It is unclear whether President Barack Obama had this strong a connection in mind when he remarked, “I think the reparations we need right here in South Carolina is investment, for example, in our schools.” But it seems quite clear that any effort to justify the pursuit of reparations for educational inequality on moral or legal grounds may do best to avoid tethering the normative case for reparations to racial discrimination-based empirical explanations of the causes of racial educational inequality. For in this post-racial, or post-Obama era, empirical explanations that tie black underachievement to choices that blacks make (or fail to make) when it comes to education are as popular–if not more popular–than explanations that link black underachievement to the persistence of racism in contemporary America. While I share President Obama’s sentiment that addressing the racial achievement gap could be part of a broad strategy of black reparations, in this day and age the most compelling and pragmatically feasible argument for this will be one that can reach an empirically-informed normative conclusion regardless of the perspective one takes on the empirical causes of racial inequalities in education.
OCG 