Five Patriotic Arguments for Reparations
Restoring Black America has implications for the U.S. as a whole
Black Americans built America.
From the clearing of colonial wilderness to the designing and building of palatial plantation mansions, to the planning and raising of the iconic buildings of our beautiful capital city, it was enslaved Africans, forcibly imported and exploited, whose labor birthed the physical American reality we take for granted. Making good on centuries of government-enabled exploitation is an apt acknowledgment of the contributions of this historical, uniquely American people group.
Black Americans helped defined American liberty.
In their quest for abolition, education, economic empowerment, and political rights, Black Americans forced issues about the compatibility of democratic freedoms with the stark realities of slavery and segregation. Not only have movements for Black liberation enhanced the political standing of other Americans, but foreign nationals immigrating to the United States also benefit from the overthrow of quotas that kept them out and discriminatory laws that would have excluded them from working once they arrived. Economic reparations are both an acknowledgment of this still ongoing legacy as well as an encouragement for Black Americans to continue contributing to the spelling out of American liberty.
The state of Black America is the ultimate test of the democratic experiment.
Despite stereotypes of Black Americans as not being smart and hard-working, history tells a different story. Is America really the economic power it claims to be if it has not managed to ensure the welfare of a people who were literally bred to work? However you answer that, it is clear that the degree of prosperity of America’s (former?) underclass is an important barometer of how well the American enterprise is doing with regard to promoting the general welfare. The full, restorative integration of Black Americans into the American economy would be a testament to the value of the American work ethic.
Federal and state injury to Black Americans is an unresolved narrative arc.
While lots of people are up in arms about issues like critical race theory and social justice, almost nobody would agree that America’s best days are behind us. Acknowledging the United States’ history of discrimination does not prevent us from moving towards a more glorious future. Addressing government complicity in the past plunder of Black America through substantial economic repair to the living heirs of those injurious losses would move the national story towards the ultimate resolution of those parts of the American story.
Social renaissance is implicit in the American story.
The revolutionary acts that elevated a handful of British colonies to a federal union, the bloody working out of a non-slaveholding Union, and the array of 20th-century movements birthed from the national push for Black civil rights are all proof of our country’s implicit ability to be reborn. Reimagining a nation in which Black Americans are in no way more vulnerable, in no way less accomplished, in no way more impoverished that mainstream America starts with an honest discussion about the ways our government cultivated policy that took the most hard-working population in history (literally) and allowed them to be chronically underpaid, underemployed, overtaxed and underrepresented in the world’s first, strongest, and wealthiest democratic republic. Reparations would not only restore dignity to the legacy of Black America, but it would be potentially the most economically and politically profitable rebirth the United States has ever seen.
