I think the resistance to reparations comes from folks like me who don't see a reason we should pay anything. Most of my ancestors are German immigrants to the northeast US who arrived after slavery was abolished. The remainder were poor Scotts Irish who continued to live in poverty in northern Appalachia.
I understand, but do not agree with, the logical hoops many jump through to justify indebtedness to all current Americans. I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.
This conflates two separate issues. One is about a financial debt owed to people. This is owed for forced labor and land thefts which continued into the 20th century. Like the OP said, for the most part this is well documented. Debts are repaid in cash or like goods.
Racism is a separate topic, which I agree should be approached differently.
Conflating the two issues is not helpful for understanding best approaches.
If you ask, many Black families will tell you about these thefts, which again are in the public record as title transfers.
Here's an example from the 20th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach . Events like this were common for decades in the 20th century. Even if you just limited to quasi-legal property theft via eminent domain, there's billions of documentable dollars owed and easily tracked. There's absolutely no reason not to give the land back to those families, or a cash payment for its fair market value.
Do we repay them as well? And how many trillions (since that’s there value of such land now, with or without interest)
We live in a legal regime where it's not even permissible to take sunken treasure that's near countries, even after centuries at sea. But somehow land stolen from indigenous people and Black people more recently is somehow unrecoverable? We need to at least write down in our laws the rationale for this.
More immediately pertinent: why were these thefts substantially different from those the Supreme Court ruled against in Oklahoma?
If we're not willing to at least do that much, yeah we should just give it back. The alternative is choosing lawlessness, which is not something we are bound to do.
We don't have to worry about converting to dollars because we can just return title to the land itself. The Supreme Court did the same this year in Oklahoma, so it wouldn't even be unprecedented.
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-oklahoma/us-suprem...
And while we are at it, what about the descendants of the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during World War 2 in Colorado and other states?
What about the children who worked in sweat shops and coal mines during the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom died young? Their relatives should be compensated. What about the descendants of the Tuskeegee Syphilis experiment? What about people affected by lead in drinking water pipes? Lead solder for drinking water wasn’t banned until 1986, so there are generations of people and their descendants who have suffered.
I can go on and on and our country will be bankrupt before we’re done. But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
Spoken by Abraham Lincoln and inscribed on his memorial:
"Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Anyway, your comment reminded me of that.
I'm less familiar with lead in water. If that was just lack of science knowledge, that's different than, say, deliberately putting lead in water to make it easier to profit off the people drinking it.
Lead pipes and lead-based solder is just one example and if you don’t like that example because it happened due to “lack of science”, I can come up with others. My point is that there are countless atrocities in America’s past, recent and not so recent.
How can we compensate everyone who deserves it and how can we prioritize one group (e.g. descendants of slaves) over another (e.g. descendants of Native American civilians who were slaughtered at one of the many massacres)?
We can’t and shouldn’t.
you're looking at this backwards. They both have claims pending. We can pay both of them if we choose to.
"yes we can" -US President Barack Obama
Isn't that a shame, well at least we could then hold our heads high.
> But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
The title is encumbered. For the same reason that laundering money doesn't make the original theft disappear, its not ethical or moral to benefit financially from atrocities then launder the money and pretend that nothing can be done.
Are you really so sure that once the ill-gotten gains are subtracted from this country's wealth there would be nothing left? In that case how could you ignore such widespread and lucrative immoral heritage?
I already do.
How many people in society 1) were in a position to redline or seriously influence redlining, 2) called for and actively supported it, or 3) even knew about it?
Even if someone's ancestors arrived post-slavery and pre-civil rights movement (forget a specific overhanging issue like redlining), would you significantly attribute the state and dynamics of American society to them? What about establishing your own sense of how this society works and establishing your own economic beachhead. Are you immediately supposed to jump in to the oldest and thorniest and most contentious issues of your new home country as if you knew what you were doing?
Let's extend that argument then. Why isn't there a strong, unequivocal history of latin immigrants fighting hard for reparations for slavery? Or asian immigrants? Do those immigrant communities also deserve part-blame for not fighting redlining in the 70s?
Would it be anathema do admit some white people in America had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of black people in America? Can the leftish political discourse bear this weighty notion, or would it break under its bulk?
But, to your points, there are historical forces that bring people good/bad fortune - including racism in America. How do you decide which ones are worthy of ex post facto adjustment on a society-wide level? How do you balance and justify that to the orthogonal part of your population; the part that had no role in the history but would still be impacted by the expenditure of communal resources? Keeping in mind here, the wider the net you cast for who need adjustment, the bigger the impact on the orthogonal population.
All I have to contribute is the fact that whatever the impact of slavery was, it wasn't confined to our distant past. This country practiced economic apartheid well into my own lifetime, and the aftereffects are impossible to miss.
I live near Division and Chicago, just outside of Chicago in Oak Park. If I cross my alley and the street behind it, Austin Blvd, I'm in the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, where, if I'm a teenaged Black kid, my likelihood of being murdered shoots up dramatically. And Austin is a middle-class neighborhood (a typical Black household making $75k/yr lives in a higher-poverty neighborhood than a white family making $40k/yr). What changes when you cross that street is that you cross a famous redlining boundary.
A few years back you could easily get a map of Chicago redlining without consulting an encyclopedia or doing any research; you just needed to look at Uber's Chicago service map. The neighborhoods they wouldn't commit to serving were uncannily the redlined neighborhoods of the 1960s.
It wasn't because Uber was trying to perpetuate the practice, but because redlining ravaged west- and south-side Chicago, and we are nowhere close to digging our way out of it.
Lots of different groups of people have been economically disadvantaged in the United States, but I don't think anything like this, at this scale, with this impact. It fucked my city --- the best city in the country --- right up. It fucked up Detroit. It fucked up STL. It's a big deal and we should all be freshly furious about it.
I agree that individual Americans shouldn't have to pay anything. All former slaveowners are long dead. These claims are properly levied against the government and whatever other institutions still exist (universities and corporations come to mind).
> I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.
You'll be relieved to learn that there are proposals for reparations that do not ask for payments to individuals.
There's no "logical hoops." It's a concrete and straightforward argument. Black and Native Americans are differently situated in a way that shows up starkly in the data: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
Most distinct subgroups of Americans are converging with whites in terms of income over generations:
> White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations
> The changing patterns of intergenerational mobility for Asians make it more difficult to predict the trajectory of their incomes, but Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run.
The two exceptions are Black and Native Americans:
> In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children.
> The large intergenerational gaps for blacks and American Indians relative to whites lead to disparities in earnings for these groups that persist across generations. If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions[.]
We tend to think of equality for Black Americans getting better over time, and while that has happened in the legal arena, it hasn't happened at all economically: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/09/872402262/what...
> While there have been some gains in income since the Kerner Commission, "in terms of the wealth gap, there's been almost no progress," says UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, who studies wealth inequality. "The average wealth of African Americans was 15% of the average wealth of whites in 1963 — and it's still around 15% today."
In 1963, the schools in my Maryland county were still segregated. They were desegregated in 1966. But half a century later, Black-white income and wealth gaps haven't changed at all. The founder of BET, Robert Johnson, has made a good capitalist case for reparations: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets-robert-johnson-calls-fo...
> “Damages is a normal factor in a capitalist society for when you have been deprived for certain rights,” he said. “If this money goes into pockets like the [coronavirus] stimulus checks ... that money is going to return back to the economy” in the form of consumption. There will also be more black-owned businesses, he added.
Arguments about whether white people today, or immigrants who came here after a certain time, should pay are misplaced. The United States, an entity that is legally distinct from its people, was culpable for enabling slavery and segregation. It can be held liable and forced to pay for its part. The United States government is still paying pensions owed to children of civil war veterans: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have-li....
Ignoring for a while a bunch of practical (though probably solvable to a large degree) problems with this, like on what basis exactly we decide who is paid, and how much are the damages exactly, a more interesting question to me is: what's next? Does this settle the claim completely? Do we consider the descendants of slaves, who get this settlement, to be made whole, and any further claims of the descendants of slaves are to be dismissed with prejudice? Are we supposed to no longer give any racial preferences and special treatment (beyond ensuring equal treatment that's a right of all American people regardless of their ancestry) to the descendants of slaves, given that any of their claims are settled in full? And finally, what do we do if the settlement does not close the gap completely? Are we then allowed to throw up our hands in the air, and say that the United States has settled its claims, and is not obligated to entertain any new ones beyond ensuring that those of actual unequal treatment are properly litigated?
My opinion here is that while settling the liability might look desirable from certain moral point of view, I sincerely doubt that it will bring a long term resolution of the problem attributed to the legacy of slavery. What I expect is that once settlement is paid up, everything about the issue will soon go back to exactly where it has been. This is not an argument against doing such settlement, but rather against high hopes for any positive long lasting change it is purported to bring about.
The way we pay for everything else—we have the Fed print money.
That would be the idea, yes.
> Do we consider the descendants of slaves, who get this settlement, to be made whole, and any further claims of the descendants of slaves are to be dismissed with prejudice?
It would depend on the specifics of the settlement, this is actually seriously discussed among reparations advocates. Its not all about writing checks to individuals. People want to put money in a fund that makes small business loans to qualified individuals.
> Are we supposed to no longer give any racial preferences and special treatment (beyond ensuring equal treatment that's a right of all American people regardless of their ancestry) to the descendants of slaves, given that any of their claims are settled in full?
That would do a lot to put an end to the racial animus in this country.
> And finally, what do we do if the settlement does not close the gap completely? Are we then allowed to throw up our hands in the air, and say that the United States has settled its claims, and is not obligated to entertain any new ones beyond ensuring that those of actual unequal treatment are properly litigated?
I'm not sure anyone is obligated to do anything but these questions will need to be addressed and conclusive answers may elude us but the existence of these questions doesn't invalidate the claim.
> My opinion here is that while settling the liability might look desirable from certain moral point of view, I sincerely doubt that it will bring a long term resolution of the problem attributed to the legacy of slavery. What I expect is that once settlement is paid up, everything about the issue will soon go back to exactly where it has been. This is not an argument against doing such settlement, but rather against high hopes for any positive long lasting change it is purported to bring about.
This is a good point and it may depend on the form of the settlement.
If there is no paper trail saying that you are a beneficiary of human trafficking, you will not pay reparations. In order to understand this, you and also the justice system need to evolve to see the world more granularly than just "race". Slaves had names, they had families, they had descendants. Those descendants have legal standing in the most basic sense: they have been deprived of property. Justice demands that those stolen assets be returned to the rightful, legal owners.
Forget "resolving racism". That's a red herring. Just return the stolen property to the rightful owners. That's a much more concrete, actionable goal.
Edit: please post response instead of downvoting. Why should this comment disappear?
What is the (broadly consistent) legal doctrine for expropriating living people's property on the basis of their ancestors sins?
How do you draw the line around legitimate grounds for litigating a criminal grievance from the past? How do you establish the appropriate damages?
I ask these important contextualizing questions not to imply that reparation aren't possible or are necessarily a bad idea, but rather to illustrate that the attitude of "this is easy, just do the obvious thing" is not going to be sufficient here. And when the comment begins with asserted speculation about what enacting reparations "would most likely" involve... I get very suspicious.
The assets changing hands will be the federal government paying descendants some sum of money taken from its tax base. And federal taxes are paid by everyone, even those of us whose families arrived after slavery and Jim Crow was abolished.
This is why some people are adamantly against reparations.