CARICOM is aware that the general taxation argument creates the problem of enslaved people’s descendants funding their own reparations. The campaign’s response has been to suggest that people of colour should be exempt from any reparations levy. This “solution” creates a worse problem than the one it solves.
A levy that exempts people of colour is a racially discriminatory tax. CARICOM advocates who have pushed for this exemption have apparently not considered, or have chosen not to acknowledge, that they are proposing exactly the kind of racial classification that equality law exists to prevent. They are, in the name of racial justice, proposing a mechanism that is itself a form of racial discrimination.
The irony is complete. The movement that draws its moral authority from the wrongness of racial discrimination is proposing a remedy that requires racial discrimination to implement. This is not a minor technical problem. It is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the reparations proposal.
