The New York Times opinion pages, an unceasing fount of media drama, offered its latest shocker today: David Brooks, conservative centrist and William F. Buckley protegé, now supports reparations. And while this may seem like a delayed Black History Month miracle, we should all be skeptical about what a centrist vision of restitution for slavery and structural racism might look like.

In his column, Brooks cites Ta-Nehisi Coates’ seminal 2014 essay in The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." He admits that he was a skeptic when the piece was published, but Brooks has evolved and says that Coates "seems right now," pointing to this part of the now iconic essay:

Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. … What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

It’s a rather kumbaya moment in Coates’s indispensable and very dollars and cents-minded article. There are plenty of policy models for reparations, from lump sum payments to targeted government programs, none of which Brooks endorses or even considers in his column. Instead, he suggests that discussion of reparations is itself some kind of salve. While he acknowledges that repairing America’s foundational injustice requires, "direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life," Brooks concludes that "reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story."

Talk is famously inexpensive, and serves as poor medicine. And his recent columns on policy and race offer hints as to what a Brooks-approved model of reparations might look like. It likely wouldn't be too extreme, like the Green New Deal "fantasy" or the "impossible dream" of Medicare for all. And Brooks has written that he feels the key to racial uplift is for white people to acknowledge structural racism and people of color to embrace "bourgeois norms" like marriage, military, and church attendance. In a column from last summer, he noted that "black men who served in the military are more likely to be in the middle class than those who did not."

"The Case for Reparations" writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Ismael Quintanilla Getty Images

Military service is indeed one of the few pathways to economic stability available to members of the nation’s most underserved communities. But for Brooks to suggest that part of the remedy to centuries of structural racism and inequality is for black people to join the armed forces of a nation prone to risking the life and limb of its service people in pointless military engagements, not to mention one that's largely indifferent to the health outcomes of its veterans, makes me shudder to think what his vision for reparations might entail.

While Brooks doesn't talk about models for reparations, or give any details as to what justice might look like, Coates outlined in his essay one mode of historical reparations that proved successful: After the holocaust, Germany paid reparations to Israel. Although Coates noted that Holocaust reparations had an important symbolic and political resonance, it also had very concrete outcomes. Germany paid the equivalent of more than $8 billion dollars to Israel, not including individual reparation claims, which Israel invested in its merchant fleet, railways, and electrical system. Over the more than a decade of payments, income from reparations drive 15 percent of Israel’s economy.

David Brooks appears on NBC’s Meet the Press in August 2018 with Kristen Welker, NBC News White House Correspondent. NBC NewsWire Getty Images

Centrist reparations would be worse than no reparations at all. They would full of self-congratulatory praise for the power of gestures and discussion, and promises of gradual change. Worst of all, the benefits of a piecemeal or milquetoast model of reparations would be in danger of being washed away by the tides of racism that continue to buffet black America, and after its implementation, the right would be unwilling to tackle any racial disparities for at least a generation.



"When conservatives start advocating for reparations," wrote novelist and New York Times contributor Kaitlyn Greenidge on Twitter, "it's gonna end up with all of us getting 1 check, 6 yrs from now, for 39.95, only redeemable at certain gov't sites that take 15% off to cash it, and conservatives get a 'WE PAID YOU WHY YOU STILL FUCKING UP' card for life."

Because of this, any series of programs, payments, or efforts at retributions that earn the name reparations need to be truly substantial and capable of reshaping the trajectory of the most disenfranchised black people in America. It wouldn’t look like a bit of easy centrism, symbolism wrapped in handshakes and promises of slow change. Economists calculate the cost of just reparations at estimates that range between one and 14 trillion dollars. For reference, the federal budget for 2019 is 4.407 trillions.

Perhaps one day Brooks’s column may be considered an admirable first step. But any progress can only be judged a first step if others follow it. Before heaping praise, let’s wait and see what comes next.

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

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