Did You Say “Reparations?” The most effective case for reparations I’ve seen is contained in a long New York Times Magazine article (6/28/20) by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a founder of the 1619 movement. With clarity and sobriety, and against the background of the emotionally charged Moment, she sets forth the cumulative, generation-to-generation force of slavery’s legacy and the decades of Jim Crow discrimination and servitude that followed the Emancipation. She presents it largely in economic terms, and brings it down persuasively to the still-wide race/class inequities that exist in earning power, access to housing, education, health care, and household wealth, all exacerbated by the pandemic. While, as I implied earlier, my lay citizen’s belief is that most of these inequities are best attacked through political action on those problems (which would also have what I perceive to be the advantage of addressing the predicaments of disadvantaged whites, and thus avoiding specifically racial resentments), Hannah-Jones argues for, among other things, the necessity of economic restitution—cash payments to qualifying African-American households, to at least somewhat compensate for the absence of the inherited wealth which, even in modest form, confers so many advantages. Then she says: “Reparations are not about punishing white Americans, and white Americans are not the ones who would pay for them.” I’m thankful for that first phrase, but the second sounds evasive. She evidently finds all the practical questions that would logically follow from her well-documented arguments—e. g., how large these payments would need to be (quite, I should think, if they’re to make a significant difference), what that would add up to, where the money is to come from, how to overcome the opposition from the working-class whites who feel cheated and the fat-cat whites who whine about anything that might invade their stash—all these, and more, to be among “technicalities” she prefers to not address. This strikes me as disingenuous. Of course whites, along with all other American citizens, would pay. One hopes this would happen with the aid of a much more progressive tax structure than the one now in place, but nonetheless, we’d pay. And as to “reparations” in the arts (if the concept has any validity at all), they will not be achieved through preposterous demands presented in an intimidating voice, like those of the We See You cohort, nor by waving aside considerations of competence and experience in favor of “diversity.”
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Music 1: The Screens Work, So Scratch the Screens. The screens, you will have guessed, are the audition screens that nearly all American orchestras (including those of the Met and the New York Philharmonic) have had in place for the past half-century, more or less. Their purpose has been to ensure fairness in hiring by separating the performer’s visual impression from his or her purely musical one. Their widespread adaptation arose from a 1969 discrimination lawsuit brought against the NYPO by two black musicians. After a long, contentious trial, The Human Rights Commission rejected the suit, citing the “unquestioned right” of the orchestra to exercise its discretion in evaluating auditions. The HRC also noted, however, a pattern of discrimination in the hiring of substitute and part-time players. In response, the Philharmonic came up with the behind-the-screen practice, and it’s been the standard ever since.
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