The Pro-White Case for Reparations

How to triangulate America's racial divide

In this essay I’ll try to convince white conservatives and especially white nationalists to support slavery reparations for black people.

My goal here is to get people talking and start to create an intellectual infrastructure for the idea so someone can run with it in a future GOP primary.

My argument will not be based on white guilt, the idea that black people “deserve” reparations, or even the idea that this policy would benefit America as a whole.

I am making the narrow claim that reparations would be good for white people specifically, and in particular would benefit white people with a strong ingroup preference who are tired of being smeared as “racist.”

The basic idea would be to use a finite payment distributed as an annuity to every black person to negotiate a permanent end to affirmative action and DEI, while securing political cover for cracking down on crime and dismantling the welfare state.

The broader goal would be to permanently castrate antiwhite grievance in America and prevent something like 2020’s “racial reckoning” from ever happening again. By securing the right symbolic victories I believe we can make the race card powerless among even the squishiest white people.

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Imagine the year is 2033 and a ceremony is taking place at the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the passage of reparations.

All the leaders of Black America are there. Obviously the Obamas would take center stage, as would Jay-Z and Beyonce and Oprah. Behind them stand the leaders of the congressional black caucus. An emaciated Al Sharpton is wheeled out beside them by Lebron, who is followed by Colin Kaepernick and Kanye and Kyrie and Steph Curry and a bunch of other artists and sportsmen I couldn’t name.

The pageantry is turned up to eleven. President DeSantis emerges from behind a curtain, followed by the four biggest and blondest members of the Marine Color Guard, who wheel out a giant piece of parchment paper intentionally drawn up to look like the Declaration of Independence.

As Beyonce sings the Black National Anthem, these luminaries proceed to walk across a stage erected in front of Lincoln’s statue to sign their name to what is subsequently called the Declaration of Absolution.

This document forfeits any claim to affirmative action and similar privileges, and states that black people formally and permanently forgive white people for the crimes of slavery and Jim Crow.

Fireworks erupt and Beyonce closes the ceremony by singing the conventional wypipo national anthem. As the black leaders leave the stage, each of them shakes the hand of President DeSantis. Dave Chapelle causes a stir by being the only one who refuses to do this.

Over the next year an enormous Monument of Absolution is erected in D.C., the centerpiece of which is a marble statue of George Washington shaking hands with an onyx statue of MLK.

This monument has a museum dedicated to celebrating the newfound amity between blacks and whites, which features a lot of exhibits showing moments in history where our races came together (and quietly presents a subtextual narrative that whites have invested an enormous amount to help blacks over the years). It also has a cafe where you can buy white and black cookies.

The day the declaration was signed is made a national holiday and branded the National Day of Reconciliation. Across the country GOP leaders celebrate it by packing a bunch of college republicans onto a bus and taking them to a barbecue at a black church. Meanwhile a new $200 bill is issued bearing the image of both Obama and Trump.

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It’s fine if the above imagery makes you roll your eyes. You aren’t the target of this propaganda. The target is the sort of white person who is psychologically susceptible to claims that we haven’t done enough for blacks—affluent white women and very young whites of a more agreeable nature.

You probably think we already repaid black people for slavery through welfare or affirmative action. I agree. Hell, I'm sure we’d done so five times over by 1970.

It also doesn’t matter one whit. That kind of argument only works on high IQ and disagreeable people, or smart people who already trust you and will hear you out. It’s almost impossible to use econometrics to convince midwits excessively sensitive to social norms and “reading the room”, especially when said midwits are single women or under 25.

Even if you succeed, redpilling folks individually is like swimming against the tide. Every time some bleeding heart girl gets a fashy boyfriend or big girl job and abandons woke ideology she is replaced by an incoming college student or embittered divorcee with an axe to grind against white men.

These people vote based on literally nothing but their feelings, and 2020 shows that in the right circumstances it’s incredibly easy to manipulate the weakest among them with sentimental wambulance rhetoric.

This is a huge threat because once these people are activated they Maoistly bully everyone around them (especially other women and young people) into going with the flow and silencing all opposition. Back in 2020 many Zoomers were ostracized merely for *not posting* that black square thing on Instagram. Eventually women start pressuring their husbands and fathers and this causes major institutional change.

The kind of symbolism I propose above is calibrated to tug on the heartstrings of people like this and hammer home the message that We Have Done Enough until it’s part of our political religion, and black nationalism no longer has any pull among softer and gentler white people.

The goal is to make arguments for babying black people so absurd that moderate liberals will let conservatives be a lot harsher towards crime and a lot stingier in dealing with inner city poverty.

You might object that we tried this before, and that neither liberals nor black people today acknowledge the magnanimity of welfare or affirmative action, and that they will just want more in the future.

It’s certainly true that white moderates and squishy conservatives supported these policies as reparations at the time, but because they weren’t explicitly called that, it’s not effective to frame them this way in arguments with black nationalists and their allies. Sadly, most people are too stupid or simply too distracted by life to form coherent narratives about things like this unless you spell it out for them.

Crucially, we also never asked black people for anything in exchange in the past, and that is an integral part of what I propose. We need to get them to sign a “contract with White America” that we can forever point to when our wife starts nagging us to vote Democrat once the next Summer of Floyd rolls around.

The centerpiece of this contract will be that black leaders sign the Declaration of Absolution. Such a document will of course be purely symbolic, but I think it will be enormously powerful in liberating people of white guilt and destroying the power of the race card.

Perhaps the 95th percentile squish will be unmoved, but I am certain the 60th percentile squish—think the Michelle Obama-loving housewife in the Dallas suburbs or liberal college girl with a conservative boyfriend—will forevermore find black nationalism a lot more annoying, and become much less supportive of opening the prisons, affirmative action, etc.

These people want to seem generous and fairminded, but they also don’t want to be taken advantage of, and in a post-reparations world I think it would become trivially easy for conservatives to characterize any riots or rent-seeking as bad faith.

Reparations will also push some proportion of middle class black people—not a huge number in absolute terms, but enough to have an impact for sure—into not feeling like they have to vote Democrat against their own economic self interest because they need to support “the culture.”

Lots of wealthier and higher IQ black people resent inner city dysfunction as much as anyone, but would never say this openly because they don’t want to feel like an Uncle Tom, and when they do so are punished by black society writ large (see Bill Cosby’s famous Pound Cake Speech). Reparations would create a lot of space psychologically for these people to defect to the GOP and start openly reproaching their coethnics for bad behavior. Clearly on the margins this will have a positive impact for white people.

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So what would reparations look like in practice? And how much do we need to give?

Personally, I like the idea of tying it to “forty acres and a mule” to further the symbolism and establish the most realistic basis for agreement between blacks and whites. With that in mind let’s get autistic and do some math.

According to a-z-animals.com, the cost of a donkey can range from $135 to $20,000, but a “Large Standard Donkey” ranges from $500 to $1500. Let’s split the middle and go with $1000. General Sherman was pretty racist even for his time, and I doubt he was planning to give black people a top of the line “Poitou Donkey” for $20k.

For the forty acres there’s a lot to consider given that the cost of land varies so much by location, so I think we should just go with the simplest approach. According to agweb.com the average price value of U.S. cropland was $5460 per acre in 2023, so I’ll use that figure and multiply it by 40 to get $218,400

If you sum these values together you get a little under $219,400, but I say we make it $250k because a nice round number sounds a lot better, and inflation will take the number there anyway by the time anyone might attempt this.

According to the Pew Research Center there are about 48 million black people in America, so the total cost of this scheme would be just over $12 trillion.

Obviously this wouldn’t be distributed as a lump sum. That would break the bank, and a lot of money would just end up in the hands of Nike instead of creating any persistent wealth. In practice you would instead have it work like Social Security and pay out monthly as a life contingent annuity.

Every black person born prior to a certain date without a felony offense in their history would at the age of 18 receive a “reparations account” that starts at $250k and accumulates interest at the inflation rate.

Each month they’d receive a check from this account based on their age and life expectancy—the older you are, the more you get. They would also inherit into their own account any funds their parents don’t manage to withdraw before they die.

To estimate the actual budgetary impact of this approach we can do some back of the envelope calculations. The median U.S. black person is 32 years old and the black life expectancy is 76, so we’d be paying the average black person for about 44 years. This means the median payment per person per year would be $5700, which in aggregate comes to $272 billion per annum—roughly a fifth of what we spend on Social Security.

That’s not nothing, but it’s not an enormous amount either. It’s small enough that we can fund it without breaking the bank, but big enough to consistently annoy white people whenever they see it in budget statistics, which will have the positive externality of making whites even more conservative in their voting habits for a good 40-50 years. Annoying white people like this is a feature of reparations, not a bug.

There are also lots of creative things you can do with a program like this. Maybe let people move some additional proportion of their monthly benefit into a 401k or IRA, and allow loans against the fund for tuition, medical expenses, and down payments on a house. This would make the program more expensive, but also create a Singapore-style incentive for private wealth creation that induces black people to save, and could be used as as an example for future attempts to privatize social security.

More importantly, you can use reparations to restrain criminality.

In the hands of a GOP administration, reparations could be passed with the stipulation that any misdemeanor offense would freeze your account for three years, while a felony conviction would zero it out permanently.

By blocking criminals from receiving any money you will give the black underclass an enormous incentive not to engage in dysfunctional behavior. Meanwhile, you’d now have a lot more latitude from white liberals and the black middle class to crack down aggressively on any crime that *does* happen. By combining the carrot with the stick in this fashion we can start to make our cities nice again.

Reparations also will let you dismantle much of the welfare state. As Andrew Yang argued in 2020 and Milton Friedman claimed many decades ago, a UBI is much more efficient to administer than any welfare program. Reduce the distribution of food stamps etc. in situations where reparations checks make up the cost and then start firing lots of unneeded bureaucrats and social workers en masse. This will break the legs of the Democrat Party. Without this apparatus it will become a lot harder for them to politically mobilize black urbanites.

You will also see a lot of black people on the margins quitting their jobs at the airport or DMV or various low level bureaucracies to live off reparations in low cost housing situations. This may expand the black underclass in an unhelpful way, but these people probably won’t become criminals since they don’t want to lose their reparations. They will just sit around smoking weed and kind of disappear.

But by quitting their jobs, these people will be opening up decent paid and respectable positions for the white working class, and this will be a huge boon for all white people. Instead of a black single mom getting paid $70k to push papers around at the DMV, it will be a white single mom who today works as a waitress at Denny’s or does Doordash or is involved in some kind of sex work.

Even the wealthier among us will benefit from this, as going to get your driver’s license renewed or through airport security will become a lot more pleasant.

Meanwhile the operational culture of a lot of state bureaucracies will become more conservative and give the GOP a foothold in regaining control over institutions as some of these people inevitably rise through the ranks of the civil service.

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So how does something like this even get passed?

So long as Trump is around it won’t be. It can’t even enter the discourse, because right now the Orange Man sucks up all oxygen on the Right and nothing interesting can happen. But Trump won’t be around forever, and once he’s gone a vacuum will quickly emerge in which people will be looking for bold new ideas.

In that universe this idea is less inconceivable, but it would still have to come from a GOP candidate smart and creative enough to do something unconventional, who also doesn’t have any incentive to play it safe. But this candidate would still need to be kind of autistic and weird for them to even consider it. They’d also need to be somewhat “racist-coded”, and would definitely have to be a white male, otherwise the magic disappears and the policy will seem inherently squishy / cucked. So it couldn’t be someone like Vivek or Kari Lake pushing this.

With that in mind, I think Ron DeSantis would be the most likely to attempt and succeed at something like this, and could try to do so in 2028 (or 2032 if he takes Rick Scott’s Senate seat and can run against an unpopular populist Democrat elected during a backlash to Trump). DeSantis is a contrarian nerd who looks at things from different angles, and that’s what led him to take the right line on Covid in 2020-2021. I think he could be persuaded to take a similar line on reparations if he had the right white paper in front of him and the right strategic team. If a big name like Hanania endorsed this I think it would percolate through the conservative intellectual ecosystem and the ball would start rolling in a useful direction.

Of course Meatball got clobbered in 2024, but nobody could beat Trump this cycle, so you can’t count that against him. DeSantis’s problem wasn’t, as many claim, that he wasn’t “likable”. GOP voters don’t want likeable, they want *dominant*.

Newt Gingrich definitely wasn’t likable, but he got very far in 2012 because he could frequently dominate Romney and various CNN anchors in the same way DeSantis excels at. If he leans into this energy like he did against Haley in the last 2024 debate I think he will do fine.

But DeSantis certainly doesn’t have the insane charisma of Trump, and after his humiliation in 2024 needs a game changer to win in 2028 against Don Jr. or Vivek or whoever else runs. That’s what this policy could offer him.

The beauty of running on reparations is it gives you space to run *far* to the right of everyone else on issues of white identity. Crucially, it allows you to say the forbidden words White People instead of relying on dogwhistles like every other Republican.

You can talk about antiwhite crime, racism against whites, affirmative action being unfair to whites, and so on, and make all of these reasons to support reparations as a means of transactionally dismantling antiwhite policies.

Every time DeSantis says “White People” on stage it will make everyone uncomfortable. They’ll start to get awkward and clam up because he is breaking the rules, but in a way that makes it almost impossible to reproach him. Meatball’s autism will suddenly become a huge advantage, because it makes it easier for him to break social norms in a big brained way. The CNN anchors won’t know how to handle it.

Nobody can punch him from the left because he’s proposing reparations, and nobody can hit him from the right because he’s talking about white interests. It’s classic triangulation, and will give his candidacy a lot more energy than someone like Don Jr. or Vivek could ever bring to the table trying to resuscitate a hollow and zombified MAGA everyone will be bored of by then.

The general election will be easier than the primary if he can find the right black surrogates to build support for his candidacy. Kanye is an obvious one who will definitely support this, but people like Jay Z and Obama will definitely resist for obvious reasons, as will much of the black elite in media and academia. These people will correctly understand this policy as threatening their own power base, and they will discourage rank and file black people from supporting DeSantis.

But I don’t think this will work any more than neoconservative disdain for Trump stopped rank and file conservative Jews from loving him when he became super pro-Israel, or Mitt Romney’s efforts drove down his support with Mormons after he put a ton of conservative justices on SCOTUS. This kind of agitation had *some* impact for sure, but Trump still won Utah by a comfortable margin.

When you pit the elites of a group against their proles in such a powerful way there is only so much the elites can do to stop the bleeding. In practice you would see thousands of young black guys on TikTok yelling at old black people for not supporting DeSantis to secure the bag.

One potential threat to this strategy is that the Dems will just offer their own reparations scheme with double the benefit amount and no restrictions based on criminality. I don’t think this would work, since the GOP can just say to black people quite credibly that they will nuke any Democrat reparations bill, while the Dems would be unable to block any GOP reparations scheme without infuriating their base. DeSantis could easily mock such a tactic as lame and cynical.

I suspect that on election day the black youth would break overwhelmingly Republican while the older black vote stays loyally Dem, and the final black vote would be about 60-40 Dem. This would easily bury the Democrats in Philly and Detroit and secure the White House for DeSantis.

Once that happens the task is getting enough black leaders onboard to sign the Declaration of Absolution. This will likely require some protracted negotiations, so Meatball’s initial offer should probably be very punitive on crime with a lower total benefit, and this will give him room to negotiate.

Maybe Obama will agree to sign only if DeSantis raises it from $100k to $250k or something, so it makes sense to start small. But elder black pols are mostly reasonable and fine with transactional politics, and once you get their support they’ll pressure Lebron et al to follow suit.

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In the years immediately following reparations the Democrat Party will be terrified about having lost such a massive proportion of the black vote, while Republicans will arrogantly dance on their grave and talk about a permanent GOP majority. This will of course be overblown and coalitions will trend back towards 50-50, as is inevitable in First Past the Post systems.

The Dems will also find clever ways to accelerate this development. In the first weeks of reparations a few black guys in Alabama will have their accounts frozen for marijuana possession or something, and the Left will turn this into a national cause célèbre. Popular sentiment among most young black people will start to turn sharply against Republicans.

But if DeSantis holds firm I think he will retain 25-30% of the black vote and blacks will start to occupy roughly the same place in politics that Hispanics did in the 2010s. Black Republicans won’t just be a Key and Peele joke anymore, because conservative black people will pretty much always vote GOP, and race relations will benefit as a result. People will mostly stop talking about America balkanizing along racial lines.

Meanwhile, as white people grow up in a post-reparations world, midwit white kids entering college will have a *vastly* stronger intellectual immune system when encountering antiwhite professors who tell them the black man is oppressed in America. A lot of them will deeply resent that their black peers are just getting free money, while the rest of them will have gone to the Museum of Absolution as kids and will have plenty of arguments to rebut any antiwhite grievance they encounter.

As these kids graduate they will become journalists, educators, and high level bureaucrats. They will become the vanguard in reclaiming our most important institutions. Educational polarization will decrease and sanity on racial issues will start to prevail.

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The approach I outline above rests on somewhat accelerationist logic that a lot of conservative whites won’t like.

The basic idea is to approach white liberals like a parent who catches his kid smoking a cigarette and makes him smoke the entire pack so he never wants to smoke again.

A lot of you will probably hate this idea, and would rather continue hammering at affirmative action and DEI in a straightforward way while we have momentum on these issues.

Your approach will probably succeed in the short term, but I fear in the long term you’re just setting yourself up for a thermostatic backlash. You will inevitably “overreach” in the mind of white moderate normies and eventually we’ll just have another Summer of Floyd.

I’m going to publish a more substantive article about this soon, but to summarize:

It seems White Americans have an almost religious dynamic with black people where we periodically cycle between worshipping them and despising them, with brief periods of friendliness in between, like the late nineties and early aughts.

This dynamic prevents white people from pursuing our rational self interest in a consistent and diplomatically optimal way when negotiating with black people, and the resulting confusion and mistrust creates a lot of bad faith actors on both sides. Black people feel like we always break our promises and betray them, and white people feel like they always take advantage of us.

We need something incredibly powerful to break this cycle and “wipe the slate clean” in an almost metaphysical way. If you don’t break the cycle, you’ll just see “racially moderate” whites jumping flamboyantly between worship and resentment for the rest of eternity, and the dynamic will continue to present a dangerous “Fifth Column” that can be exploited by geopolitical rivals like the British Empire, USSR, and China.

In my opinion, any prowhite political impulse in America needs to center the goal of breaking this cycle above almost everything else. If you can’t destroy the systemic factors religiously empowering antiwhite grievance, you will at some point lose the white moderate and will need to start from square one.

By supporting reparations, prowhites can “square the circle” on this issue. Instead of being the Bad Cop in a dialectic with Thaddeus Stevens / Robin DeAngelo types—and only making impermanent progress whenever we’re proven right by riots or racial grifting—we can triangulate the existing discourse and deliberately hack the mind of the white moderate normie, permanently winning him to our side.

We’ll sacrifice a bit of treasure in the short term, but in doing so will permanently reshape the metapolitical contours of American racial discourse.

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Hopefully you found this argument interesting at the very least. I don’t expect to have convinced anyone entirely, but I’m sure at least some of you will be amenable to further discussions.

As mentioned, I will be publishing a more substantive exploration of the White-Black political dynamic described above in the coming days, and I think that will start to convince a lot more people.

((EDIT: This piece has since been published, and you can read it here))

In the meantime, please give me any initial pushback you have in the comments—I would love to hear your thoughts!