Blacks suffer from problems, such as poverty, due to prior mistreatment. If there is to be general financial reparations, would a Black $200,000 earner be entitled to compensation? (Without historic maltreatment he might earn $300,000.)
Many Vietnam veterans suffer from problems, such as poverty, due to their mistreatment. Should they have a special commission to decide reparations? Victims of financial frauds have suffered. Should we have a special commission for them? Native Americans? Germans who were mistreated during W.W. II?
Why not just have a society striving for future equality, and with a European-style safety-net for those who are disadvantaged for whatever reason? Too Simple? Un-american? Not enough make-work for legislators and lawyers, and too little opportunity for posturing in the media?
Exactly. I’ve been reading Michael Lind’s excellent Next American Nation and he argues that affirmative action (of which reparations are an extreme form of) had done little to actually benefit the genuinely poor black population and instead has served to destroy any potential transracial coalition of the working class to ensure a better future for all Americans.
That was sort of my line of thinking when I first read the OP, but the example that popped into my head was: Women. Denied the vote for over 100 years. Discriminated against in property law, education, military… you name it.
The big issue here is slavery, and I don’t think one can fault the federal government for “not ending slavery fast enough”. Slavery was the norm all around the world when the US was formed, and every country had to find its own way to eliminate it. We eventually fought a horrible war that ended it.
Terrible things were done all over the world in the past, and just about everyone has some complaint to level against some government, somewhere wrt his ancestors. What should be done is focus on things we can do moving forward to create a more equitable society.
Go ahead and study the issue all you want. Can’t hurt anything. But policy needs to be forward looking and not focused on correcting all the wrongs of the past 250 years.
I haven’t read it, but probably not. I don’t think it helpful. Everyone knows slavery is a bad thing, particularly for the slaves. But we got rid of it long ago. The problem today is racism, in several forms. But I think that the racism present today has almost nothing to do with slavery, as there is no one alive that experienced being on either end of a master’s whip. I’d say the government policy that is responsible for more of the problems blacks face today is Lyndon Johnson’s welfare plan, which tied payments to the mother and unintentionally lead to the break of the black families. If you want to study that, I’d be all for it.
Things like this are hard to study in real time. Looking back 200 years and making a million assumptions makes any “study” a waste of time. Jim Crow is much closer, but that too, has been dispensed with. And while it’s nice to entertain you hypothetical about taking reparations off the table, you might as well be talking about free unicorns for everyone.
In addition to the above, I’m generally a stop your whining and get on with it kinda guy. With the unfair laws having png been abolished, I firmly believe that the best thing that any individual black person can do—as well as the black community in the U.S. writ large—is to get on with the business of life. I commend those who worked to change the laws, but they succeeded. Now the best way to honor their struggle and sacrifice is to flourish in society that that they could only dream about.
Okay. But what about just the wrongs of recent decades (which, of course, compounded upon the wrongs of more distant decades, and so on)?
‘We can’t correct all the wrongs of the past’ seems like just an excuse to avoid making any difficult policy decisions – of course it’s true, we can’t correct every bad thing that was done. But considering the huge reprecussions that many of those bad things still have today (some of which Coates goes into detail about), I think it’s very reasonable to at least consider the idea that some specific and directed government action could actually be beneficial to both those who suffer most due to these reprecussions, and to the country at large.
Even direct payments, if that’s how it was done (and I recognize that, politically, this has minimal chance of success), would be payments to Americans. Printing money and giving it to black people to close the wealth gap, for example (and I’m far from sure the idea is a good one), would only be about 20% more than the Federal Reserve is currently spending on ‘quantitative easing’.
I’m not sold, not by far. But I think dismissing such ideas out of hand is, at best, extremely lazy.
Except that, do you really think that if this study were to be done that that would be the end of it? No way. It would be the beginning of more studies and more proposals for reparations. At some point, we just need to move on. All of us.
Yes, someone’s ancestors were treated horribly. Film at 11:00. And tomorrow you need to get up and go to work, or school.
If any individual has actionable claims against the government (whether state or federal), they should pursue them. I’m not seeing any actionable claims by a “race” of people. For instance, we didn’t compensate everyone of Japanese descent for the internment of many Japanese during WWII.
Well, that’s kind of the thing. We’re not just talking about someone’s ancestors. We’re talking about a lot of someones, because this is also about Jim Crow.
I don’t understand how reparations would bring closure.
If we’re talking about rape, families being torn apart (in slavery), the denial of equal opportunity to receive education, decent jobs, home ownership, the vote, and so forth (post emancipation), how can this discrimination possibly be corrected with a lump sum of cash? How can you decide what dollar value on this kind of injustice? How can one person (or some government bureaucrat) possibly decide for someone else, who has suffered profound injustice, that they have received sufficient closure & compensation?
What needs to be done is to set up legal protections to ensure this kind of inequality doesn’t happen again/further.
without specifying the details of said reparations, he was saying the equivalent of “Alakazam!”
The devil is in the details, dude…and I doubt very much any plan could possibly do all that he claims.
“A revolution of the American consciousness” sounds like so much academic drivel. If that is really his goal, then I think it’s more appropriately pursued in a work of fiction.
In the 1860s slaves were an incredibly valuable asset, from the point of view of the slaveholders slaves were machines that harvested cotton, a very valuable cash crop. They made the slaveholders very rich. When the slaves were freed the capital was not destroyed but transferred from the slave holders to the slaves themselves. The value went from being categorized as capital to being categorized as labor. The value of the slaves was transferred to the slaves at emancipation. As Yglesesias points out, this was a huge amount of value.
While very valuable to the slave holders it is likely that slavery was a net loser of value to society overall. Governments had to provide slave patrols to look for escapees and weapons and militias to protect against slave revolts. All of this had to be provided by taxing those who were not slaveholders. Further slavery kept blacks from being a part of the labor and consumer markets which removed 3.5 million people from the larger economy. The civil war killed 300,000 conferederates out of a white population of 5.5 million. That is a higher percentage of death than Japan suffered in WW2 and they had two nuclear bombs dropped on them. Jim Crow likewise restricted the economies of the states that implemented them. For most of the time between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement the south had a standard of living that was one third that of the northeast. It is likely that the average white person suffered substantial economic harm from Slavery and Jim Crow, though not nearly what black people suffered.
Whatever economic benefit accrued to the slaveowners and the beneficiaries of Jim Crow was mostly spent on consumption by those people and not passed down. The south was a very poor place for much of the twenthieth century and did not start to become equal in wealth until segregration started to end. There just was not that much wealth to hand down. Inheritances have always been a very small portion of the average person’s income. Despite a widespread legacy of discrimination and even a period of internment, asian americans have a per household wealth level that is almost the same as white americans. This is because of high incomes and savings rate, not inheritances.
Since the end of the Jim Crow era the government has sought to intervene in the housing markets to benefit black americans. The Community Reinvestment act was amended to give community groups a say in bank mergers. The spate of mergers around the Y2K problem meant that the banks that emerged were very strong advocates of minority lending. Agressive lending was done in black communities to encourage people to buy houses. Then the market crashed and black communities were hit the hardest as house values fell the farthest and rebounded the slowest. The government does not do a good job in trying to help people beat the market.
What the government should do instead of wasting a taxpayer money on a commission to decide on reparations is to head the advice of Fredrick Douglass “Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by ever interference, and succeed best by being let alone.”
Perhaps a class action lawsuit would have the best chance at success.
We did, though, compensate everyone who was detained.
We didn’t compensate those who were enslaved, nor those brutalized and repressed by subsequent government policies (and tolerated informal policies which included lynching) like Jim Crow and housing discrimination.
Here’s a good follow up – should the freed slaves have been compensated in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War? Should those who suffered because of Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and other policies/practices have been compensated in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Act and other legislation that outlawed such practices be compensated?
If you answer “yes”, then what is the time period after the bad policies/practices beyond which your “yes” answer turns to “no”?
Another follow up: should living black Americans older than X who suffered due to Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and other policies and practices, be compensated?
Totally butchered this sentence. It should read “Should those who suffered because of Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and other policies/practices have been compensated in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Act and other legislation that outlawed such practices?”.