A government-appointed reparations committee in San Francisco is recommending that each eligible Black resident be awarded a one-time payment of $5 million in an effort to correct the city’s decades of racial discrimination. Conservatives say the reparations proposal — which some say would cost $50 billion — would ruin the city’s financial picture, given San Francisco’s budget is only $14 billion.

Straight Arrow News contributor Star Parker believes the problem goes much deeper than the steep price tag.

The problem, most of all, is with the principle of the matter. My ancestors were slaves. And my life as a young woman was a mess. Was my life a mess because my ancestors were slaves? I don’t think so. Did I need reparations to turn things around for me? Certainly not. 

I needed a wake-up call, which to my great gratitude, I got from a few churchgoing Black Christians who told me the way I was living was unacceptable to God. So I went to their church, took back responsibility for my life, and turned my circumstances around.

The problem with the idea of reparations is that it redirects attention away from an individual’s responsibility for their own unique lives. And it redirects attention in such a way to encourage individuals to believe that a collective problem from the past is the cause of all their individual problems in the present.

To be sure, compensation — what many refer to as restitution for damages — is a legitimate principle, but only in the very real here and now, not when it’s pushed to the abstract past. And most of the time, it’s in cases where one individual has caused damages against another — in other words, personal responsibility on both sides. After all, one of the main problems with racism is that it denies the uniqueness, the dignity and the personal responsibility of each individual.