The Democrats’ trillion-dollar reparations racket

When politicians run out of solutions, they start offering symbolism – and this year, that symbolism comes in the form of a check.

Representative Summer Lee’s “Reparations Now” resolution calls for trillions of dollars in payments to black Americans as compensation for slavery and its aftershocks. As a black man in America, this issue cuts close to home. My grandparents came from South Georgia, and their grandparents were born into slavery. That blood runs through me. The pain, the endurance, the quiet strength – it’s part of my inheritance.

If reparations were handed out, I’d be one of the people eligible to receive them. But I couldn’t take the check in good conscience.

Because while I honor what my ancestors endured, I don’t believe their suffering should be reduced to a dollar amount. They didn’t survive for me to wait on a payout – they fought, worked and built so I could stand on my own. To accept that check would feel like trading in their dignity for dependency. My success – and even my setbacks – are mine. And that’s something they would’ve wanted: not a government handout, but a legacy of strength.

This isn’t just about money – it’s about narrative. And the story being told here is that black Americans remain helpless without government intervention, that our future is forever chained to our past. That’s not empowerment. It’s political theater.

The reality is that this narrative doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The strongest predictors of success in today’s America are not race or historical trauma – but family structure, socioeconomic stability and cultural habits. This is not to deny the horrors of slavery or the devastation of Jim Crow. It’s to say that we are not defined by them.

A two-parent household is one of the greatest protectors against poverty, incarceration and poor educational outcomes – regardless of race. Strong families and disciplined values beat government checks every time. That’s the reality politicians like Summer Lee refuse to acknowledge because it doesn’t fuel their outrage machine or their fundraising campaigns.

If she truly wanted to uplift black America, she wouldn’t be demanding trillion-dollar reparations. She’d be pushing for school choice. She’d be fighting for small-business deregulation and access to capital. She’d be demanding that the welfare state stop punishing marriage and fatherhood in low-income communities. In other words, she’d be doing the hard, thankless work of restoring the cultural and economic foundations that make progress sustainable – not symbolic.

But instead, we get this: a flashy, impossible promise with no legislative future. Reparations have become the crypto of progressive politics – all hype, no stability and an easy way to get people emotionally invested in something that will never pay out.

Lee went even further, framing this as a historical inflection point: “This is a moment in time where societies are shaped and new societies are built. We should be the ones who are shaping it.”

It’s a stirring line, designed to evoke empowerment. But let’s not kid ourselves – it’s also fear-based messaging. It implies that unless we cash in now, black Americans will be locked out of whatever “new society” is coming. That unless trillions are handed down from Washington, the future will be forged without us.

That’s not just misleading – it’s disempowering.

There is no grand conspiracy to erase black people from the future. But there is a very real danger in telling generations of young black men and women that their fate depends on what politicians in DC decide, instead of the choices they make every single day. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations – wrapped in the language of racial justice.

And here’s the real insult: the very government that oversaw slavery, enforced segregation and mismanaged public housing is now supposed to be the moral and economic savior of black America? The same system that failed us for generations is now being sold as our only hope? That’s not justice – it’s delusion.

And yet, every few years, right on schedule, the reparations debate gets revived – not because it’s politically viable, but because it’s politically useful. It galvanizes the base. It dominates the headlines. It keeps black Americans emotionally tethered to a party that has perfected the art of symbolic politics.

But what has that party delivered? Urban schools still fail. Black-owned businesses still struggle to access capital. The welfare state continues to discourage marriage and reward dependence. And violent crime is disproportionately concentrated in black neighborhoods run by the same leaders who claim to be our advocates.

This is the bait-and-switch of modern racial politics: trade in real empowerment for political theater. Promise trillions you can’t deliver while doing nothing to fix the structures that actually keep black communities stagnant. It’s not progress – it’s a trap.

What black America needs isn’t more apologies or empty resolutions. It needs a cultural restoration – one that prioritizes family, ownership, faith, discipline and education. We don’t need another round of grievance politics. We need to build.

That’s the real path to power. Not symbolic checks, but generational wealth. Not victimhood narratives, but legacy thinking. Not state-funded absolution, but community-led transformation.

If there’s a new society being built, we don’t need reparations to shape it. We need responsibility, resolve, and reality-based leadership. Because the future isn’t handed out – it’s earned.

And the people best positioned to lead black America forward aren’t those who exploit our pain for press conferences. They’re the ones building families, businesses and institutions despite the noise – quietly proving every day that we don’t need to be saved. We just need to be free.