JULY 10, 2019 – In the news again is talk of reparations to descendants of American slavery. I say, “No.” If the answer were to be “Yes,” we’d lose our way in weeds and never emerge. Hear me out.
At the outset we’d face a definitional question: who qualifies? According to DNA testing as part of a fascinating PBS documentary, The African Americans, the average black in America is somewhere around 20% European. Would it matter if some or all of that 20% were the blood of a slave-owner rapist? What about descendants of slaves freed before January 1, 1863 (the effective date of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) or descendants of slaves who escaped? Should the latter two groups receive less in reparations? What about descendants of ex-slaves who, as forced laborers after Reconstruction, found themselves in worse circumstances than under slavery? What about descendants of lynching victims? Should they be given preferential treatment? Should the time of the lynching—1970 vs. 1870 make a difference? Should wealthy blacks be entitled to the same reparations as poor blacks?
And what about reparations themselves? Cold cash? Better housing? Money for college? For health care?
What about other victims in American history—Native Americans; descendants of Irish immigrants who were given the shaft by earlier immigrants in the big cities of the East; descendants of Chinese laborers—little more than slaves—who built Western railroads; descendants of the Japanese-Americans detained in camps during World War II?
But I oppose reparations mainly because it’s a classic American response: throwing money at victims. In the case of America’s “original sin,” the institution and its legacy did so much damage, wrecked so many lives for so many generations that no amount of reparations could possibly repair, restore, renew what was so brutally broken—human lives and potential.
I’m not advocating for irony here—“Sorry, damages too big, therefore, nothing!” We desperately need cogent policies creating better opportunities, much of which can be tied directly to better housing (both in form and location; See The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein). But ahead of all else in regard to the plight of most blacks in America is white acknowledgment of history.
Acknowledgment, however, must come from meaningful knowledge and understanding of history; not so much the history of American slavery but the history of “slavery by another name” (See Douglas Blackmon’s book by that title)—how blacks were treated in the South after Reconstruction; the history of the Great Migration (See The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson); the history of the Civil Rights Movement (See Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954 – 1965 by Juan Williams and Julian Bond).
For kicks, I urge a trade-off: sincere, knowledge-based acknowledgment in exchange for a nation-wide moratorium on the word “racist,” which has become as charged and counterproductive as “socialist.”
After acknowledgment, “reparations” in the form of intelligent policy initiatives will follow.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
