Letters to the Editor.

Reprimanding Reed

Since I agree with Adolph L. Reed Jr. that reparations for slavery is a bad idea, it may seem odd that I react to his article negatively ("The Case Against Reparations," December issue). Nevertheless, I do react negatively.

Nowhere in his litany of reasons for not supporting the reparations movement was there any interest in the injustice of such a policy to those actually paying reparations, the taxpayers (minus, I suppose, those on the receiving end). Why, I wonder, does Reed leave out these payers from the focus of his concern? Is it because he so swallows his own rhetoric as to believe that "corporate elites" would do the paying? Does he really have any doubt that, however the details are determined, the primary victims of this vile scheme would be millions of ordinary Americans who bear no responsibility whatsoever for slavery?

Perhaps it's because Reed does not seem to see moral responsibility as a concept bearing any relationship at all to the actual deeds of actual individuals--that is, morality as most people understand it.

Like millions of others, my sense of elemental morality leads me to say, "Not with my money, you don't. No way."

Jonathan Burack Stoughton, Wisconsin

Reed misses the boat entirely in his December column. He completely misreads Randall Robinson's argument for reparations. Robinson's position does not depend on a view of African Americans "as defective and in need of moral and psychological repair."

Instead, it rests on the undeniable social, economic, and political problems faced by a disproportionate segment of the African American population that are a direct consequence of slavery and racial prejudice.

Reed seems all too quick to indict "upper class blacks," who he assumes would "conduct the finely calibrated analyses that determine what forms and magnitude just compensation should take," and who would "administer whatever compromise palliatives are likely to ensue from this activity." However, Reed himself says there is a "plethora of technical problems" raised by the question of reparations. So how does he then reach the conclusion that some elite class of African Americans will administer some program for reparations?

Reed's claim that the reparations campaign would detract from more legitimate social and economic concerns is also entirely unfounded. In fact, the reparations argument is made on behalf of the very concerns Reed accuses it of dismissing--"quality heath care, the right to a...