Why Reparations are Wrong
The Society, By J.L. Reiter
For educated Europeans, the word “reparations” brings to mind the enormous burden placed on Germany by France and Britain after World War I to compensate them for four years of ruin. The result was to destroy Germany’s economy, causing inflation that in the early 1920s required literally wheelbarrows of paper money to buy a mere postage stamp. The high unemployment that accompanied stratospheric inflation made willing recruits for both Communists and Nazis, and created a popular resentment against the victorious French and English that Hitler exploited to come to power. Still, at least these reparations were paid by living Germans (minus more than a million men who had already paid by dying in the war) to living Allies.
However, for today’s Americans, “reparations” mean payback for slavery, by people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves. As a policy, it is proposed by leftist Democrats, for whom it fits snugly into a framework where the U.S. is a “structurally racist,” “white supremacist” country that can only be fixed by dismantling racist “systems” and discriminating in favor of “oppressed” groups.
This takes the US along the path to ruin in many ways. Reparations are incalculable, in that none of the necessary variables exist; impracticable, in that they could not be carried out without grave economic damage; and impolitic in that they would derail America’s steady progress toward racial equality while exacerbating inter-racial animus.
Let’s start with a quick review of history.
First forcibly brought to the English colonies in the early 17th century and thereafter mostly to the Southern states, slaves were freed during (in the Confederacy) and after (in the rest of the United States) the Civil War. Promises by General Sherman of “40 acres and a mule” for every freed slave were never kept; the North attempted Reconstruction of the South for a decade before abandoning the project in 1877 in the face of fervent southern white opposition and as part of a national political deal to elect President Rutherford B. Hayes. This left blacks in the South languishing under a system of oppressive state and local laws, later called “Jim Crow,” that severely limited their economic and political lives until the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s began to ameliorate their plight.
Since then, Federal and local governments, businesses, schools, and universities have created an array of programs to redress the various disadvantages that slavery and overt racism imposed on black Americans prior to the civil rights laws of the mid-1960s. These measures include child and family welfare payments; preferential hiring and reserved government contracts for minority-owned companies (called “affirmative action” after a phrase used by President Lyndon Johnson); and significantly lower test score requirements for admission to competitive schools. Notwithstanding these efforts, black Americans descended from slaves remain, on average, behind other groups (whites, Asians, black African immigrants) in education and average household wealth.
A 2014 essay in the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the standard “The Case for Reparations” for the left. The core argument is that the gap in average personal wealth between white and black Americans can only be due to historical injustice, which is allegedly present today in what the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah calls “… continued White dominance of important institutions — business, media, politics — across society.” In this bleak, dystopian vision, modern America has made no real progress since 1865, let alone 1965. In April 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee voted to form a commission to study reparations proposals. There have been efforts in some states and cities, using local tax money, to go further, even enacting reparations on a small scale.
A basic objection to reparations is on moral grounds: Why should Americans whose ancestors fought the Civil War to end slavery (over 300,000 Union soldiers died) or those who lived in areas where there was no Jim Crow, or no black people for that matter, pay reparations to anyone today? Why should Americans whose ancestors arrived after the Civil War, or who themselves arrived after the Civil Rights era, pay? Why should poor whites, Asians, or Hispanics pay reparations to rich blacks? As scholars like Wilfred Reilly have pointed out, the argument that disparities between groups can only be due to racism is belied not least by the fact that most of the top ten richest demographic sub-groups in America are non-white, including not only south and east Asians but also African and Caribbean immigrants.
Why should the children of rich Nigerians, or Ghanaian or Jamaican immigrants, get cash reparations in addition to easier entry into Ivy League schools and other race-based advantages? As Brown University economist Glenn Loury points out, the 40 million or so black Americans represent the richest community of people of African descent anywhere in the world, including Africa itself. Why should the children of America’s significant black elite be paid reparations, by white, Hispanic, or other people who are poor?
Reparations, as a current policy proposal, is supposed to be a one-shot effort to compensate individual black Americans today for all the disadvantages that racist housing, education, and economic policies--varying tremendously across states and times--cost them as a group over the past 400 years. There is no doubt that an unpardonable injustice was done by many white Americans to most blacks over much of the country’s history, and that some effects have lasted into the present day. However, attributing a percentage of blame for any particular measurable disparity to historical, legal racism above all other factors (e.g. geography, age, family structure, occupation, educational attainment, or personal industry) is a major obstacle for proponents of reparations. To overcome this, Coates and How to be an Anti-Racist author Ibram X. Kendi simplistically consider all present disparities between black and white Americans as entirely due to racism.
Calculating a dollar figure is an even bigger hurdle. Duke University professor William Darity attributes the entire ‘wealth gap’ between the average black and white American family to the effects of slavery, as if there were no other inputs, and estimates the cost of redressing it, by giving every slave-descended black family around $800,000, with the whole program costing an astronomical $11 trillion, a sum of money which would amount to an unprecedented act of economic suicide for the country as a whole.
If one can simply ignore the question of fairness, as proponents clearly have, there remain the practical obstacles to implementing reparations: How would one identity the recipients? National NAACP President Derrick Johnson has said that there should be no distinction made between black Americans descended from slaves and black Africans in general, thus opening the field of potential recipients without limit. How much would each recipient get? Where would the money come from?
Even if they were fair, and practicable, human nature tells us that any reparations payment made would only lead to more claims, even less tethered to reality. Look at a few examples from former colonies, where the idea of shaking down the woke Western conscience for money to right historical wrongs has caught on. This year, the German Foreign Minister accepted that Germany was responsible for a genocide in Namibia between 1904 and 1908, when colonizers killed tens of thousands of Ovaherero and Nama people. Germany offered roughly $1.3 billion in aid for the country as a “gesture of recognition for immeasurable suffering.”
There was indeed an atrocity: perhaps three-quarters of the Ovaherero and nearly half the Nama were killed, and their land and livestock were taken as punishment for taking part in an uprising. However, it was committed more than a century ago by a country (Imperial Germany, under Kaiser Wilhelm II) that no longer exists, by people long dead. The country that perpetrated the act in Namibia has since been reconstituted as the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Democratic (East) and Federal (West) German Republics, and now a united Germany since the 1990s. An admission of responsibility and offer of payment was completely unnecessary from a legal standpoint, even if the Germans felt it morally so.
Was it enough? Of course not. Namibian member of parliament Inna Hengari called the deal, which took six years to negotiate, an “insult.” Local traditional chiefs, understandably assuming the money would never reach their communities, claimed they were not consulted and also rejected the offer. They want more money, control over who gets it, and an apology – not just acknowledgement – of the genocide. The chiefs want the words “reparations” or “compensation” specifically mentioned, despite the obvious legal implications of those words that Germany was keen to avoid.
Inspired by the Nama-Herero case, the Aliab, a sub-tribe of the Dinka Community in South Sudan, have demanded compensation from Great Britain for “hundreds of people killed and over 14,000 cattle looted by British soldiers between 1919 and 1920” (in response to the assassination of a British officer). In a letter to the British Ambassador, the Aliab claim that any reparations would go “to fund community infrastructure including schools, hospitals, veterinary centers, and piped potable water.” One could be forgiven for questioning whether the money would be any better spent than the hundreds of millions already taken from Western taxpayers to prop up the catastrophe that is South Sudan.
The collective strategy seems to be to aim high and negotiate down to whatever guilt will get you. So, this will go on, until former colonial powers reject their responsibility for actions taken by their long-dead ancestors.
Obviously, no one alive is arguing that slavery wasn’t anything but evil. However, it was also present in nearly all human civilizations from ancient times until the 19th century, and vestiges of it remain even today in the Middle East and Africa. It was and is by no means merely a black-white racial phenomenon, and it was ended by white Europeans. When it comes to blanket claims for generic colonial injustice, however, one might as well argue that the Romans should compensate the Gauls, or the Vikings the British, as that Americans of 2021 should settle the scores of 1619-1865.
While historically America has seen worse times, not since the Vietnam era has the country’s political and social divisions seemed so stark. Democrats seem intent on embedding identity politics into every aspect of economic and civil life, which means white people are only at the beginning of a never-ending road of apology and self-loathing prescribed by ideologues like Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, the woke, white person’s guide to self-flagellation.
People are capable of both sinning and of repentance, but they will not accept being told they are shameful forever for what their faraway, dead relatives perpetrated, without eventually rejecting the scolds. Republicans have a long way to go to formulate a hopeful, forward-looking vision to inspire national unity, but they are on safer political ground in rejecting reparations and other attempts at socially-engineered “equity.” Meanwhile, if the Democrats remain mired in revision and revanchism, they will eventually lose voters who don’t want to marinate in the guilt of others forever.
America is a forward-looking country, one of whose signal strengths is that we don’t want to be bogged down in historical vendettas forever like so many other peoples. Forcing some taxpayers to pay large sums of money to others based purely on the color of their skin should be called out as the racism it is. It is a grievance-based, tragically short-sighted way to live and to think. Democrats should toss it on the ash heap of history, and move onto ideas to lift all poor or disadvantaged Americans, not just those of the ‘right’ color. So long as ideologues keep alive the tantalizing idea of cash reparations for injustices no one alive can account for, we will ever be a country divided, looking backward, mired in vituperation and regret.
—J. L. Reiter has East Coast origins but has lived and worked abroad for 25 years. He writes a semi-regular column here, ‘The Society,’ on US domestic culture, society, and politics.