Diatribes of Jay: Reparations: Why, to Whom, How Much and for How Long?

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Why?
To Whom?
How Much?
For How Long?
Conclusion

Slavery’s long shadow still darkens Americans’ days. As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The notion of compensating people still living under that shadow is gaining traction. A famous article in The Atlantic Magazine by Ta-Nehisi Coates may have kicked off the current flurry of interest. But now interest in reparations has grown well beyond mere academic and intellectual speculation. It has become a factor in the Democratic presidential primaries.

This essay avoids abstract moral and philosophical speculation. Instead, it takes a pragmatic approach. After stating the reasons for reparations in business terms, it discusses how, to whom and when they could be best made. Rather than try to undo past wrongs—a literal impossibility, since all American slaves are long dead—reparations should remove as much of that lasting shadow as possible in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Why? As Calvin Coolidge once said, “The business of America is business.” So let’s look at reparations as a business matter. Let’s discuss them in the language of business and capitalism, that is, the language now used for most economic and political problems in our nation.

The Emancipation Proclamation freed some 3.9 million slaves. They and their ancestors, going back about ten generations, had built a lot of infrastructure. They had cleared forests for towns and fields, built homes, plantations and common buildings, cleared swamps, forged trails through the wilderness, and helped build the roads and canals that knit together what eventually became today’s United States. They also had done the farming and plantation scut work—the cooking, cleaning, planting, sowing and tending of farm animals—needed to keep a whole region of our nation alive.

Slaves helped build our nation’s most famous monuments and public places. These include the Capitol, the White House, and Jefferson’s grand home, his Monticello. The exact proportion of the slaves’ contribution has been lost in the mists of time, but no one doubts it was substantial.

There’s also a subtler way in which the slaves helped build our nation. Many of our Founders owned slaves. George Washington, who organized our Revolutionary forces and planned our War of Independence, owned 300. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote our Declaration of Independence and much of the Constitution, owned 175. James Madison, whom historians generally credit (with Jefferson) for co-authoring most of the Constitution, owned several dozen.

These men lived like European aristocrats on land that, not long before, had been untamed wilderness. Who gave them the leisure to study the history of Europe, ancient Rome and ancient Greece, to travel abroad, to think great thoughts, and to plan the foundations of a new democracy? Their slaves did.

The slaves didn’t do the thinking or the writing, but they made it possible. Would Jefferson, Madison and Washington, among others, have had the time and energy to learn what they knew and to plan our nation and write its Founding documents, after coming home dog tired from the hunt or the fields every day?

Few things are so fundamental to every human society, and to every capitalist economy, as payment for labor. Hired labor is the legal, economic and practical means by which modern humans realize our species’ chief evolutionary-biological advantage: our ability to cooperate. It’s also the foundation of capitalism, our nation’s durable economic system.

But the slaves never got paid. Their labor was stolen. For each individual slave, the theft was a lifelong injustice. For slaves as a class, it lasted from the first landfall of slaves in America in 1619, in Jamestown, until the slaves’ Emancipation in 1865. That’s 246 years.

Two wrongs inhere in these facts. A whole class of people, eventually defined by race, was robbed of their pay. And our Founders received an unjust windfall that broke every rule of capitalism. Eventually, everyone living in the United States today got the benefit of that windfall.

The wrong inheres in both the theft of labor and the unearned windfall to every living American. The debt will continue to grow, by interest, inflation and practical consequences, until it’s paid.

The slaves are long dead, so we can’t pay them what we owe. But many—although not all—of their descendants live under slavery’s long shadow: racism and discrimination. So why not compensate the descendants? Why not indeed, when doing so might improve our social cohesion and reduce conflict, bring millions out of poverty and misery, and boost our economy by freeing millions to use all of their innate talents?

That, in a nutshell, is the business case for reparations. It has little to do with the finer points of moral philosophy or historical justice. It simply recognizes that a debt unpaid can fester forever, while paying the debt, even if only partially and belatedly, can boost our economy, encourage further labor and industry, foster social harmony, and meld all us Americans into one unbreakable, indivisible people at last.

To Whom? Once you reach the conclusion that some reparations are due, a knotty question arises. Who should get them?

In my view, advocates for reparations have paid far too little attention to this central question. Much, although not all, of the opposition to reparations comes from invidious assumptions about who will get them and under what circumstances. If we give them to the wrong people in the wrong way, reparations could grant undeserved windfalls.

Since the whole push for reparations rests on the evil of nearly two and a half centuries of slavery and another century of Jim Crow and its aftermath, one simple condition seems appropriate. Those who get reparations should be descendants of slaves. People like former President Obama, whose father descended from a Kenyan tribal leader, should not be eligible.

While appropriate, this condition takes us only so far. Tougher questions arise immediately. Should every descendant of slaves get reparations, and, if so, should each get the same amount?

Here, in my view, the precedent of reparations for the Japanese Internment is misguided. Those reparations were for only four years of unjust and unlawful confinement, not the theft of a lifetime of labor under harsh conditions often amounting to torture.

Yet even for the Interned Japanese, a one-size-fits-all approach, in retrospect, seems unjust and inappropriate. Some Internees, such as pre-teens and retired grandparents, lost mostly time: four or fewer years of confinement. Others lost homes, farms, and businesses they had spent their whole lives building. Some lost the fruits of their initiative and labor during the primes of their lives: assets never to be recovered. To assume that all lost equally was to lump all Internees together—an approach that itself smacks of racism.

For two reasons, a more nuanced and specific approach is even more vital for the descendants of slaves. First, there are many more of them: the descendants, after 1.5 centuries, of 3.9 million people, as compared to “more than 100,000” compensated Internees. Second, consequential injuries and injustices, amplified over generations, were often much greater for slaves and their descendants than for unjustly Interned citizens of Japanese descent.

Regardless of the breadth and depth of their suffering from racism, not all descendants of slaves deserve reparations. For example, it would be difficult to justify—let alone generate political support for—giving reparations to highly successful descendants of slaves like Denzel Washington or Oprah Winfrey. And if any individual treated reparations as a windfall, to buy things like fancy cars or ocean cruises, that would sour the public on the whole idea of reparations. The old demagogic image of the “welfare queen” would surely raise its ugly head again.

So there seems to be no escape from granting and calibrating reparations individually, person by person. Only in this way can justice be done and public support for reparations be sustained.

I think individual descendants of slaves should have to apply for reparations. That way, those who didn’t want them or didn’t think they deserved them would eliminate themselves from consideration without government involvement or red tape. (Non-profit organizations could help less-well-educated people apply, while better-educated ones could apply for grants to form and run those non-profit organizations.)

Among those who applied for reparations, something like the 9/11 Commission, which was organized to compensate for injuries from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, could decide whether to grant them and, if so, the amount. This Reparations Commission could consist of five well-respected people— all prominent descendants of slaves themselves—who would have strong motivation to conserve a limited reparations fund and make the reparations count.

Two criteria, it seems to me, should govern any such Commission in making grants. First, they should try to gauge the extent to which claimed suffering and disadvantage of each applicant derived from racism and other consequences of slavery, rather than lack of initiative or just bad luck. In other words, they should apply a criterion of justifiable need.

Second and more important, they should judge the extent to which each grant of reparations would help reverse the consequences of slavery. A grant could do so, for example, by boosting applicants out of the cycle of poverty, despair and hopelessness that racism and cumulative economic disadvantage have imposed on descendants of slaves, or simply by helping them get out of the ghetto. A grant could also do so by allowing grantees to contribute to the general economy, or to work to erase slavery’s long shadow directly by working for the public good, for example, in a non-profit.

This second point, in my view, is the key to making reparations work. Recipients of reparations should have a useful purpose for the money they ask for, and their applications should specify and elaborate it. The useful purpose should be one that provides a visible benefit, if only by insuring one more durable entrant into America’s middle class.

Specific purposes could be as varied as starting a business, going to college or a private school, helping a child or relative receive medical treatment or go to school, moving a family out of a ghetto, or helping a family afford health insurance. Before making a grant, the Commission should have some evidence that the purpose is sincere and that the grant’s use for it will have a good chance of success.

Confining grants to these conditions will increase the likelihood that they will actually help remove racism’s long shadow. It will also increase public support for the reparations program generally, as successful uses of grants to turn lives around produce stories that encourage public support.

How Much? How easy it is to calibrate the size of each grant depends upon the goal. If the criterion is compensating for past harm, quantification will be hard. Although the sting and injury of racism and discrimination are real, they’re not easy to quantify. Nor are all the slings and arrows of daily prejudice and discrimination duly recorded. In any event, existing laws and institutions allow victims of certain types of discrimination to be made whole. Quantifying grants will be much easier if the criterion is what’s needed to get a specific job done.

If a kid who has the test scores and grades to get into Yale or Harvard can’t possibly afford to do so, then the amount would be whatever is necessary to give her or him a “full ride,” after Yale’s or Harvard’s own available resources have been exhausted. If a woman wants to start a business and has a reasonable plan, the grant would be enough to fund the start-up after voluntary private investment is exhausted. If a person with proper training wants to start a non-profit to discourage descendants of slaves from taking drugs, falling into violence, or dropping out of school, the amount would be whatever it takes to let the applicant do the job and still live a middle-class life, taking voluntary contributions and other grants into account.

In every case, the amount of a grant of reparations would be that needed to achieve a particular goal of boosting an individual or family out of the ghetto, providing a wider public benefit, or otherwise pushing back the shadow of slavery. The key point is that these results be achieved by the grantee’s own efforts. The means would be the proverbial dream of grantors of money: giving recipients fishing rods instead of fish.

Ultimately, the goal would be to bring a critical mass of ordinary descendants of slaves irrevocably into the middle class, with respectable and durable careers, home ownership, and average net worth, and therefore a stake in the United States of America comparable to that of the average white citizen.

The goal would not be to erase racism—the long shadow of slavery—all at once. That would be a much harder task. Instead the goal would be to give descendants of slaves, as a group, a “head start” belated, but big enough and for enough people, to insure the eventual banishment of slavery’s long shadow.

For How Long? Slavery in America lasted 246 years. That’s just shy of two and a half centuries. After Abolition, there were a couple of decades of hope, followed by some three-quarters of a century of white terror, lynchings, and Jim Crow—a regime of legalized oppression formalized in law. Many descendants of slaves didn’t have equal rights to vote and to travel, even in theory, until Lyndon Johnson rammed through the two civil rights acts in the mid-1960s.

That’s just half a century ago. If we still recognize our troops’ victory and sacrifice at Normandy every year, we ought to recall this sordid history as well. The formalized ending of the legalized oppression of Jim Crow came even more recently than D-Day. And, as described below, further extra-legal and semi-legal oppression continued right up to today.

Furthermore, the foundations of today’s racism were the lies and myths that white masters invented as “necessities” of slavery. The lie of blacks’ “inferiority” was “justification” for treating human beings as no true Christian ought to treat another person. The “one drop” rule—that a person with “one drop” of “black” blood is completely and irrevocably “black”—was not just utter scientific and genetic nonsense. It was deliberately designed to allow white masters to keep and augment their “property” with the issue of their own and other white men’s rapes of female slaves.

The crowning “glory” of lies was the one that blacks were intellectually “inferior” when white masters had rules forbidding their improvement. Among these rules were actual laws forbidding anyone from teaching black people how to read and write. Keep them from learning and call them “inferior” to justify “owning” them and keeping them ignorant and docile; that was the logic of slavery.

The consequences of these lies and injustices have rolled down the centuries of history. So slavery’s long shadow darkens all our lives today. It casts darkness on the terrible conditions of the ghettos and in repeatedly verified gaps between blacks and whites in education, home ownership, net worth, and income. The notion that all the disparities in treatment and their inevitable consequences in outcomes suddenly disappeared with Emancipation or the Civil Rights Acts would be laughable if it were not so tragically misguided.

However honest our will and profound our efforts, we simply cannot abolish the consequences of centuries of oppression overnight. That’s yet one more reason not to make reparations a one-time-only or one-size-fits-all affair. If we are really to do the job and bring most or all of slavery’s descendants into the American mainstream, where they belong, it will take perhaps a generation, at least a decade.

There are other reasons to make reparations a long-lasting program, too. First, if they are to do the job and provide more than token compensation, reparations are going to cost a lot of money. As with any “big ticket” item, it’s easier to swallow the cost in installments.

Second, as the program becomes successful in lifting a critical mass of people out of poverty and into positions of achievement, wealth and prestige, it will garner increasing public support, albeit increasing opposition from some. Support for the program will inevitably wax and wane with changes in the times, the economy and political winds. A longer-lasting program would better survive the vicissitudes of time and so have a better chance of doing durable good.

For me, the question is not how long the program should last, but when it should end. It should not end until it has done the job, until the long shadow of racism has substantially receded or vanished entirely. It should not end until the surprise and (for some) the chagrin of a “first” like Barack Obama’s presidency have faded, and the sight of “black” people in positions of power, prestige and prosperity becomes accepted and routine.

I would leave it up to Reparations Commission and its five Commissioners descended from slaves to determine when the program has fulfilled it purpose. They, more than anyone, would know when a critical mass of descendants of slaves will have risen above the shadow of slavery and assumed the rightful position of a racial group that has done so much to build America for so little reward. They would also know when the program had outlived its usefulness and had become a source of undeserved privilege, just like the vile systems it will have replaced, and so a source of justifiable resentment.

* * *
In the heady days of Reconstruction, Congress passed a second “Freedman’s Act.” It would have given every family of freed slaves forty acres of arable land and a mule to plow them. But Andrew Johnson, who became president after a Southerner assassinated Abraham Lincoln, vetoed the bill. Congress lacked the votes to override his veto. (In those days, in striking contrast to today, it was Republicans who sought to do justice and complete the job of renewal that the brutal Civil War had merely begun.)

If that law had passed, and if the just-freed slaves had gotten the prescribed early economic head start, we would have had a very different United States of America today. We would have had something resembling a fair test of what freed slaves and their descendants could have done with genuine legal equality and a real hand up.

But that never happened. A compromise in the hotly disputed presidential election of 1876 resulted in the winner, Rutherford B. Hayes, pulling federal troops out of the South in 1877. That ended Reconstruction, after only twelve years.

White terror under the Ku Klux Klan and the Night Riders followed. Then came poll taxes, voting tests and other forms of disenfranchisement. The Jim Crow laws followed, with “whites only” signs on everything from drinking fountains and bathrooms to public hotels and restaurants. Segregation of schools lasted long after 1954, when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, because its decision prescribed integration with “all deliberate speed.”

Two decades after Brown came political struggles over school busing—a measure designed to achieve genuine integration in schools after widespread failure of other means. That measure, too, soon failed, mostly due to whites’ resistance. Then came today’s police killings and the return of systematic and deliberate disenfranchisement, at least in the South. The means were gerrymandered voting districts and “black“ precincts marred by closed polling stations, inordinately long lines, and posters announcing elections on the wrong days. The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, in effect blessed this disenfranchisement.

So except for the brief twelve years of Reconstruction (1865-1877), a couple of decades of school busing after Brown, and some genuine efforts to legalize equality after the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s, our government (especially the Southern states) has permitted—and sometimes practiced—systematic oppression of slaves and their descendants for all but a mere half-century since whites first brought slaves to America in 1619. Even with unjustifiably generous accounting for the brief periods of light and hope, that’s 350 years of near-continuous oppression. The oppression continues under Trump today.

No other group has experienced such longstanding, durable and systematic oppression in the United States. The comparison is not even close. The Irish, the Italians, the Catholics, the Germans, the Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese and (today) the (East) Indians—all eventually all found their way to acceptance and real equality. Homosexuals got the right to marry. But the descendants of slaves as a group (with notable exceptions!) remain on the margins of society, “protected” in theory by the Constitution but in practice by little else.

Violence and terror have always been part of their oppression. It’s not been just the Ku Klux Klan, the Night Riders, the lynchings and (today) the routine manhandling and more-than-occasional killings by the police. The post-slavery violence began with what may have been the most consequential act of violence in human history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Isn’t it now time to put all this dismal history firmly behind us? Isn’t it time to make an honest effort to erase the long shadow of slavery, once and for all? We can do that in the only way—the usual way—of making amends and forcing change in a capitalist society, with money. Let’s begin at last.

Footnote: There is an argument that other people, not descendants of slaves, also deserve reparations. Although not its original victims, they are “collateral damage” of racism. White people who harbor prejudice and don’t know their ancestry treat them just like descendants of slaves, in employment, in business and in everyday life.

But in my view the difficulties of parsing the nuances of their disadvantages and their rightful compensation, plus the strong political opposition that compensating them will provoke, makes broadening the sweep of reparations unwise. Reparations will attract more support and succeed better if they don’t lose their principal focus: paying the long-unpaid wages of our nation’s “original sin” of slavery.

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Diatribes of Jay

07 July 2019

Reparations: Why, to Whom, How Much and for How Long?

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