By Katharine Whittemore
One of the most powerful magazine articles I’ve ever read is “The Case for Reparations,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the June 2014 issue of The Atlantic. Its subtitle says it all: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”
Still for some the argument for redress probably seems pie in the sky. It is not. After World War II, Germany paid its victims and the Jewish state of Israel, and in 1988 the United States paid Japanese Americans interned during the war. Coates showed us why the nation should embrace racial reparations — then today’s books deepened his case.
“Unrectified evil is evil still,” declares J. Angelo Corlett in my first title, “Race, Racism and Reparations” (Cornell University, 2003). Corlett explains that Native Americans were robbed of their land, but African-Americans were robbed of their income during slavery, and then again under Jim Crow. Thus these reparations should not be land-based, but monetary, a way to atone for centuries of economic inequality, just as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 met centuries of political inequality.
He goes on to list (and dispense with) each objection to reparations. Take the objection of historical complexity, meaning how could you possibly trace each injustice and how far back do you go? Answer: Do lawyers throw out cases because they’re “too complex’’? Plus, the reparations movement is legally justified by the principle of “morally just acquisitions and transfers,” which have no statute of limitations. Then there’s the objection of collective responsibility — should the present generation have to pay for the mistakes of their ancestors? Answer: Nations are, by nature, transgenerational entities, honoring treaties that go back many decades; in America, we hold sacred a 1788 document called the Constitution.
The movement is stronger the closer you get to the equator, as I found out via “Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide” (University of West Indies, 2013). Hilary McD. Beckles, an economic historian based in Barbados, reveals that those who lived in the Caribbean did get reparations: It’s just that Britain paid, unbelievably, the slave owners, not the slaves. After slavery was abolished in 1838, they got 20 million pounds in compensation for their loss of property. Prime Minister David Cameron’s wealth, for instance, rests in part on slave reparations.
In 2014, CARICOM (the Caribbean Community and Common Market) approved a 10-point plan for slavery reparations (Beckles chaired the task force). Down there, the slave era is called “Barbarity Time,” and Beckles cites how, in the 20th century, international law recognized crimes against humanity and lays out steps for redress. Slavery, he reasons, is also a crime against humanity, and a meritorious claim must meet three criteria: 1) The injustice must be well documented; 2) The victims must be identifiable as a distinct group; 3) The current members of the group must continue to suffer harm. Check, check, check.
In “Reparations for Nazi Victims in Postwar Europe” (Cambridge University, 2012), Regula Ludi shows how the Nazi experience radically changed the concept of reparations. Before, it was a matter of the losing side in a war paying the winning side. But now payment goes to defenseless victims. Nahum Goldmann, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, and David Ben-Gurion, prime minister of Israel, pushed hard to get Germany to pay reparations under the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952. Ben-Gurion focused on confiscated Jewish property, especially “heirless assets,” which should go to Israel “so that the murderers do not become the heirs as well.”
This fueled the fledgling Israeli state: A third of its electrical system was funded by reparations, plus half its railways. Ludi also covers the French redress system, modeled on its pension plan for Resistance fighters, and Switzerland’s plan, which dispensed monies in limited instances, hoping to deflect debate on the Swiss role in funding the Nazi war machine.
A third of Jewish sufferers refused this “blood money” and that story is rivetingly told in “How to Accept German Reparations” (University of Pennsylvania, 2014). Anthropologist Susan Slyomovics, the daughter of Auschwitz survivors, explores many nuances and ambivalences. Her mother rejected reparations for decades, while her grandmother accepted them from the start. Meanwhile, the German state moved from cruel absurdity (at first, a slave laborer couldn’t get back wages because there were no wages to make up) to dramatically relaxed restrictions after the fall of communism in the 1990s.
“Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice” (Polity, 2002) is by an Australian philosophy professor named Janna Thompson, and it offers a sophisticated theory of moral justice, through the lens of reparations for black Americans and the Aborigines of her country. It’s true that “[h]istory is a tale of unrequited justice,” but it’s also true that, as Edmund Burke said, a political society “is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those yet to be born.” We believe past environmental wrongs must be addressed to create a viable future. Surely, the same applies to historical wrongs? Thompson points out both precedents and inconsistencies; Japanese-Americans achieved reparations, for instance, even though they were treated better than slaves, and their period of injustice lasted three years, not three centuries.
“Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress” (University of Illinois, 1999) chronicles this remarkable, hard-won success. Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H. Kitano, and S. Megan Berthold argue that it took a number of factors — publicity from incarceration memoirs, ethnic organizational efforts, savvy political moves — to bring about passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, wherein some 82,000 Japanese-American internees received a formal apology and $20,000 apiece in compensation for their lost income and property during World War II.
The bill was co-sponsored by California Representative Norman Mineta, who was interned in Wyoming as a boy, and Wyoming’s Alan Simpson, who met Mineta at that same camp. I was impressed at how the movement cannily marshaled symbolism: Japanese-American World War II veterans, in full uniform, were featured at every event, and the vote was timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.
Meanwhile, every year since 1989, Representative John Conyers has raised a bill to create a commission to discuss reparations — just discuss — for descendents of slavery. It dies in committee each time. In “Long Overdue: the Politics of Racial Reparations” (New York University, 2007), Charles P. Henry draws lessons from how Holocaust victims and Japanese-American internees won redress, noting that the latter emphasized unconstitutionality, not race. He also analyzes smaller precedents, namely the lawsuits brought by residents of two black communities destroyed by white rioting in the 1920s. The suit predicated on “racial reparations” lost (Tulsa, Okla.), but the suit based on “compensation” (Rosewood, Fla.) won. Rosewood also had distinct advantages: The payout was lower (there were fewer survivors), and influential local pols supported the cause.
What might be the math of reparations? One economist puts the modern equivalent of 40 acres and a mule (promised in Reconstruction, but almost never given) as $98,000 per each African-American, or $3 trillion altogether. If you blanch at such a figure, ask yourself this: Do you come from a long line of wage earners? Have you benefited from inheritance? The average estate for a white family is $265,000. For a black family, it’s $28,500.
In his Atlantic article, Coates tells the story of Clyde Ross, age 91, redlined out of a mortgage and the son of ancestors who were bilked routinely. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Ross says. “It’s because of then.”
Katharine Whittemore is a freelance writer based in Northampton. She can be reached at katharine.whittemore @comcast.net.
