian gives me reason to not walk away. But I can’t tolerate much more of this straying into woke progressivism.
freedom and reason 