For black Americans, a long road to reparations
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After 50 years of slavery Belinda Sutton was freed and given a pension from the estate of the man who had enslaved her, but it was not from his generosity. Born in Ghana, Sutton had to go to court to get an income for her work, performed on an estate near Boston. And she had to keep returningto enforce the legal decision that she would be paid.
Her 1783 struggle to get repayment—one of the earliest known cases in the United States—foreshadowed the difficulties formerly enslaved people and their descendants faced in seeking similar compensation.
Black Americans have again called for reparations that would redress slavery, post-Civil War land ownership restrictions for the newly freedmen, Jim Crow laws, redlining, discriminatory lending practices, and employment discrimination.
The first state-level task force to consider reparations, in California, officially filed for a sweep report which recommended a formal apology and called for payments to eligible black residents.
Despite pockets with momentum in it different citiesthe battle for reparations is an uphill battle.
What are reparations?
Reparations are measures that seek to rectify a horrific injustice with an acknowledgment and an apology. In this context, they refer to an effort to end the unpaid labor of millions of Africans who arrived in the English North American colonies as human property. Their work was essential to the accumulation of American capital, but neither they nor their descendants shared in the benefits.
The goal of any recovery plan today is to compensate the 40 million descendants of the enslaved people and, in theory, to reduce the inequalities caused by slavery.
Why is there more interest in the reparations debate?
The topic was largely confined to the political left until June 2014 article in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates led to a heated discussion. Coates argued that after being exploited by almost every American institution, Black Americans should be properly compensated.
Momentum built in 2019, the 400th anniversary of the first documented arrival of Africans in the Virginia colony. Coates was the key witness at a congressional hearing on a bill, House Resolution 40, calling for a commission to study reparations for slavery. Further attention was drawn to the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans through The Times’ The 1619 Project.
Following high-profile deaths of black Americans at the hands of police officers, such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd, calls for racial justice are accompanied by demands for reparations. The call for reparations also became a more prominent campaign theme in 2020, including in the Democratic primary.
Why might reparations be necessary?
White Americans, especially those who belonged to slave-owning families, amassed considerable wealth through the unpaid work of Africans. Enslaved people grew the cotton, built the railroads, and developed the great universities that fueled the growth of the American economy. After the Civil War, four million people were freed, but without a dollar to their name.
Land ownership has been the main driver of wealth in the United States, and the lack of access for black Americans is the basis on which the wealth gap exists today.
The Domestic law granted hundreds of millions of acres in the West (which were the traditional or treaty lands of many Native American tribes) to white Americans in 1862; and free land was used to incentivize white foreigners to immigrate to the United States.
From 1862 to 1934, the federal government gave away nearly 10 percent of the nation’s land to more than 1.5 million white families. About 46 million American adults are descended from those homesteaders.
Restrictions on land tenure left Black Americans collectively own less land than the nation’s top five landowners, all of whom are white. That was six million black Americans forced to flee the terror of the Jim Crow South, and many of them left behind farms, homes, shops, vehicles and other economic assets.
A measure taken by the federal government points to the average the median wealth for black households is $24,100, while the average median wealth for white households is $188,200.
When you break it down, a black family has 12 cents for every dollar a typical white household has, a gap that has grown over the past half century.
When are reparations paid in the US?
Americans who received compensation for historic injustices include: Native Americans, for land seized by the government; Japanese Americans, because they were held in internment camps; survivors of police abuse in Chicago; victims of forced sterilization; and black residents Rosewooda Florida town that was burned to the ground by a murderous white mob.
“It lifted the specter of infidelity that hung over us for 42 years because we were imprisoned,” said Representative Robert T. Matsui, a California Democrat who was interned with his parents as a child. “We became whole again as American citizens.”
The payments of $20,000 to about 80,000 eligible Japanese Americans were nowhere near compensation for the property they lost, and other examples of reparations were mostly not forthcoming.
Today, institutions have taken on a leading role. A prominent order of Catholic priests said it plans to raise $100 million for the descendants of the people it enslaved. Virginia Theological Seminary, created a $1.7 million fund to support black seminarians and black worshipers. The Princeton Theological Seminary said it would spend $27 million on scholarships and initiatives to redress his ties to slavery. Georgetown said it would raise about $400,000 a year to benefit the descendants of the 272 enslaved people sold nearly 200 years ago to help the college.
Some cities and municipalities have taken action. In 2021, the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, became the first to pass a measure that would allow up to $25,000 in direct descendants of black residents disadvantaged by discriminatory housing policies between 1919 and 1969.
What is the argument against the idea of reparations?
Some critics argue that anyone owed reparations is dead, and that people who did not benefit from the slave trade, or those who never owned slaves, should not have to compensate the descendants of enslaved Africans. Reparations would create more racial tension, they add.
Others argue that the country paid its debt with blood during the Civil War and that Black Americans benefited from social programs such as affirmative action, which the Supreme Court recently ended for college admissions. Some insist that black Americans are better off in the United States today than they are in Africa. Dwelling on the issue, they say, perpetuates a psychology of victimization rather than individual responsibility.
There are also doubts about the affordability of cash reparations, after San Francisco city councilors proposed a one-time payment of $5 million to all who qualify, and a California reparations task force recommended up to $1.2 million for older black residents. None of these will be adopted by lawmakers for months on end.
How is the idea of reparations viewed?
About 80 percent of white Americans say they believe descendants of enslaved people in the United States should not be repaid in any way, according to a Pew Research Center survey, while only 17 percent of black Americans oppose reparations. In addition, 58 percent of Hispanic adults and 65 percent of Asian respondents are not in favor; together these two growing groups make up a quarter of the population.
Opinion is divided between Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Eight percent of Republicans and right-leaning people believe that descendants of enslaved people should be repaid in some way, according to Pew.
Racial and ethnic disparities have cost the U.S. economy about $51 trillion in lost production since 1990, an economic analysis finds shows. Mary Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco who examined the economy’s lost output, said, “The need for justice, for closing some of these gaps, is not just a moral one, but an economic one. “
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