Another dead-end for the racial reckoning

America’s “racial reckoning” — which consisted mainly of riots and downed statues — seems largely to have faded away. But it persists in the pages of the Washington Post.

To read the Post these days is to wonder whether BLM is paying for the advertising. It isn’t, and need not. The Post is determined to keep “reckoning,” even in the face of lost subscriptions and layoffs.

Reparations for slavery are a major part of the BLM agenda. Among the many problems with such reparations is the fact that only a very small percentage of today’s Americans are descended from slave owners. Indeed, a large portion of the population is descended from people who came to America after slavery ended.

Undaunted, the Post has found a family that not only descends from slave owners, but still lives on property where its descendants used slave labor. To make this family an even more alluring target, a large amount of uranium sits under this property. If it can ever be mined, it will be worth a fortune. (Don’t hold your breath, though. Forty years ago, as a law firm associate, I worked on a project intended to clear the way for mining Virginia’s uranium.)

The Post strongly implies that this fortune, if it materializes, should be shared with descendants of the slaves who worked on the plantation. It claims that the uranium on the property “ties back to the story of how America’s early lawmakers created a system of entrenched racial and economic hierarchies as durable as the red brick mansion where a Walter Coles has always lived.”

In fact, however, the uranium on the property in question has no connection with slavery. The economic benefits the Coles descendants gained through slavery (and whatever small portion of it might still accrue to Walter Coles) came from raising crops. Nothing the slaves did has any relation to the uranium. The mineral would have been present even if the property owners had paid those who worked their fields.

Would Walter Coles own the property today if his descendants had paid their workers? The answer, in all likelihood, is yes. There’s no reason to believe the property wouldn’t have been profitable enough to keep in the family, absent slavery. After all, it has stayed in the family during the nearly 160 years since slavery was abolished and the nearly 60 since the end of Jim Crow.

The Coles family has said it will donate 3 percent of any uranium profits to promote local education, among other charitable causes. The Post seems unhappy that the family won’t look for descendants of slaves who worked on the plantation to pay. However, the descendants the Post found say they aren’t seeking reparations. One of them told the Post:

Our family, we’re not looking for anything. If you ask about reparations, what we’re looking for is information. I want to know about my family legacy. And do we have ancestors [buried] on that property? And if they’re there, who’s there? And do we have access to their place of burial to see it, to reflect on it, to pay homage to it?

According to the Post, the Coles family welcomed the only descendant of a Coles slave who is known to have visited their property.

I want to make one more point about the Post’s article. It quotes the Walter Coles as saying he probably would have been for slavery if he had lived back then. That’s true, assuming he was part of a family of slaveowners (but not if he was from a family of New England ministers).

However, the same thing is true of the Post reporter who wrote this article. For that matter, it’s true of all of us, including the descendants of the Coles family’s slaves. Had they been born a Coles in the first half of the 18th century, they probably would have been for slavery, too.

This cold reality isn’t an argument against reparations. The case for reparations is based on who did what to whom — not who would have done what.

But it is an argument against the moral preening of BLM, the Post, other racial reckoners who talk constantly about slavery even though it was abolished in 1865.