 Slavery was a horror. But today's blacks are not survivors and today's whites are not culpable. |
ARE BLACK Americans owed reparations for the 240 years that their forebears were enslaved in this country? Some people have always said so, but the claim has never been taken seriously.
Perhaps that is going to change. Last week, two of the best-known black men on Harvard's faculty enlisted in the reparations crusade. Law professsor Charles Ogletree Jr. told The Boston Globe that he and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department, as well as several other intellectuals, are assessing "the viability" of demanding payment for the long generations of slavery.
Their announcement comes shortly after the publication of "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," a passionate brief in favor of reparations by Randall Robinson, the founder of TransAfrica. An issue that has always been relegated to the political fringe is beginning to draw the spotlight of mainstream attention.
Exactly how the descendants of slaves should be compensated isn't clear even to those who favor the idea. Ideas run the gamut from a government check for each black family to free college tuition for needy black students. Nor do the advocates agree on the best way to press their demand. Some talk of a class-action lawsuit. Others support a bill, annually introduced by John Conyers, a Detroit congressman, that would set up a federal commission on reparations.
But the details are beside the point, Ogletree says. "This is not a situation of someone sitting at the mailbox waiting for a check," he told the Globe. "That trivializes the broad purpose. The real point is to put closure to a very sorry period in our history."
Closure, however, is the one thing a great debate on the subject of reparations is assuredly not going to provide. Far from calming racial grievances, it will only inflame them further. As it is, the quotas and preferences of affirmative action fuel endless strife and afflict American society with a nerve-racking color-consciousness. A national campaign for a vast transfer of wealth from whites to blacks is not going to make things better.
The argument for reparations is not a frivolous one. "Black people worked long, hard, killing days, years, centuries — and they were never paid," Randall Robinson writes. "The value of their labor went into others' pockets — plantation owners, Northern entrepreneurs, state treasuries, the United States government. . . . There is a debt here."
Supporters of reparations cite economists who calculate the value of that debt, adjusted for inflation, at $1.4 trillion — and up. And that doesn't include the added trillions lost to black Americans after Emancipation — the income they were denied because of legal segregation and discrimination.
This is not a claim without merit. Indeed, as a matter of abstract justice, the case for reparations is profound. But so are the objections to it. No white American alive today has ever owned a slave, and the vast majority of Americans are descended from non-slaveowners. No black American alive today is a survivor of slavery, or even the child — or with rare exceptions, the grandchild — of a survivor of slavery. The nearly 2½ centuries during which human beings were treated as chattel are a sordid stain on our history. But no living American is responsible for that stain, and none deserves to be punished for it.
Those who call for reparations point to precedents — the money paid to Japanese-Americans for their internment during World War II and the sums earmarked for Jews to settle claims arising from the Holocaust. But those cases stand on a different moral plane. The Japanese Americans who received payment were themselves imprisoned by the US government. The Jewish survivors who accepted compensation from the German government — and many survivors, incidentally, refused to touch so much as a pfennig — themselves suffered at the hands of the Germans.
Slavery was a horror and its effects are with us still, but today's blacks are not survivors and today's whites are not culpable.
Some injustices cannot be rectified. Some debts cannot be paid. Surely the proponents of reparations do not mean to suggest that mere dollars — even trillions of them — can retroactively cleanse the evil committed by those who bought and used Africans like cattle.
The United States inherited slavery from the Europeans who colonized America, and didn't abolish it until 1865. There is an ocean of tragedy in that history. But there is also a world of hope and glory in the long American ascent to equality and civil rights. Slavery and Jim Crow were wretched, but they came to an end. And they did so in large part because white Americans turned against them.
Nothing can atone for the brutality of slavery, but that doesn't mean Americans have not tried to make things right. The descendants of the slaves live in a land where the government, the law, and the courts are adamant about protecting their rights and ensuring equality for all. That may not balance the ledger-books of history. It is not everything. But it is a great deal, and it has enabled African-Americans to know more freedom and success than any black people in history.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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