Two weeks ago, I participated in a debate on reparations hosted by the American Public Square and later televised by KCPT, the PBS station in Kansas City. If I didn’t know beforehand that the game was rigged, I did by the time the edited debate hit the airwaves. Grab your wallets, folks. The reparations crowd is coming for your money.
The concept behind American Public Square is a reasonable one. Troubled by the increasing polarization of the electorate, former ambassador to Portugal Allan Katz founded the organization to bridge the partisan divide through civil discourse.
The programming skews left, as does the audience, but the forum provides contrarians like myself an opportunity to burst the occasional bubble. Some years back, for intense, I participated in a discussion on Muslims in which the on-site “fact-checker” came to my aid more than once, as did the ringer of the “civility bell.” I cannot say I converted anyone to my viewpoint, but in my strategically congenial way — “Honey, he’s not the monster I thought he was” — I may have forced a few people to question their assumptions.
The reparations discussion was anything but congenial. The organizers had a hard time finding a second person to take the “con” side. The one fellow on the “pro” side could barely bring himself to look at me before we started. The moderator, like the organizers, seemed nervous throughout. The audience was about 20 percent black and generally hostile. And all my jokes fell flat.
On the Muslim panel, I tried a little Sun Tzu on the audience, questioning why liberals would ally themselves with a faith group more socially conservative than even the dreaded religious right. On the reparations panel, I again avoided the obvious flaws in their argument and asked instead why black activists would appeal to the very liberals whose largesse has shattered their communities.
I used my first opportunity to speak to imagine the world that singer Fats Domino saw around him on the occasion of his 30th birthday in 1958. Jobs were plentiful. Black families were intact. The community was strong. Streets were safe. One racial barrier after another was falling, and Fats himself was making a boatload of money.
The black community had weathered the era of institutional white racism in relatively good shape, but they were not prepared for what was right around the corner: the era of institutional white guilt. This, I argued, was a force more seductive and ultimately more destructive than the era that preceded it.
This two-minute spiel was to be my set-up for more specific charges to come. I could tell it made people uneasy. The civility monitor rang the bell in the middle of my monologue. Thinking he had rung it by mistake, I ignored him. Then an audience member demanded a fact-check on, of all things, the success of Fats Domino.
The fact-checker backed me up. Fats had made $750,000 in royalties in his lifetime and had a net worth of $8 million at the time of his death. One or more of the panelists then angrily insisted that Fats was an exception and that white managers routinely ripped off black artists. I would be more specific here, but program organizers decided to edit out my opening remarks altogether.
The editing was not done for the sake of balance. Of the 40 broadcast minutes in which a panelist was speaking, the pro side got 29 of those minutes. Our side got 11. The TV audience did not hear from me or my ally, Pete Mundo, a morning show host on KCMO radio, until the pro side had spoken for seven minutes.
The moderator had asked Pete a reasonable question: “What is the biggest objection from your listeners?” When Pete calmly began to address the fairness issue, the civility bell rang once again. Pete stopped and asked the monitor, a black man, “What did I say that was incorrect?” The monitor’s answer stunned us both: “What does it matter what they think?”
By “they,” the man meant Pete’s listeners. The monitor’s objection was, in a paradoxical way, on target. As the evening unfolded, it became clear that it did not matter what the citizens of Kansas City thought. Mayor Quinton Lucas’s hand-picked reparations commission was prepared to do all the thinking for them. By their lights, it was “uncivil” of any white person to raise any objection at all.
I and Pete and Pete’s listeners could debate the justice or the efficacy of reparations until we convinced ourselves the whole thing was a joke, but the joke is on us. The die has been cast, and the commissioners are already dividing up the spoils.
