Nikole Hannah-Jones’s strange new case for reparations

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last year to prohibit race-based affirmative action in college admissions, some advocates for race-based social policy are opting for a new standard of eligibility for reparations and other compensation claims: one’s lineage as a descendant of slaves. The latest example of this shift is New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, best known as the architect of The 1619 Project, which argued that the United States was established in 1619 as a white supremacist ethnostate, the year that the first Africans were brought to the English colonies. In a sprawling 10,000-word New York Times piece that will appear in this weekend’s Sunday Magazine, Hannah-Jones concludes that “race-based affirmative action has died,” and the fight for “racial justice” must continue under a new rubric: “descendants of slavery”. Hannah-Jones doesn’t elaborate on her proposal — it appears at the very end of her lengthy historical essay, which argues that conservatives and racists (operating as synonyms) have co-opted the concept of colour blindness to thwart racial justice. The question of eligibility is a touchy issue, to say the least, as the switch from race to lineage would have the practical effect of excluding a growing US...