The subject of reparations being offered to African-Americans for two-and-a-half centuries of slavery and Jim Crow laws and their consequences is in the air this election season. No one quite knows the forms such reparations might take, but most people will at least acknowledge that lasting damage was done to an enslaved people (and their heirs) worked, in many cases, to death generating the wealth of white America. Prohibited from speaking their languages, worshipping their religions, maintaining the integrities of their families—husbands, wives, and children often sold at the discretion of masters—in addition to these afflictions, corporal punishment and summary executions, they received nothing for their work.
Even after slavery had been abolished, Jim Crow and vagrancy laws in the South were consistently administered to ensure the free labor required by the Southern economy. These laws were enforced with unspeakable violence. According to a study in the Washington Post in 2015—
“Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials,” the report’s summary states.
Researchers have determined that 3,959 black people were killed in “racial terror lynchings” in a dozen Southern states between 1877 and 1950. The newly adjusted numbers include 700 people not previously named in earlier works which attempted to comprehensively document the toll. Some of those previous studies were conducted while lynching was still an ongoing phenomenon.[1]
Men and women were hanged by the thousands, burned alive, tortured and their agonies photographed and reproduced as post-card memorabilia for white communities that attended the events, often bringing their children along as witnesses, for transgression as slight as not stepping off the sidewalk when a white person approached, looking a white man in the eye, speaking to a white woman, suggesting that an error had been made in the year’s accounts owed to a sharecropper family, or trying to vote or organize labor.
If one has wronged another, before there is any hope of reconciliation, at least an apology must be proffered acknowledging the harm. The U.S. House of Representative issued such an apology for slavery in 2008, but an apology by one-half of the government, while better than nothing, does not constitute an act of national contrition. I doubt that many citizens are even aware of or now or remember this event.
Let us be excessively generous for the moment and consider that half official apology a first step towards healing this national wound. After an apology, some accounting of the harm done to victims must be calculated and some attempt at redress made. Logically and morally that is not a difficult conclusion.
It is at this point however, that the argument becomes enmeshed in resentment, ideology, and old prejudices.
The damages against African Americans and the lasting effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws are so egregious that some people recoil at even considering reparations because the amount required for anything resembling compensation would be too inconceivably large to consider.[2] One’s perspective on this varies widely depending on how much melanin is in one’s skin. It is not surprising that in this current era of widening income gaps and job loss, where personal status and family survival feel ever more precarious, that the idea of reparations for African Americans is widely unpopular among white people. What surprises this writer is the degree and severity of reported white response.
In a study conducted by YouGov in 2014, only 37% of Americans believed that slaves should have received any cash compensation after being freed. Furthermore, only 15% believed that descendants of slaves should ever receive cash payments. The findings indicated a clear divide between black and white Americans on this issue, noting: "Only 6% of white Americans support cash payments to the descendants of slaves, compared to 59% of black Americans. Similarly, only 19% of whites – and 63% of blacks – support special education and job training programs for the descendants of slaves.
It is these last figures that are particularly disturbing. Education benefits, some tax advantages, job-training for victims of poverty and racism at the Nation’s hand, and legislation to promote minority business lending and the availability of capital would diminish the burden by spreading it across the entire population. What does one make of the scale of this resistance the core concern of the political dilemma blocking the Nation’s honorable response to a criminal assault which spanned generations? What are we to make of this resistance, and what might insistence on paying reparations do to Democratic chances to win the Presidency or the Senate next year?
In 1973, Edgar Z. Friedenberg wrote a brilliant little book called The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial Wastes. In it, he addressed the problems of the “peculiar mean-spiritedness of democratic political life…and the growth of spite and rancor among the lower-middling functionaries” of modern society. He cites a term by Friedrich Nietzsche called Ressentiment ( not to be confused with the English word ‘resentment.’) Here is his definition:
Ressentiment is a free-floating disposition to visit upon others the bitterness that accumulates from one’s own subordination and existential guilt at allowing oneself to be used by other people for their own purposes, while one’s own life rusts away unnoticed.”
He goes on to describe Ressentiment as “the inescapable consequence of exploitation.” The book makes a well-reasoned argument about why, for instance, so many public solutions to problems involve vast bureaucracies and humiliating demands on clients who are not free to refuse the services offered to them—the unemployed, students. He continues:
“When the demands of the deprived cannot be ignored, the funding that might have been directly used to provide for them is diverted into bureaucratic structures whose major function is to control them, though minimal provision for their subsistence will be made in the process as necessary to keep them going and maintain the raison d’être of the service organization.
We have seen countless examples of such bureaucracies like Welfare and unemployment, and public schools, to realize that any suggestions of giving someone something they supposedly did not earn, will be met with rancor and political resistance.
It is as specious for opponents of Reparations to suggest that the “original” victims of slavery are all dead as it would be to suggest that children of depressed Holocaust survivors, or the children of parents suffering PTSD from war and disaster suffered no consequences. Such wounds percolate through the generations, are transmitted across dinner tables and family gatherings like ripples expanding after a stone has broken the surface tension of a lake. When such damages have been enforced by law and enshrined institutions of white superiority, it is easy to see the evidence of the damage in today’s swollen black prison populations and disparities of wealth, which remain like bruises after a beating. According to the Guardian newspaper, A new report calculates that median wealth for black Americans will fall to $0 by 2053, if current trends continue.[3]
My fear is that the singling out of one deserving population for recompense will unleash torrents of resentment that could well cost Democratic the next election. There is a way around it I feel, and this article is dedicated to that strategy.
Many non-African-Americans will resist any form of reparations and argue(correctly) that numerous cultures and races have been aggrieved at the hands of our Nation and the singling out of one for special benefit deprives the rest of justice. First among equals of course is the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and their continued enforced impoverishment, and lax execution of trust responsibilities by the Federal Government.[4]
Let’s then include the indentured servants who traded seven years of their lives for the cost of their passage to America, toiling during those years to build the means of production—clearing the land, building mills, barns, granaries etc.-- for the Founding Fathers. Let’s include the waves of late 19th century immigrants, particularly the Chinese who were not allowed to bring wives with them, were worked, in some cases to death, and then excluded. In the 20th Century immigrants were subject to prejudice and used as divisive wedges to lower wages, diminish union power, and often as shock troops to protect white only neighborhoods (with Chicago’s white ethnic resistance to African-American migration out of ‘black’ neighborhoods as a case-in-point)
During my own childhood Jews like myself were prohibited and limited in many occupations and barred or limited at many schools and universities. My family was unable to join the country club one block from our family home. All such people have heirs who inherited family wounds, and sustained damage at the hands of the economic and political system. I sense their numbers and outrage at being unrecognized in the enormity of the majority against reparations.
Given the above, it occurs to me that to be successful, reparations for African-Americans must, also acknowledge other unrecognized victims as well. Suffering is not a competitive sport, and the admission of more people into consideration of who is owed compensation for damages, does not/nor should not, weaken the case for African-Americans. It does lead one to believe however, that the scale of damage done to such groups, collectively or in combination can only be addressed by systemic changes which may unintentionally benefit all citizens.
By Jim Crow standards I am non-White (Kazakh, Semitic, North African and Spanish) my mother’s Russian genes have camouflaged me to appear white and so I have benefitted by receiving white perks and privileges during my lifetime. It is not for me to specify the compensation others should receive. That is theirs to determine and claim, but a clear analysis of the political vectors and risks involved might suggest creative alliances to fight for programmatic reparations for all dedicated in the name of Justice and healing—free medical care, free higher education, forgiveness of student loans, government loans to students at advantageous interest rates, favorable loan and tax categories for those who should have received recognition and compensation, and access to pools of capital available to nurture small business ventures and entrepreneurism among traditionally ignored populations. Such broad packages of benefits and extended alliances might produce reparations for legions of past oppressions which would cover sizeable percentages of the population to pass political muster and serve the purpose of forging tighter bonds between cultures and communities, rather than fostering resentments which split them apart, offering political advantage to Republicans.
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[1] “Even More Black People Were Lynched in the U.S. Previously Thought, Study Finds” Mark Berman,Washington Post, February 10, 2015
[2] Economist Robert Browne stated the ultimate goal of reparations should be to "restore the black community to the economic position it would have if it had not been subjected to slavery and discrimination".[8] He estimates a fair reparation value anywhere between $1.4 to $4.7 Trillion, or roughly $142,000 for every black American living today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery
3 inequality.project@theguardian.com
4 As an instance: Several years ago, after a decade of extensive pressure from the House Committee on Government Operations, the BIA agreed to contract with Arthur Anderson & Co. to audit and reconcile both the tribal accounts and a random sampling of some 17,000 IIM accounts. The sampling of the IIM accounts
was to be a precursor to a complete reconciliation of all IIM trust accounts -- the first in history. What happened next is truly astounding. After years of work and millions of dollars in fees, Arthur Anderson was only able to reconcile the 2,000 tribal accounts -- not the 17,000 IIMs -- and only then for the relatively short period of some 20 years from 1973 to 1992. For this 20-year period alone, the auditor noted that at least $2.4 billion in the tribal trust accounts was unaccounted for and billions of dollars more were virtually untraceable because of the questionable nature of the government's records. http://albionmonitor.com/free/biatrustfund.html