One measure of a community's silliness is the degree to which assumptions are made about people based on nothing but color.
A secondary theme in many of the letters that roll in is making unwarranted assumptions about my position on, of all things, reparations for slavery.
It's clear that some letter writers look at the column photo and assume they can pigeonhole me. A typical negative letter goes something like this:
"Mr. Norman. You're a jerk for writing what you did about [the war in Afghanistan/bad cops/President Bush]. You're so [un-American/pro-criminal/anti-Republican], it's sickening. Stop whining about the relatively small amount of injustice perpetrated by well-meaning people in this great country of ours and look at the big picture.
"And another thing, instead of bellyaching about reparations, you should encourage your people to work as hard as whites do when they immigrate to America from [generic European feudal state] with only the clothes on their backs, $20 in their pocket, and a few cases of tuberculosis between them. My people were discriminated against worse than your people, but within 10 minutes of getting off the boat, they were working 19-hour days in the mills, paying taxes in Natrona Heights, and looking down on other immigrants. That's the American way, so love it or lump it."
If a dollar were deposited into a special account every time a letter with this level of stupidity and revisionism crossed a black columnist's desk anywhere in America, no one would bother clamoring for reparations. The fund would have an inexhaustible revenue stream. The compound interest alone would make every American of African descent a millionaire many times over.
But alas, short of a way of directly penalizing those who actually held slaves many generations after the fact, I'm still very much a skeptic when it comes to reparations for slavery. Since everyone living in America is already profiting from their misery, I don't need another cent of blood money to make me feel "compensated."
Getting paid for decades of Jim Crow discrimination is a nonstarter for me, too, though there are instances -- like the Department of Agriculture's shameful and systematic disenfranchisement of black farmers -- that cry out for financial compensation this minute. I say pay the survivors of the Tulsa riots of 1921, throw in the families of every man and woman lynched since 1865 while you're at it, and some measure of national decency will have been achieved belatedly.
Of course, this position disappoints those who write regularly wanting to know when I'm going to come out swinging on behalf of several class action lawsuits seeking reparations for blacks across the board.
That won't be happening anytime soon, though I can understand the frustration of those who point to the financial shakedown of Catholic dioceses during this sex scandal as evidence of American hypocrisy. Though one would think putting a monetary value on the suffering caused by sexual abuse would be spiritually untenable, lawyers manage to come up with figures every day.
Black folks read the papers, too. They know lawsuits against Enron's former executives are moving forward, cheered on by most Americans. They're heartened when agreements are negotiated overseas that will pay survivors of the Nazi death camps back wages for their work as slaves of the Third Reich.
When treasures hanging in museums or gathering dust in lost bank accounts are returned to the Jewish families they were looted from a half-century ago, cheers go up from the lowliest 'hood to Oprah's penthouse. Lawsuits by Native Americans seeking the enforcement of century-old treaties are applauded as just and overdue.
That's why it's galling to many blacks when Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's promise that blacks would receive 40 acres and a mule at the end of the Civil War is derided as not being worth the paper it was printed on. It's a contract many believe is morally binding on the United States, even if the legality of such a sweeping promise is suspect.
Since Americans of all persuasions are constantly trying to get something for nothing, many blacks resent being told to go to the back of the line when it comes to getting paid to make centuries of accumulated "pain" go away.
But everyone knows reparations are as American as apple pie. Most folks simply want justice to come out of someone else's slice.
Tony Norman's email: tnorman@post-gazette.com
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