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,...