Vox, a fairly woke outfit, ran an article about a Kirsten Gillibrand campaign stop in Youngstown a few days ago. Gillibrand was apparently confronted by a woman who, alluding to the impacts of the closure of the Lordstown GM plant on its largely white workforce, wanted to know why Democrats liked to talk about “white privilege.” Gillibrand responded by saying that both the newly-unemployed white workers and African-Americans caught in a racist law enforcement system had legitimate grievances, and she felt everyone’s pain.
Her response was cited with approval by the writer, and it might well have been reasonable and prudent, but it wasn’t woke. A genuinely woke person would have reminded the woman that, regardless of her temporary problems with the system, she was an oppressor who lived off wealth stolen from African-Americans, and she needed to write a reparation check to them as penance.
The problem for the Democrats is that the majority of their own party, to say nothing of the electorate as a whole, isn’t woke, even though their activists generally are. The following reactions are possible:
- Ignore the activists, play to the center, and oppose reparations altogether (Biden);
- Try to thread the needle and offer sympathy and an ongoing discussion about reparations, but no concrete plan (Warren, Sanders);
- Propose specific measures that look a bit like reparations, but without the side dish of guilt (Booker, Harris); or
- Embrace the whole program, and commit electoral suicide (no one, for obvious reasons).
If you’re Ta-Nehisi Coates, the high priest of reparations, you don’t really care about getting Trump out of office; in fact, four more years of Trump outrages will probably bring you closer to your goal, so you support #4 even if it means losing in 2020. The rest of us have to worry about such lesser items as the erosion of our liberal democratic system, nuclear war, and the like; we don’t have the luxury of waiting until 2024 for relief, so discussions about reparations need to be shelved as soon as possible.