Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/groundbreaking-exhibi...
The re-enactors are all fantastic and very knowledgeable. It’s unsettling talking to a black re-enactor who’s firmly in-character as a slave, which I suppose is the point:
The average middle/upper class person today is the same, living on the fruit of foreign slave and subsistence laborers for clothing, food, and toys, and eating from the suffering of factory animals.
I'm pretty sure Washington's will freed his slaves on Martha's death because he didn't want to break up slave families (her slaves were part of her dowry and as such could not be manumitted so easily at will). Manumission law was quite complicated, and IIRC Washington himself lobbied to liberalize Virginia's law somewhat so that it was not as difficult to free slaves.
One of the most appalling aspects of US slavery was that it did break up families quite often. Washington doing this to keep the families together is hardly evil compared to what the alternative would have been.
EDIT: The parent post has grated on me a bit more. Why are we so arrogant to assume we know the whole context of what was going on two or three centuries ago? Every time I review the literature of historical situations, the richness and complexity is remarkable. We tend to think of our time as "more complex," but I think we are comparing the complex reality we experience with the simple stories we have been told (and continue to tell ourselves) about the past. In reality, much of the past was comparably complex to our own lives today.
This passage is by an enslaved (interviewed by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission) in Kentucky, 1963, named Charlotte "I belong to Gen. Thos. Strange. I have two boys. I pay a dollar a week to him, and support myself and children, and pay my house rent. I have been hiring myself for over fifteen years; I get along very well, and keep the hire paid up. You couldn't pay me to live at home, if I could help myself. My master doesn't supply me with anything -- not even a little medicine -- no more than if I didn't belong to him. Each of my children pays him $2.00 a week. They work in tobacconist shops. I support them. One of my boys is thirteen years old and the other seventeen. They get $2 a week pay. If the boys make more than $2 a week a piece I get what is over; if they don't make that, I have to make it good to him. He has got to have it Saturday night, sure. I have not had good health. Sometimes I am ailing, but I always keep up enough to try to make my wages. I have only one room, and pay three dollars a month for it. I live by washing."
What is the "slavery we know today"?
Do you mean "American slavery as we understand it today", or "Slavery in the current day"? If the former, then how is the passage you quoted different from our understanding of American slavery? Do you mean to say it was better, worse, or in some other way different?
Have you actually compared the two? You'll notice one is far more insidious if you do.
Also, don't conveniently leave out the inflation of the world reserve fiat global enslavement system.
I know we can always opt to live in the woods, and barter, but you've got to take both into consideration to honestly consider what it is I said.
“Not all suffered the same Holocaust we know today. It’s just important to remember/question how diverse people’s Holocaust experiences actually were.”
Maybe it’s just me but these type of statements seem to miss the point. Given the deplorable state of American understanding of slavery, Reconstruction, the state-sanctioned apartheid that only ended a few decades ago, and all its effects that continue to reverberate, I don’t think “a nuanced understanding” of slavery is really what’s called for. The evidence suggests that most Americans never even learned the ABCs of slavery and its effects.
Yeah, obviously we need to fix the appalling state of our Civil War and slavery history in this country.
There are some places in the US which have started, but they're just kind of pulling numbers out of a hat and I don't see that being scalable. But reparations should be paid, if for nothing else, at least for the unpaid hours.
Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.
Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly? Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago? How do you foresee this working? How do you foresee this helping anything?
Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.
Do you realize that's an extraordinary claim? You have proof for this, right?
Warning; while there really was slavery in Ireland at one time (indeed Dublin was one of the biggest markets in Europe before the Normans suppressed it in the 12th century), if you Google for this you are likely to get a good bit of nonsense. Decent summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_slaves_myth
Obviously GP's claim is a dumb one, because all you have to do is say "Here is one counter example, you're wrong". But looking at that page makes it very clear that slavery is a big part of most of world history.
If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind. [1]
[1] http://www.understandingslavery.com/index.php-option=com_con...
But IMO, if we can figure out how much time/money was stolen and who benefitted the most from it, we can start to have some idea of what's fair.
I'm a big fan of UBI as well, and it'd make a lot of sense to have the ancestors of slaves be the first to get onto UBI. But, obviously, this is a group decision and should be based off logic and records; not feelings.
For example, there's examples (IIRC) of former slaves owning slaves themselves; how is that addressed? What moral principles are in play, which can be logically applied to figure out if such a person's progeny receive reparations?
*descendants
The same issues that make UBI a bad idea will probably preclude the individual payment approach to reparations
All those people are dead. The only entities left to sue are legal entities that aren't natural persons.
> If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind.
Then governments, corporations, etc. in Africa and Europe can be held to the same standard.
I don't think anyone should pay any more than they benefitted from slavery.
The average person has no ancestors who owned slaves, and the only benefits they got were things like cheaper goods and services. Added up over a lifetime, it's probably not a lot.
But some people come from ancestors who made a LOT of money off slavery, and the benefits of that have been passed down to them one way or another.
So I think different people should be in different brackets based off how much they benefitted from slavery, and those brackets should be proportion of wealth tax over 20-30 years. Not so much to bankrupt anyone, but enough to pay the off the debt.
Also, I think it should be treated as the alpha version of UBI. Basically, the ancestors of slaves should be the first to get on the list for UBI because they're kind of opposites of each-other.
This is a logical fallacy (though a popular one). An idea is either good or bad. The traits of the person speaking the idea are irrelevant, and do not make a good idea bad, or a bad idea good.
Further, an idea doesn't become more or less "subject to discussion" as a result of the race of the person speaking it.
I'm basically claiming, ofc I think my idea is good, but I really don't want to assume it.
In the latter case, we can probably start collecting our reparations for the Barbary slave trades from the Arabs, and probably even make money! (Reparation arbitrage).
I accept petrol or petrodollars. Check my bio for the paypal link.
The average person benefitted from compound accumulation of capital. After hundreds of years of compound interest, its probably unfathomably large.
> But some people come from ancestors who made a LOT of money off slavery, and the benefits of that have been passed down to them one way or another.
If those people can be identified then someone may lodge a claim against their assets. From what I learned in Black World Studies, the fruits of slavery are largely considered to have been spread through society in a way that can't be traced and reconstructed because everything is tainted.
How many American citizens went to prison because they refused to send in their contribution to the reparation funds for Japanese internment?
Yeah its called taxation.
> You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right?
I'm not convinced that this is true. do you have any documentation?
> Where do your reparations end? Are you going to forcefully take money from me because African Americans were enslaved generations ago, but then forcefully have money taken from them for the other Africans and other races they themselves enslaved in Africa before that? Where does it end?
Claims are against the legal institutions that still exist. People aren't held responsible for the sins of their ancestors, rather the same institutions that benefitted still exist and can be sued for damages. There's a pending claim against them.
> Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago?
You didn't know that we collect taxes here when you immigrated?
> Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.
If you're opposed to taxation, arguing against reparations is probably the worst possible way to make your point. Slavery and taxation are quite similar (some would say the difference matters but those people are pro-tax).
You must be young to speak with such certainty.
Post-slavery, black sharecroppers basically made nothing after expenses. So how much was their time actually worth? (An economist will ask this.)
Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?
Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)
Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.
The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?
That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.
Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?
Yeah, no. There are simple answers to several of your questions.
Not just the US of course. Britain and France among others are owed a lot more in reparations for what Germany did and the long-term consequences.
The US got repaid - only in part - for its war lending. It has never been paid reparations for its losses in WW2 (including 400,000 military deaths).
What's the reparations tally for 400,000 dead, going by the numbers thrown around these days? $10 trillion? Germany and Japan can figure out the split on that and then write some big fat checks to the families in question.
How much was the labor of slaves worth to the slaveowners? surely you're not arguing it was worth nothing?
> Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?
The price of social programs don't factor in at all.
> Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)
This will come up if the reparations take the form of payments to individuals.
> Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.
Thank heavens we live in a country where people are allowed to have opinions without demonstrating the right to those opinions on the basis of heritage.
> The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?
Why would they?
> That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.
Sadly you can't get rid of the effects of history by choosing to forget about it.
> Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?
This is unhelpful.
What are the limits? Who will be excepted? How will it be enforced? All good questions! But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with.
That's because the first order of business is to demonstrate that reparations are even a good idea. Engage with those who don't like the idea, and address the concerns they raise, if you can; then deal with minutae.
Also, it sets a precedent: if you care about your decedents and progeny at all, there is nothing to gain from cheating. You may benefit and die before repercussions occur, but all debts must be paid eventually. Justice is hard, but not when it comes to hours worked vs hours paid.
> if you care about your decedents and progeny at all, there is nothing to gain from cheating. You may benefit and die before repercussions occur, but all debts must be paid eventually.
I really hope you're not suggesting that we set a precedent of digging through history to find old debts we might be owed.
The statute of limitations is a law. We are talking about a moral claim that supercedes the text of laws. Remember this is from a time when slavery itself was legal.
Also consider there is no statute of limitations for some crimes including murder.
> I really hope you're not suggesting that we set a precedent of digging through history to find old debts we might be owed.
I think he's more suggesting we not set a precedent of permitting people to benefit financially from atrocities if they can run out the clock.
That’s not really... likely. Even if your state wasn’t a ‘state’ Pre-abolishion, there was slavery there. The history of slavery in North America did not start at Plymouth Rock.
Thats easy, the same government that permitted and regulated slavery is the first defendant. After that any other legal institution that still exists in the same form (universities, state and city governments, non-profits, etc.).
> We also don't live in states where slavery was ever a thing.
They made the cross country railroad on slave labor. Pretty sure every state has benefitted from rail traffic.
I guess, here is a simple non-rhetorical thought question: Why should your family get any of the benefits of this country's past? I don't know you or where you/your family immigrated from, but your family came here for the benefits of the US. Maybe the US was a wealthier country than where your family left, or maybe more stable, or maybe they felt there was more opportunity for economic mobility. Those benefits/properties where present before your family decided to move, so why should you benefit from them?
Note, I'm actually pro-immigration and support people moving here, but I think it's a good exercise to walk through. All of those benefits were accrued before your family came here, and yet your family gets to benefit from them. Why? As you said, they had zero responsibility for things that happened before they arrived.
So by the same token, if the country had both assets and debts before you arrived, why shouldn't the logic that says you and your family should take on and gain from those assets that pre-dated you, also not mean that you should take on the associated debts?
I can't think of a reason why someone immigrating should only take on the benefits of the assets but be excluded from the liabilities. But am open to discussion.
One thing that might be helpful, if I'm in favor and you're opposed, then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of reparations. Then maybe that is worth engaging with.
On the contrary; if I represent the status quo and you represent a new idea, the onus is on you to defend it. It's your responsibility. Put it out there. Say exactly what your thesis is, and back it up, and defend it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant - anything about your ideas that are indefensible will be shown to be so, and what's left will be gold.
To make my point via reductio ad absurdum, let's flip the script and use something hyperbolic: you represent the status quo, and I represent (heaven forbid) some new variation of racial cleansing. But, I declare to those opposed, "engaging with those who don't like the idea [of racial cleansing] is a fool's errand, because a lot of these people will just cherry-pick whatever objection they can think of in bad faith." So, I say to you, the skeptical defendent of the status quo, if you don't like the idea of racial cleansing, "then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of [exterminating a race]."
To me, flipping your proposition on its head like that makes it pretty obvious that it's unsatisfactory as the starting point of an intellectual discussion. It even tends to beg the question: you've made your position the 'null hypothesis'. The status quo should be the null hypothesis.
> And even in good faith, people who don't like the idea all have different reasons. Start with the root axiom "Slavery is wrong", people will be happy to engage with you on that. Disregard them and move on to the next syllogism, you'll have a different set of people objecting.
Yes, exactly. Your job is to answer every set of people who don't like your idea. Just because you believe that this new thing is moral and right does not make it so, and it is the acme of hubris to distain to justify your proposed actions.
The first order of business is to demonstrate the validity of the claim. The benefit of the reparation is dependent on the form of the reparation itself.
> Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.
The most? The Europeans. Where is the money? It's in London and Amsterdam among a few other former empires.
The Europeans transported around 12.5 millions slaves to the Americas. They owe so much in reparations it will bankrupt half the nations in Western Europe.
It's very interesting how the Europeans - who were responsible for African slavery in the Americas - never want to talk about it and how nobody in the US ever asks any questions about how much the Europeans are going to pay.
The Europeans transported close to five million slaves to Brazil, nearly ten times as many slaves as were transported to the territory that became the US. One can imagine the reparations tally just for that alone to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Britain and the Netherlands should just go ahead and write a check equal to 10% of their entire national wealth to African-Americans. That might get things started on the path to justice. All of the assets of the British throne should be liquidated as part of the process and put into the reparations pot.
12.5 million Africans don't end up enslaved and heading to the Americas without the European empires making it happen.
The US owes a lot for its part, no question (what I'm saying is not a reduction in the responsibility of the US, I'm properly adding the Europeans to it). The Europeans owe that much more, including for the other 12 million slaves in the rest of the Americas (which, again, nobody ever wants to talk about re reparations, not under any circumstances). Every discussion is always about the US paying reparations. The Europeans were primarily responsible, the US didn't exist yet and banned the import of slaves as one of its first major actions post formation in January 1808. The US has spent two centuries dealing with the consequences of what the European powers did. We have had to deal with the consequences of their slave trade, while they've skirted it almost entirely.
What consequences have the Europeans suffered over the past two centuries, for what they did? Almost nothing. It's long past time for the Europeans to pay, big time.
It will bankrupt parts of Western Europe. That's how big the reparations number very obviously is.
All big European revolutions after 1789 had claims to stop slavery in overseas territory. So lots of European people have actually fought a to put an end to this long before Americans. Europeans were also victims from slavery from North Africa and Ottoman Empire at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire).
Kings of the time obviously use this trade as an instrument of power but it was not something that had a meaningful impact on life of ordinary peoples.
You are just inventing an alternate history to find someone to dislike.
Then you add in redlining, and it starts to look systemtic.
So the cure should be appropriate to the disease, make home ownership practical, affordable, and (if you are into reparations) subsidized.
Or at least as subsidized as being a rich person is in the mortgage origination process (via that stealth socio-economic test that is your FICO score).
How would that work?
You make it easier for people to own, then the prices increase. Do you subsidize more? If so, then it's just 2008 again.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/collins-v-mnuchi...
I'm talking about building power lines and wastewater plants and shit like that. Encouraging counties to adopt zoning that simplifies residential construction. Etc.
Fun fact: First thing you learn from when moving to USA is to get a credit card immediately. Start working on that score. Even if you don't intend to stay, just in case you change your mind.
My first credit card 5 years ago had a $1000 limit. And only if I kept my bank balance above $1000.
> having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be
I just don't understand how someone can talk about a "well-founded number" for reparations in a serious way.
How can you calculate a dollar amount, even within 5 orders of magnitude, for something that happened to millions of people for hundreds of years, affects millions of people today, and we don't have details about any of it?
There are many people who:
- had African ancestors who sold other Africans to slavers
- have a mixture of heritage
- immigrated from Africa long after slavery ended
It's nonsensical to come up with a dollar amount for even a single person, so how can we possibly do it at scale? Should African Americans descended from slave traders be paying reparations to African Americans descended from slaves? Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?
There are so few records for any of this, it just seems absolutely insane to me. I am a huge history nerd, and there aren't concrete answers for a lot of things that happened this decade, even with impeccable records.
And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”. That shit still haunts me to this day.
This is no different than paying taxes for any number of other social programs, however its a singularly bad place to draw the line.
> Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved?
Because you aren't being charged. The government that legalized and regulated slavery is being charged. This government is (one of) the legal institutions that permitted slavery and benefitted from slavery that still exists. Therefore they are responsible for satisfying legal claims that are still pending.
> When there was still slavery in America, my people were enslaving members of their own ethnic group back in the old country. Forgive me for not wanting any part of this current dispute.
If you don't want any part of it then you are free to remain neutral in discussions of this issue. By arguing against reparations you are participating in the dispute.
> And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”.
That doesn't challenge the assertion that you benefitted from the accumulated capital that was in part built on the forced labor of slaves.
> That shit still haunts me to this day.
I'm truly sorry for your traumatic experience.
p.s. I've upvoted this comment because while I disagree with the substance, it raises important arguments that need to be responded to and the comment itself contributes to the discussion. I'd like to ask down voters to consider why they feel this comment needs to be suppressed because I disagree with their opinion on the value of the comment and its contribution to the discussion.
Why should you be a contributor to the wrongs of this country's past? Simple, because you are a member/resident of this country, and this country benefits from them. I could be wrong, but I don't see any complaints about paying of any war debt accrued by the US from entering WW II or the Vietnam war, but you also pay towards that. It's accepted that current us citizens who benefit from the previous actions of the country, also have responsiblity for the previous decisions of the country.
An enormous part of the reason why this country is so financially successful is because of slavery and stealing wages for so long. That's why the US was an agricultural powerhouse, that's why the north industrialized so quickly, that's why we became a major economic power in the 20th century.
And even you yourself admit you see all of those benefits, and reap them. You came to this country presumably for those exact reasons. You're as you say an immigrant, and the reason you chose to come here, and not stay where you were was because of exactly the benefits this country accrued by leaning heavily on slavery during it's critical period.
The fact you had negative experiences while here (and I'm sorry you did), doesn't invalidate or outweigh the fact that you came here to benefit from America's benefits, and that you have benefited from them.
American education does an incredibly poor job of covering the financial windfall of slaver in the US. And (extremely reasonably) people from other countries who move here never learned about it back home. To give some perspective, the value of "human capital" held as chattel slaves, was more valuable than all industrial and transportation capital in the entire country.[1] That's how much value was present. I'd highly recommend anyone who hasn't really read about slavery to really read about it. Unfortunately there was an intentional concerted effort in the middle of last century to downplay the scope and impact of slavery in the US and a lot of those vestiges are present because it was very successful.
There is way more here than the simplistic arguments that are made online in chat forums. I'd recommend looking into it. While not ideal, this essay is a decent place to start if you're curious. [2]
[1] - https://slate.com/business/2013/07/america-s-slave-wealth.ht... [2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
'Slavery made economic sense' is a narrative that, until recently, you would only have heard from the likes of "Black-Israelite" conspiracy peddlers. Let's not give credence to such unscientific and misleading claims.
Also, when slavery was at it's height, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia were far more prosperous regions than they eventually became post-civil war. The south in general was more financially well-off during the time of slavery than it has been since - and you can read primary sources from the time and region saying as much. I can point you towards primary sources from elected officials of the time period saying as much - that they knew slavery was evil, but they also knew it was the source of economic and social stability that they enjoyed. The institution of slavery itself did not directly lead to economic fall of the southern states - rather it was the tensions from having a nation with both slaveholding states and non-slaveholding states, and the south's extremely strong incentive to protect their advantageous status even at the cost of war.
When the war did happen, the civil-war-related destruction that happened in the south (ie, the burning of Atlanta), had an equally dramatic impact and the outcome that we see today. Decades of slavery were certainly impactful, but so were the effects of the civil war, reconstruction, the great migration, and later cycles of industrialization, which tended to reach the south last due to network effects (there was no impetus to branch out from the skilled workers available up north... until unions took hold at least). All of those effects are more recent, and more relevant to the economic conditions today.
Additionally, the cultural regressiveness you speak of is closely tied to the Great Awakening and the particularly conservative religious denominations that became regionally dominant - and notably, these denominations had, and still have strong pull on southern white and black communities alike. The south actually had a reputation for being quite a fun and "sinful" place before that. My own state, NC, founded the first public university in the world (UNC Chapel Hill) - a paradoxically very progressive institution - despite being founded by slavers during a period of widespread slavery.
So understanding inequality and culture that exists in South, both now and then, and today is a complex thing. I would strongly caution trying to reduce it down that completely.
I think you have been given a very skewed view of the role that slavery played in our country's economic past. There have been long efforts to downplay the role of slavery, and there still are. Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery, and then continuing into the extremely exploitive sharecropping. That's the core period our country developed - and the single export that brought in the most capital into this country. That continuous inflow of capital is also what made New York City the financial powerhouse it became. [1]
Slavery wasn't a just for the few. One of the number one ways that people mislead with slavery is by trying to show the percentage of the slaves divided by the total population in 1860. That's extremely misleading, as individuals didn't own slaves, families did. The same way measuring what percentage of families own their home is accurate, not individuals that own the home, as only one in the family typically owns the home.
There were 15 slave states in 1860. Of the top 10 states, in all of them at least 25% of families owned slaves. With the top two states South Carolina and Mississippi topping out at 46% and 49% of families. Almost half the families owned slaves. And that's ignoring everyone else in the south who didn't own slaves, but participated in the slave trade - and those who rented slaves for labor but didn't technically "own them". [2]
On top of that of the top 5 states owning slaves, enslaved people ranged from over 40% of the population in Georgia, to almost 60% of the entire population of the state of South Carolina. [3]
Slavery and the white supremacy views it was built on, were an absolutely core part of the first part of this country's existence - culturally, economically, politically. Slavery wasn't a niche occurrence only for the elite - and especially so for the white South. It was disgusting, it was violent, it was immoral and it was everywhere. It didn't play a minimal role. The idea that a few wealthy elite slave owners "tricked" the rest of the southern population to go to war for them is a farce. The entire south gathered up to go to war because white supremacy was the culture of their land.
It's taken this country a long time to try to undo that work - and we still haven't finished...
But to downplay Slavery is to also downplay what was taken from Black Americans, and how much that theft built this early country.
1. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr... 2. https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/07/percent-of-whites-own... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census
Wait, you're making a very different claim than what I was talking about. I agree that it probably made some sense to have some kind of plantation economy in the South, and that, as a matter of fact the plantations the South did have were based on enslaved labor. And for sure, there are interesting debates to have about the unacknowledged contribution that's inherent in that. But slavery was never a necessary part of that successful economy; indeed, it's quite physically possible to have plantations that employ free laborers as opposed to relying on slaves!
I likely do not understand what you mean here, because a casual reading of this seems ridiculous. Most white people do not go to top schools either.
On the flip side, if one were to list factors that play a role in becoming decently successful, going to a top school is fairly low on that list (as in most successful people didn't go to one either).
I'm probably not interpreting the comment as you intended, though.
It's almost as hard to come up with a fair number on how much help a given person should get due to being adversely affected by the pandemic. Yet that's not seen as a barrier to provide money.
> Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?
As a collective? Yes.
Absolutely not. That is ludicrous.
There are measurable effects to the pandemic: changes in income, medical expenses, etc. There is certainly an emotional toll for even the best-off people, but no one is proposing paying people for emotional pain. It's all about getting them through this exceptional (and temporary) time.
Reparations for slavery are about things that can't be measured (generations of lost opportunities, not months), immense/immeasurable pain, and a long tail of policies (like racist zoning laws) that outlived slavery by 100+ years.
Your analogy to the pandemic actually makes it even more stark how difficult it is to calculate something so large, complex, and obscured by the fog of history.
> As a collective? Yes.
OK, let's say you do this. Let's say you decide the amount that a particular official/organized tribe should get is $1T. You don't have to decide who gets the money because the tribe has already done all that legwork for you and has an official roll.
Now how do you decide who pays? Do you try to trace the heritage of every American and determine when/how they took tribal land?
Maybe not. So do you just take it out of social programs? The same social programs that are intended to fix some of the cycles of poverty that people descended from slaves are relying on to get them some equity?
Well, you can't do that either. So how do you decide who pays, and who decides who pays?
Eventually you get into the business of punishing or rewarding people for their ancestors' crimes, which is not at all different from forcing a murderer's child to give money to his victim's family. If you look at it in a microcosm, it seems completely insane because it is.
Your ancestry definitely has a big effect on your life, but that's not the same as being culpable for their crimes, and it's not deterministic. My family was fantastically wealthy until my dad's generation, and then they were poor. Should my dad, as a completely broke 25-year-old, have had to pay reparations to someone for his ancestors' wealth (which I'm sure was gained unfairly)?
If it can't be measured, it should be omitted. Nobody is suggesting making up random numbers based off feelings.
> Should my dad, as a completely broke 25-year-old, have had to pay reparations to someone for his ancestors' wealth (which I'm sure was gained unfairly)?
First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age (and props for that). But also, there are ways to use math to make things fair. For instance: progressive taxation based off wealth. Lower income pay a small percentage (probably less than 1%) while higher income pays 1-2%. And given that slavery lasted ~90 years, so too could the timeline for paying reparations.
There are solutions here. Nobody is saying do it all at once and make people starve. But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.
It's better late than never, and if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too.
Honestly, I'd be willing to say this could be one of the best cost vs benefit long-term PR investments the US could make on the world stage. But only if it's done right, and not as a punitive thing.
Then reparations for slavery are completely off the table. You can't measure the economic output of someone who died 150-400 years ago. There are major disputes about what a human life is worth now, when we know every possible detail about them.
> First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age
I think you missed where I said "have had to pay" (meaning "when he was 25").
> But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.
Let's assume, first, that people are owed money that rightfully belonged to their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. I would disagree with that, but I'll leave that aside for now.
How much are the following worth, in today's dollars?
- 1 hour of planting crops at 3pm on a sunny day in Alabama in February of 1802
- 1 hour of planting crops at 10am on a cloudy day in Georgia in March of 1791
- 1 hour of breastfeeding a slaver's baby
- 1 hour of cooking food for a 10-person family
Are those worth $5? Surely not, because minimum wage is higher than that. But that is what a lot of undocumented immigrants get paid for the same work, so maybe $5 is correct?
Or is it worth $50, because those people's bodies were in constant pain from beatings, over-work, malnutrition, and poor health care?
Let's say we settle on $25/hour. If we divide it up between that person's 1,000+ descendants, it's not much money. But then we have to consider the interest! Should we use the national rate of inflation? Should we just peg it to the adjusted dollar? Should we assume that money would've been invested in gold?
I think you see my point. There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense. And then once you get to the end and decide on a number, how do you decide who pays it? Should recent immigrants pay reparations for slavery? Should a rural, white meth addict lying in their own vomit pay reparations for all of their "privileges"?
It makes far, far more sense to just have a strong society safety net and not try to figure out what events 100, 200, or 500 years ago resulted in someone's current situation.
> if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too
The example of Germany supports my point. Here are the major differences:
- Germany was forced to pay most of its reparations by the Allies
- Planning for German reparations began a few months after the war ended
- Many Germans were enslaved by the Allies as a form of reparation, and those people were then paid reparations
- Much of the rest of Germany's reparations were paid directly to Holocaust survivors[1] or their spouses or to Israel, not to millions of their descendants hundreds of years later[2]
The best number I can find for the total reparations paid by Germany is ~€60B, which translates to €4.3k for every living Jew (~14M) since 1945. I know that's not perfect, because some Holocaust survivors are dead and many living Jews are not descended from one, but bear with me.
If you look at that number yearly by person, you get €57/person/year.
That is not a meaningful amount of money compared to the consequences of slavery, even if you change it by a couple of orders of magnitude. Germany arguably owes Jewish people trillions of euros, not billions.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/europe/for-60th-yea...
2. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/german-holocaust-repara...
3. https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/410502/23e348e9f5c6c0...
There's obviously a lot of tolerance on these estimates, but even with extreme tolerances $0 seems a bit low.
> There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense
The first step would be having a serious discussion about every question you raised. They're all good questions, and with some amount of investigation, yield closer and closer answers.
This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.
Correct.
> This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.
I'm opposed to trying to adjudicate a distant and poorly-documented past in order to take money from one group and give it to another. That's why the best estimate, for me, is $0. The first thing to do is to do no more harm, and as we see from the enslaved-Germans example, reparations can end up being another injustice that needs to be repaired.
I am not opposed to fixing the unfair deficits caused by slavery, but I don't think we need to (or that it's ethical to) look at history to do that. We can simplify it to, "Who was born with fewer opportunities? Who has fewer opportunities now? Who is discriminated against now?"
In many cases, the most deeply affected parties will overlap with the people affected by the legacy of slavery. But we'll also cover people who had generations of near-slavery (e.g. white Appalachian sharecropper who became timber workers and then coal miners), as well as people are suffering deeply from modern atrocities like the opioid crisis.
It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.
Be careful with your thinking if you care about being even-handed with your empathy. Being empathetic is a fantastic thing, but don't allow cynical people to hijack your empathy.
This is a very patronizing argument. If someone breaks into your bank account and steals your cash, then later is caught. There is no valid line of reasoning that goes "well I'll only give the money back if you tell me how you plan to spend it first". "Oh, you planned to spend it all on bubble gum and sweets? Then no I don't need to give it back, because I think that might do you more harm than good."
Argue on the merits of the topic, not based on knowing what's best for people.
So, yeah, the merits are kinda low to.
So my dad goes and steals your dad's land. He give me the land as his son. I split it in half and give half to a friend of mine. The investigation occurs and determine this land was stolen and should be returned. I don't think the argument of, "sorry won't return it because I didn't steal it, my dad did" holds much water. Nor the argument of, "nope I won't return it because a friend of mine that has nothing to do with the theft is benefiting from it" holds much water either as reasons for your family to not get their land returned.
And related, possession of stolen goods is a fairly common legal concept. Regardless of penalty, at minimum once discovered the goods are returned, even if they'd previously be sold or given to someone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_of_stolen_goods#Uni...
Will there later be reparations for the reparations taken now from uninvolved parties since the point of reparations is that stealing labor and wealth is wrong and must be corrected via payment in later generations? If we take from them we're perpetuating the same sort of theft? I agree if we were omniscient it would be "right," but we're far far from that.
Also, let's say there's a reparation payment, but it doesn't rectify inequality, because there are more systemic problems at play, like local tax revenue funding local schools, so poor towns have poor schools. After "reparations," you don't think voters will think "we paid reparations, stop complaining."
If the purpose is "righting a wrong" I think the tool is too blunt and will create many more wrongs.
If the purpose is to "fix inequality", I think it won't address the underlying structural problems, but will "check the box" and absolve responsibilities.
2) Second and third-generation descendents of slaves are still alive. In other words, people who conceivably would have benefited directly from their grandparents or great-grandparents receiving substantial reparations.
3) Reparations have been called for for more recent attacks on Black American rights and economic wellbeing; discriminatory and destructive public policy that dates back decades but that also goes up to, at least, the predatory lending practices backed by the government in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, which saw black-owned wealth in America cut in half.
These are important considerations that impact directly on the form that reparations "should" take. However they are orthogonal to the merits of the claim for reparations.
Too bad they feel the need to run their own platform instead of contributing to wikidata. They're using the same software, and the data falls squarely within Wikidata's scope.
Even worse that they feel the need to stamp this with a CC license. Not only does this make it incompatible with the CC0/public domain requirement. I consider it borderline offensive to assert copyright over the basic facts of someone's life: https://enslaved.org/record/person/Q405665
This project obviously involves a lot of work. And, taken as a whole, some of that work is creative in nature. But individual records are not.
Luckily, US law does not recognise copyright for databases.
However, the beauty of using a linked data platform is of course that it's easy to link back to other sources, like Wikidata. I could definitely see that in the future Wikidata could do an import of many of these items, or link properly to them using a new property.
I do agree that it's unfortunate that they're licensing everything under CC-BY instead of CC-Zero.
I disagree with the idea that this data is inferior in some way to what is expected for inclusion in WD. Their sourcing seems to be impeccable, better than maybe 80 % of WD at the statement-level ("Imported from cebwiki") and certainly adequate on the item-level.
Data on individual slaves also strikes me as far more useful for the possibilities that Wikidata offers than academic papers. The latter are important in their own right, but metadata on journal articles is of little use unless you're studying impact factors, academic careers, or the rise and fall of academic disciplines.
Structured data on slavery neatly connects with geography, economics, culture, and really any aspect society today. I imagine there were changes in regions of origin over time, for example, and it'd be interesting to see if these can still be found in, say, regional culinary preferences, language, or music.
And under US law, the copyright on a database would apply to the collective work and not to the individual facts, so your frustration and analysis are sort of strange (they can't copyright the facts and whether the collective work would gain copyright is an open question without an obvious answer).
The data only falls within Wikidata's scope if "every single enslaved person" can be described using reliable sources. That's a very dubious position. And Wikidata has scaling problems already due to their scholarly-article data - but at least that comes with plenty of surrounding info about authors, topics, citations etc. etc. that's uniquely suited to a general-purpose knowledge base. Can one make the same claim about the micro-level archival history of slavery in the antebellum U.S.?
etymonline.com/word/spare
Which gives us "spare made", "well made", and "well set" as descriptions.
A similar "ethnography" (http://tiny.cc/3ip6tz) gives me this:
"Although from their wiry and spare conformation of body, the Villees look tall, they are not so in reality."
Which I would think implies thin.
After visiting Africa I think will also help people expand their mind set about the world and that Africa is not a bad place and has lot of opportunities.
Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
Taiwan does something similar with a paid trip to visit Taiwan to learn about the culture and history and create business connection between the people.
It would not cost anything as well, you just reallocate aid money.
To a degree European Africans have been doing this for a long time, plenty of YouTube videos about people moving to Africa to start a business. Fun to watch too. Many of these European Africans have positions of power in the government or private sector.
Thoughts?
This might trigger some people. If you used a term like "ancestral region(s)" or something, it might've been less triggering.
Firstly, the word "homeland" is not one typically associated with one's country of ancestry. I've rarely ever heard someone use that term. On the contrary, I have heard people say "my ancestors came from X country", or like "my great-grandparents came from Italy". The term "homeland" is usually used for the region where a person's current home is. And this not to mention that even a first-generation immigrant who has lived in X country for a long time, could consider X country to be his true homeland.
Secondly, there's an implicit assumption here that "Africa" is the "homeland" of African Americans. I don't need to explain why that's troubling.
Thirdly, many of my "African American" friends are of thoroughly mixed ancestry. One such friend did a 23andMe test, and it turned out he had 54% European ancestry (even though physically "he looks black"), 30-something% African ancestry, and a smattering of other ancestry groups (including Native American) for the rest. It would be inaccurate and inappropriate to consider him as someone "of African ancestry" (even though he looks somewhat so). The phenotypes a person's genome expressed do not necessarily correspond to a person's actual genetic ancestry.
I could go into more reasons as to why it's not a great term to use, but I think these three reasons make a good case.
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> get a lump sum, if they start a business or invest in land
While the underlying motivation behind your idea is pretty decent (and a fairly lofty goal I might add); I, for one, would rather prefer direct foreign aid (not loans, but literal foreign aid grants with no expectation of return). There's too much of a risk of corruption with your idea, and bad incentives are baked right into it. Just increase the current foreign aid to developing countries across the board. Do something like the Marshall Plan, where in exchange for free-market economic policies, we directly invest in education, infrastructure, and other things in developing countries.
On a secondary note, domestically, I would rather focus on just getting some kind of actual, concrete, meaningful (maybe financial) reparations bill passed through Congress. That alone seems like a huge and almost insurmountable political challenge, and I want to see that tackled somehow. We want to improve the quality of life and access to opportunity for the poorest economic classes in the US, so they can pursue their ambitions and dreams from a similar starting point as more well-off Americans. Achieving this alone would be a huuuge deal in and of itself.
A famous quote: "broke is temporary, poor is eternal"
Tongue in cheek, if we had a program of cash payments I suspect that TV manufacturers and car dealers would have record years.
> Black Americans are more likely than either whites or Hispanics to be the third generation Americans. Seventy-five percent of black Americans indicate they are at least the third generation born in the United States, compared to 58% of whites and 13% of Hispanics.
(And "Hispanic" literally means "from Spain". Very few Spaniards crossed The Atlantic before Columbus.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Societ...
Later Marcus Garvey motivated another 'Back to Africa' movement. As I understand it the, the movement did not send very many blacks back to Africa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey
We have to wonder, do Africans want Black Americans to come colonize their homelands?
Most of African Europeans a)know what country their ancestors are from, b) have direct links to their relatives in Africa.
> Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
I think this is exactly Africa's main issue: being seen first foremost as a land of resources and economic ventures. You go to the Americas/Europe/Asia/Oceania to visit, and Africa to make money/for "humanitarian aid". Things may evolve when they change to "X has invested a lot in Africans".
I would say — from a European perspective — a baffling number of white Americans cling on to a European cultural identity. It feels to an outsider like many Americans want to be American + something else. Many/most black Americans don’t have this luxury, and my hot take is that Kwanza and other pan-African neo traditions seek to fill this gap? As a counter-example, I lived in the anglophone Caribbean for many years, and it always felt like there was a strong sense of national identity there, very distinct from trying to associate with Africa in any way. I guess I’d also expect 2nd/3rd generation African immigrants to America to maintain their cultural identity — I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone with Ethiopian heritage describe themselves as anything other than Ethiopian whatever their passport or recent ancestry
Sure—why not set an example by starting your own fund?