The Case Against Reparations

Progressive, The, Dec, 2000 by Adolph L. Jr. Reed

The notion that white America, however defined, owes reparations to black Americans for slavery and its legacy has been around for some time. Until recently, its most dramatic eruption into public life was in 1969, when James Forman, the former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), led a protest at New York's liberal Riverside Church and presented a "Black Manifesto" that demanded, among other things, $500 million in reparations to black Americans from white churches and synagogues. The idea lingered on the periphery of the public agenda for a few years. In 1972, Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH and the National Economics Association, a black economists' group, attempted to reintroduce it around the Presidential election in conjunction with a demand for a $900 million "freedom budget."

For the next two decades, the idea of organizing to demand reparations circulated mainly within politically marginal, nationalist circles. It did not gain much traction even among black activists.

During the last half-dozen years or so, however, the issue has been threatening to come in from the margins. Partly stimulated by the successful pursuit of compensation for Japanese Americans who were interned by the U.S. government during World War II and for victims of Nazi slave labor, talk of a movement to demand reparations for black Americans has been spreading.

I've watched this with curiosity and bemusement. I imagined that the reparations talk would evaporate because it seemed so clearly a political dead end. No such luck.

Publication of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (E.P. Dutton, 2000) by Randall Robinson, the respected president of TransAfrica, the organization that played a central role in the U.S. movement against apartheid in South Africa, seems to have propelled the reparations issue into the spotlight. Now it seems to be everywhere--in special features on network television, in mainstream publications like Harper's and The New York Times, and all over the black-oriented media.

How has this happened? And what is its significance? To put it more provocatively, how does a project that seems so obviously a nonstarter in American politics come to capture so much of the public imagination? After all, support for affirmative action has eroded significantly, and reparations raises the ante on compensatory policy exponentially. Why has this idea attained currency now?

Answering these questions requires understanding that the call for reparations blends material, symbolic, and psychological components.

The material component is the most obvious, since the call for reparations responds to the actual harm inflicted on blacks during and after slavery. This component includes direct legacies, such as the federal government's failure to fulfill the promise of Emancipation by adopting the Radical Republican proposals during Reconstruction that would have expropriated the plantations in the South and divided them among the freed people, thus establishing a black yeomanry of independent stakeholders. It also includes the federal government's further capitulation to the former slaveholders by accepting their disenfranchisement of black voters later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, black citizens were removed from effective participation in public life. What followed was the imposition of the white supremacist regime of official political and economic apartheid that reigned in the South for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

The indirect material legacy of slavery includes such explicitly discriminatory practices as the Federal Housing Administration's enforcement of racially exclusionary "restrictive covenants" in its lending policies officially until 1948 and unofficially for some years thereafter. This practice severely disadvantaged black people's pursuit of home ownership, the principal form of capital accumulation for most Americans.

The effects of unequal education, labor market discrimination, and publicly initiated and supported ghettoization are further indirect material legacies of slavery. We could also include the effects of New Deal compromises with Southern Democrats--largely racially inspired--that excluded most black workers from initial coverage under Social Security and agricultural assistance.

That blacks have been systematically disadvantaged as a result of slavery and its aftermath there can be no doubt. That is the strength of the material case for reparations.

The symbolic component of the reparations campaign seems to center on public acknowledgment of the injustices inflicted on black people historically in this country. On the one hand, this could promote public education about the real history of the United States, although that is a project that does not require the rhetoric of reparations. On the other hand, it fits the Clintonoid tenor of sappy public apologies and maudlin psychobabble about collective pain and healing.

Robinson, for his part, seems fixated on pursuing racial parity in monuments and statuary--perhaps a function of his long years in Washington, D.C., and his growing up in Richmond, Virginia, two cities in which the politics of public monuments loom larger than elsewhere. (And how much would you like to bet that that's as far as the restitution would go? Elites will always prefer symbolic gestures to material ones: "Let's see, should we give them college tuition and affordable housing or a heartfelt apology and a few monuments and plaques? Hmmm, which will it be, which will it be?")