Reparations: Caught cheating

Literally 56 years ago I attended a talk in a Minneapolis church by a Black woman who had just returned from Resurrection City, the encampment that sprung out of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's vision of a Poor People's Campaign. He put out a call to meet him on the Mall in Washington DC in May, 1968. He was assassinated that April, but his vision was carried out by his colleagues and 3000 campers around the Reflecting Pool for some 42 days. The woman who returned and gave the talk in July, 1968 that I heard as a 17-year-old boy who had just graduated from high school impacts me to this day. One of the cogent points she made was about reparations, a movement that had begun to be discussed more widely. Paraphrase: 

Some white people are responding that now we have the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, so we have laws that have made things right. I say, good laws, but not enough. It's like we've been playing poker all night and one guy is winning big with most of the money from the rest of us and at 3 a.m. we catch him cheating. Do we let him say, okay, you caught me, I'll play fair now? I don't think so. He's going to have to give back the money he got by cheating. White America has cheated for more than 400 years. We think they need to give back some of that wealth they hold.

This is something like the lawsuit[1] against the Fearless Fund, a granting group that offers specifically to aspiring Black women entrepreneurs. The lawsuit is brought by Edward Blum, a conservative litigator trying to do everything he can, along with others like him, to roll back affirmative action and DEI on a broad scale. 

Peeling back the layers of logic on all sides should be able to lead to an outcome that could be managed outside the adversarial environment of a court, but in this case perhaps neither party is interested in listening, having made up their minds that the other side is just completely wrong. We'll see. Mediation is preferable, but the parties have to want it. 

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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/26/dei-lawsuit-black-businesses-fearless-fund-edward-blum/