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Reparations for Slavery in the US

23:54 / 21.08.01

The upcoming UN conference on racism brings the subject of reparations for slavery to the fore once again. Randall Robinson's long-threatened suit against the U.S. government is inching closer to reality. Over in the pages of The New Republic, John MacWhorter is arguing that the Great Society programs implemented of the 1960s have been functioning as a sort of de facto reparations program for 35 years now.

The dialogue is open, but the questions are many. What form would reparations take? Cash? The "forty acres and a mule" proposed to 40,000 former slaves by the Freedmen’s Bureau under order of General Sherman—an offer later rescinded by president Andrew Johnson? (Estimated 2001 cash value of 40 acres + 1 mule = about $150, 000).

Who should pay? The US Government? The descendents of slaveholders? The corporate descendants of the financial entities directly involved in the slave trade?

Who would benefit? All African-Americans? Direct descendants of the original 40,000 who were to benefit under the Freedmen's Bureau? The governments of the West African nations from which most slaves were taken?

And the most important question: Why are reparations a good thing? They'd be a salve to the white conscience, maybe—but for the people on the ground, African-Americans, what, if anything, would reparations change?

Thoughts?

02:04 / 22.08.01

Personally i think reparations are a great idea. If I owned a slave I think he should get some sort of settlement for what I subjected him to....OH..wait a minute I never owned a slave. I think only those people who are alive today and who owned slaves should pay a settlement to the slaves they had...if the slaves are alive today. Otherwise I dispute the concept of having my tax dollars (ok, so Im canadian and not american so I dont think it applies to me..(we had the railroad (you're welcome)but im imagining myself in their position) pay for the evil that someone else did to someone else who is dead.

04:53 / 22.08.01

I think if there's an outstanding agreement and direct complaint that hasn't been resolved (by those who are alive), it should be figured out...but no one has the right to stand in and take or place accountability for actions they themselves have not been personally involved in.

Shouldn't all people have this right...the jews of the holocaust, the ill-treated immigrants of the latest era, everyone. Anyways, all people of priviledge today had to come into power at one point in time through the available means. Power struggle was never intimate...uncountable amounts of people have been, are, and will be mistreated to this effect.

If this is due process, I feel that the actions that my people face should be accounted for as well. My people of course being all people, not just the kind that I came from.

05:54 / 22.08.01

But what about the fact that both nations and corporations which did profit from slavery continue to exist? The people who did are dead (even if their descendants reap the benefits), but the institutions aren't, necessarily. If a corporation's wealth is based on a foundation of slave labour, isn't there a case that they should pay some sort of reparations?

08:16 / 22.08.01

Agreed - that's the issue - not that we are responsible for the actions perpetrated upon slaves and those oppressed by our people in the past, but that we may nonetheless have benefitted from their sacrifices.

However, this is almost impossible to quantify. Do you limit reparations for slavery to those who are descended from slaves? What about those with only one parent who was a slave? What about those who are of mixed parentage - slave / oppressor? What about those people who found their lives adversely affected by the history of slavery but who were not slaves? Like the African Americans who are relatively recent arrivals, but who find themselves living in an environment of racial distrust and are unable to work? And what about those who have been lucky or successful enough to become high earning descendants? Do they get given cash or reparations as well. It's easier with the holocaust, because it's more recent and there are more readily identifiable amounts of property, lineage
and cause and effect. But still...

I don't know that there is an easy answer to all of this - except to institute a policy that says that it is fundamental to the responsibilities of the American state to provide extra advantages to the disenfranchised. And that means taxation for the rest of us. Which is something you'll NEVER get the Republicans to agree to, and more to the point, MAY not be in the best interests of getting a country out of recession...

10:12 / 22.08.01

quote:Originally posted by Tom Coates:
I don't know that there is an easy answer to all of this - except to institute a policy that says that it is fundamental to the responsibilities of the American state to provide extra advantages to the disenfranchised.Hence the argument that the aforementioned "Great Society" programs put in place under Lyndon Johnson (welfare, Affirmative Action, mandatory nondiscriminatory housing practices, et cetera) have been doing the job of reparations without calling it reparations...

deletia

10:51 / 22.08.01

On a slight sidestep, I was talkign to a Jewish friend the other day, who commented that he found the latest Volkswagen advert (the thesis of which is that people have all sorts of good-luck totems in their cars, but people who drive VWs don't need any) has as one of the totems a menorah and star of David.

Given that Volkswagen profiteered from slave labour in Nazi Germany, he contended that it was a little cheeky.

Thoughts?

deletia

10:53 / 22.08.01

quote:Originally posted by Jack Fear:
Hence the argument that the aforementioned "Great Society" programs put in place under Lyndon Johnson (welfare, Affirmative Action, mandatory nondiscriminatory housing practices, et cetera) have been doing the job of reparations without calling it reparations...

Yeah. But the pendulum has swung too far. Now that pretty much every CEO of every major American and European corporation is black, increasingly the impossibility of ambition in a black man's world is creating a culture of despair in the white "ghettoes" - the Hamptons, Beverly Hills, Richmond - where the gun is law.

12:11 / 22.08.01

One thing I've thought for a long time is that the U.S. has never really healed from the effects of slavery. I mean there's plenty of folks who'll go on about the Holocaust and British Imperialism while ignoring the bad effects for both blacks and whites due to slavery.

At the very least, I think the discussion on whether reparations are necessary opens a dialogue about slavery in America.

The Great Society argument put forth by the New Republic seems like such a typical Republican argument to me. So much of the programs put forth by the Great Society era have been stripped and chipped away. Head Start has lost massive amounts of funding, and of course Welfare and Aid to Women and Children has been wonderfully "reformed." Affirmative action is also being reformed and eliminated. That argument sounds completely bogus.

Having lived in a city that's so segregated my friends and I jokingly refer to it as "Little South Africa," a city where it appears over 90% of the low-wage workers are black, I think some sort of action is needed.

How much? And who should pay? Rough one. My relatives were not even in the U.S. at the time of slavery. And yet, as an American I do feel a responsibility to those ancestors. Or to paraphrase Barbara Kingsolver, "We know that what the white man has done to the black man is horrible. So now what do we do?"

12:26 / 22.08.01

quote: At the very least, I think the discussion on whether reparations are necessary opens a dialogue about slavery in America.

But is this a healing process? The truisms of history are that if you don't remember the past you are bound to repeat it, but the opposite also follows - that if you never let the past die then you'll never get past it.

One of the things to ask yourself is at what stage the issue of slavery ceases to be an issue. At what point can you say that it is no longer relevant to socio-political relations? Gay people have issues like this as well - as oppression in various countries around the world gradually ebbs, the relevance of our own history of trauma should ebb along with it. Or should it?

Seems to me that the dialogue that is being engaged in is more to do with the current race war rather than slavery - and that a disenfranchised people are being told (reasonably or otherwise) that someone needs to pay for the oppression of their forebears. It's a call to arms, surely? Justified or not, the call for reparations seems to me to be based around shoring up racial tensions rather than diffusing them.

Now - that's not to say that that's a bad thing - tensions may need to rise for a resolution to emerge - but do we honestly think that such reparations would resolve the issue, or would they merely be recognised as ANOTHER acceptance of guilt by an oppressive people - thus reinforcing the boundaries between opressors and oppressed.

Seems to me that the best way to address the issue is, as ever, to tax the rich and support the poor's ability to help themselves. Black or white. That's the only non-devisive way to make a better country...

13:04 / 22.08.01

quote:Originally posted by Tom Coates:
At what point can you say that it is no longer relevant to socio-political relations?

Parity?

I think $150,000 would change quite a lot for, say, every African American in the US. I know it'd change my life. Still, that is a rather lot of money. I mean, we'd have to spend nothing on Defense for like a year.

Tom, what is the current Race War? Should I arm myself? Are they coming for me because my blood is tainted? And how, exactly, are programs like Affirmative Action based on shoring up racial tension than diffusing it?

It's not really about saying that we feel guilty as white folk. Even if we accept the fnatasy of "opportunity" we ought to address the fact that, particularly in the US, race plays a definitive role in determining one's future.

Still, you're right, redressing the root economics of the situation is a better solution. Pumping money into all schools, single payer healthcare, &c.

13:23 / 22.08.01

There is, of course, the argument that those of us whose ancestors never owned slaves, or only emigrated to the States after Emancipation, have no moral imperative to participate in funding a reparations program.

This would, of course, also let us off the hook from funding the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or government programs to assist Native Americans in accordance with old treaties signed before we were even born!

Is this our debt to pay?
If it is America's debt, then yes, it is ours--as citizens.

Citizenship grants rights, but also incurs responsibilities. For good or ill.

05:15 / 23.08.01

Just wait until a someone goes into Italian court and charges that Rome used slavery to build itself and that the Italian and, indeed, European people as a whole have benefited immensely from the sacrifices made by his ancient slave ancestors. And now it's payback time, baby.

Of course, this is an absurd argument, right? That was thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, slavery has existed for a good deal longer than our "enlightened" society has, and yet every group which has been historically persecuted has yet to be fully compensated for the crimes against their ancestors.

Should the descendants of persecuted pagans be compensated by the Church because their ancestors were burnt at the stake?

How much money is it going to cost to heal the wounds caused by the Holocaust, caused by persecution under a communist regime, for war crimes against a state by another state? How much money is it going to take to get everyone to sit down, look at each other, and chuckle, no matter what their hair color, eye color, skin color?

There isn't enough money in the world to repay everyone for the crimes committed against them.

We all started in the ooze all those millenia ago. And look where we are now.

But hey, I'm just ranting. Back to the topic.

[ 23-08-2001: Message edited by: Brenden Simpson ]