Making Reparations Work

I’m a 78-year-old white man. Ever since I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ path-breaking 2014 essay in The Atlantic, I’ve been thinking about reparations and how to make them work.

Why? Because I think our society and our democracy are sick. And I think the root cause is failure to deal effectively with four centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, racial division and discrimination. Over our nation’s history, and even today, innumerable white and other non-Black people have exploited and are exploiting these social evils for financial and political gain.

Think about that. The Demagogue—unquestionably the most evil and twisted character of any American president—could still win again. He might take our democracy down with a “culture war” most, if not all, of which is based on “race.” The driving force of his demagoguery relies partly on economics: the insanity of leaders’ failure to note that selling 60,000 factories offshore also sold jobs, dignity, family support, the reliability of supply chains, and progress in science and engineering. But a lot of it is also based on the insane notion that people who (and whose ancestors) have been getting the short end of the stick for four centuries are now getting too much, and that the alleged unfairness of it all is hurting the rest of us.

I won’t try to refute that nonsense analytically. It’s self-evidently wrong, factually, economically, historically, socially and scientifically. It’s a lie put forth by evil men to cement their advantages, dupe the rubes, and subvert our democracy.

But I will say this. For the last several years, I’ve been contributing more to political candidates and causes than I ever have before. In the last presidential election cycle alone, I contributed enough to buy a small car.

Why do this, when I’m nearing the end of my life and, although comfortably retired, I’m by no means rich? I think our great nation is sick and in crisis. I would like to know, before I leave this world, that it has a chance to survive the crisis and realize its potential. I would be happy to pay an equivalent amount in taxes—say, five thousand or so a year, for the rest of my life—to ensure that outcome.

But how can we best use the money? Read on.

1. The Goal. In my mind, the goal of reparations is clear and limited. We must mend the demonstrable consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, repression, discrimination and racism, to living and future descendants of victims. And we must do so as quickly and effectively as possible.

The goal is not to cure past harm. That’s impossible, if only because tens of millions of those harmed are already dead and past caring. Even for those still living, we have no time machine to cure their past harm, and trying to assess it quantitatively would be wasted effort. (I also believe it would be impossible to achieve any accurate measure of past harm; but that’s another story.)

The goal is certainly not to cure white guilt, if only because some of that guilt is well deserved. The goal is to cure our sick society, as quickly as humanly possible. Once we do that, white guilt will recede, or will have receded, of its own accord.

2. The Measure. How can we measure how sick our society is? When a patient is sick, we turn to practical, scientific means. We take temperature. We take blood samples. We make a white blood count. We assess the quantity and balance of proteins, enzymes and other components of blood. We ask the patient about nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, pains in extremities, “brain fog” and other practical symptoms.

We know now that, regardless of his owning slaves, our hypocritical Founder Thomas Jefferson was right in the most important thing he ever wrote. He left us with the simple message that “all . . . are created equal.” (He left out women, but now we know better.)

Science tells us that all of us are 99.9% identical in our DNA, which determines our genetic heredity. Science only developed to this knowledge after we Americans had passed our key civil rights laws in the mid-1960s. So our moral understanding preceded the scientific.

But now we know, as well as we can know anything in science, that there is no such real thing as “race.” At least there was and is nothing with greater meaning than minor differences in personal appearance. Like the infamous “one-drop” rule, “race” was and is a fiction, invented for the sole purpose of keeping human beings and their progeny as property, or in subservient positions. It was and is an excuse for discrimination and exploitation, nothing more.

“Race” was a fiction, developed and refined over generations, for the purpose of perpetuating and justifying slavery and later exploitation. We know now that the color of one’s skin, the width of one’s nose or lips, the shape of one’s eyelids, and all the other indicators of “race” have no more cause-and-effect influence on a person’s intelligence, creativity or character than hair color, eye color, height, or body-mass index.

But unlike “race,” racism is as real as war and famine. So the question before us is: how can we cure the disease of pervasive and institutional racism and its many social, political and economic consequences? How can we even measure the extent of the disease and its cure?

The answer, as in medicine, is that we measure the consequences. We measure the known disparities between people who self-identify as Black and other people in income, wealth, health, family net worth, per-capita incarceration rates, education, housing, nutrition, neighborhood pollution, access to healthy food and health care, and longevity. When objective measures of these real disparities among the roughly one-eighth of us that so self-identify fall below the noise levels of rational measurements, we can declare ourselves “cured” as a nation. We have a long way to go.

3. The means. Understanding what a “cure” means gets us halfway to understanding how to effect the cure. We must mend the consequences of four centuries of terrible, systematic mistreatment of people (and their ancestors) who now amount to one of every eight of us.

Just stating that goal makes one thing clear. We are not going to do this with a single grant of money, let alone to people who have given little or no thought to how to spend it.

It took us four centuries to get here. Even if you subtract the lean twelve years of Reconstruction and all the sixty or so years since passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid 1960s, that’s nearly 330 years of going in the wrong direction. So we’re not going to fix this overnight. If we’re serious about curing the patient, we’re going to need the stamina for a work of decades, maybe even half a century.

And please don’t cite the reparations for Japanese Internment as a counterexample. Although those reparations were also well deserved, their precise means was a mistake. Some Japanese-Americans lost businesses, land and assets acquired and built over a lifetime. Some, especially the young, lost only time. So the “one size fits all” amount was an insult to some and a windfall to others.

While teaching law in Hawaii, I met a young man of Japanese descent. His father had spent his life building a Zen Buddhist temple and monastery in a beautiful valley on the Windward Side of Oahu. He had attracted and kept a congregation to fill them. Then the father had lost this property and his congregation due to his Internment. His son spent over a decade trying to recover the land through legal action. In this case, the $20,000 “reparation” was no more than a down payment of compensation for an horrendous loss.

As horrible as it was, the Internment lasted, at most, four years. Three centuries of systematic mistreatment is another story altogether. To fix that will take a long time and sustained effort. No serious effort can come in a single decade, let alone a single year. And taking the necessary time will have a coincidental benefit: it’s easier to pay a big bill in installments. The nation of Germany has set an example by paying a total of 80 billion Euros—over $ 85 billion—to Holocaust survivors over a period of 70 years.

4. The Plan. Money alone is not the answer. There must be a plan. If money is given to people with no plan, some will inevitably use it unwisely. They will buy fancy cars and clothes, or (as did my impecunious sister after receiving a legal settlement) go on a cruise. The right wing will demagogue this incessantly, and reparations will lose whatever little political support outside the victims’ communities they may enjoy.

So there must be a plan. To effect a real cure of our sickness, there must be thousands of individual plans, funded carefully and intelligently over decades. In order to have such plans, there must be: (1) an animating mechanism; and (2) a means of funding them.

The animating mechanism, I think, is simple: put Black people in charge. Here the progress of our armed forces under President Biden is exemplary. After 75 years, Harry Truman’s 1948 desegregation of our armed forces has produced a true color-blind meritocracy. Just recently, that meritocracy has given us two superbly qualified supreme military leaders, former General Lloyd J. Austen III as Secretary of Defense, and Charles Q. Brown Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nominee. Both are Black.

As a cure for right-wing extremism and white supremacy in our armed forces, this leadership structure is sheer genius. (I have no inside knowledge whether this was part of its purpose; I write only of obvious cause and effect.) What better way to cause extremists and white supremacists to leave our armed forces voluntarily, of their own twisted accord, without interminable disputes among lesser leadership, or (as is our national wont) interminable litigation?

So can we translate this stroke of genius and real progress from our armed forces to our civilian economy? I think so. The key is much the same: make many more smart and skilled Black people leaders by giving them capital to start businesses, or simply to improve the condition and prospects of themselves and/or their families.

Here are just a few examples of how this might work:

A group of Black developers creates a gated community on a desirable hill near town, with award-winning housing design, plenty of open space, bicycle and pedestrian paths, good local restaurants, and top-notch healthy grocery stores, all within walking distance of the homes. To promote racial harmony, they impose a requirement to “pass” a race-neutral test for minimal unconscious bias. The group also funds low-polluting public transportation to where the jobs are.

A Black entrepreneur opens a healthy restaurant or grocery store, or both, in a so-called “food desert.”

A Black entrepreneurial educator opens a private school dedicated to rigor and equality, in a location accessible to poor people who need them.

A Black-led construction company conceives a beautiful and climate-friendly means for re-connecting Black and other parts of a city divided by a polluting highway.

A Black family whose child is gifted, but for some reason cannot get scholarship money, gets a grant to attend a private preparatory school, or an Ivy League or other “elite” college.

Black non-profit entrepreneurs form a private NGO to get ghetto kids employed in trades or into college, to provide health care or advice in poor communities, or to advance voter education and empowerment in the ghetto.

A Black family whose parent or parents have good jobs gets a grant to help the family move out of the ghetto and closer to the parents’ work.

Black parents with a sick kid get a grant to travel to and access the nation’s best health care for the kid’s particular condition.

(In all these examples, I use the term Black as a generic adjective, meaning people who self-identify as such. Whether the program would limit reparations to descendants of slaves or take a broader approach would be a matter for discussion and debate. But I think the program’s leaders, at least, should be distinguished descendants of slaves. That would emphasize the goal: to erase the long shadow of slavery and the centuries-long failure to expunge its consequences.)

These examples are reasons why, in an earlier essay, I suggested that reparations be not lump-sum, single-time grants, but a national program of applied-for grants, to be used for curing our national disease, administered by a distinguished panel of descendants of slaves. The panel, including educators, economists, health experts, and scientists, could accept applications for grants and fund those most likely to help cure our national disease. All together, the grants would form not just “a plan,” but the thousands of small plans needed to cure a disease four centuries in the making.

In my earlier essay, I also suggested that the distinguished panel itself decide when to end the program when the grants began to look a bit like the white privilege they are supposed to cure. But on further reflection, I now think that criterion is both insufficient and too subjective. The panel should be authorized and required to end the program when key national objective measures of inequality among the eighth of our population hobbled by four centuries of mistreatment—such as income, net worth, housing value, educational achievement, etc.— reach rough parity with the same objective measures for the rest of us.

What “rough parity” means and how it should be measured the governing legislation should spell out. But science and quantitative measures, not subjectivity, should be the test of a cure.

With good will and some money, we can do this. It won’t be cheap, and it won’t happen overnight. But we can never succeed unless we start. If we can truly put “culture wars” behind us, we can cure the lingering disease of our Founding, cage the kind of demagoguery that helped kill Rome, and reach for Mars and the stars. We can also defang the cause of the Mother of all American Culture Wars: racism against Black people based on the biologically meaningless but socially devastating concept of “race.”


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