The Folly of the Reparations Movement
Credit: NJ Spotlight News
Long considered a controversial and somewhat fringe topic, the reparations movement has entered the mainstream in recent years, with a surge of interest in the concept of financially compensating the African-American descendants of slaves for the unpaid labor their ancestors performed from 1619–1865 and the subsequent decades of racial discrimination known as Jim Crow.
During the 2020 Democratic Party primaries, for instance, several candidates — including Kamala Harris (D-California), US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), Julian Castro, and US Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey)— went on record in support of reparations, while US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) saw his support among black voters suffer when he expressed opposition to the idea. Legislation in the U.S. Congress introduced by Senator Booker (D-NJ) and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) seeks to establish a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans, and the issue has gained traction on the local and state levels around the country as well.
In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, created a reparations plan for its black residents, becoming the first American city to do so, and that same year the city of Los Angeles established a Reparations Advisory Commission — composed of local leading voices in activism, academia, law, and racial justice — to “develop and recommend on the format and goals of reparations for Black Angelenos” and “seek opportunities to fund the reparations.”
Also in 2021, California set up the nation’s first state-level reparations task force, which two years later issued a report to the California legislature that proposed a comprehensive reparations plan for black Californians. Late last year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation to establish a commission to study reparations in the Empire State. Acknowledging the horrific injustice of slavery, the commission will examine “its lingering negative effects on people currently living in the State of New York,” Hochul said, and will seek “to right the wrongs of the past.” A similar effort is underway in Massachusetts.
But despite the growing prevalence of discussions on reparations and increasing mainstream acceptance of the concept, a vast majority of Americans continue to hold a negative view of the prospect of financially compensating black descendants of slaves. A Pew Research Center survey found that just three-in-ten U.S. adults support reparations, with 68 percent saying that reparations should not be made.
Predictably, support for reparations varies wildly along racial lines, with 77 percent of blacks believing that reparations are in order and just 18 percent of whites feeling the same way. Even those who support reparations, however, tend to believe that they are highly unlikely to come to pass, with three-quarters of reparations supporters saying that it is not likely to happen in their lifetime. Only 10 percent believe that it is extremely or very likely.
While most Americans would agree that slavery is a stain on American history — or, as Thomas Jefferson once put it, a “hideous blot” — there are a number of reasons the proposals for reparations are problematic, one of which being the practicalities in identifying qualified recipients of direct financial compensation.
Due to the centuries of racial mixing in the United States, today the average African-American genome is almost a quarter European, and nearly four percent of self-identifying white people have some African ancestry. That means there are millions descendants of enslaved Africans who would be considered “white” because their African features have disappeared over the generations, while there are also plenty of descendants of white slaveowners who would be considered “black.”
Partly, this is due to the unfortunate reality of masters sexually assaulting their slaves during the era of chattel slavery but it is also the result of consensual relationships and the dilution of European genetic features over time due to racial intermixing. And then of course there is the reality of Africans and people of African descent emigrating to the United States long after slavery ended. The difficulties, therefore, of determining which Americans should receive reparations would be substantial.
In addition, the argument that black people deserve designated cash payments to atone for the legacy of slavery overlooks the reality that for many years, African Americans have already benefited from substantial government assistance in the form of affirmative action, education grants, housing subsidies, Medicaid, and welfare programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly known as food stamps) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Despite making up 13–14 percent of the nation’s population, black people account for 50 percent of those receiving SNAP, TANF, and rental subsidies in America, as well as 20 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries, and it is estimated that every year, African Americans receive around $270 billion dollars from these programs. With these figures in mind, it would seem that the U.S. has already paid a form of reparations to the tune of trillions of dollars.
Historical Trauma
Proponents for reparations, however, counter that these welfare programs are insufficient in addressing the root issue and that specific financial compensation is needed to help atone for the sin of slavery, heal the wounds of this cruel injustice, and allow the African-American community to build wealth and move forward.
As the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans asserted in its final report, “Descendants of those who were enslaved have uniquely carried the weight of the harms and atrocities visited upon their ancestors, as trauma and loss have passed from generation to generation.” It is largely because of this intergenerational trauma, the argument goes, that African Americans lag behind in many socioeconomic indicators and why financial reparations are necessary to remedy this situation.
But although perhaps the most emotionally compelling argument for reparations, this is also one of the most problematic. While there is growing scientific evidence for the concept of intergenerational trauma — encompassing various disciplines such as genetics, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology — the fact is that trauma is not something unique to African Americans and to compensate every category of people who have experienced historical trauma would be overwhelming to say the least.
At the same time, there is also little reason to believe that reparations would cure it. Since intergenerational trauma has supposedly affected the collective DNA of the black race and has epigenetically altered the genetic code of millions of individuals, the idea that receiving a cash payment would be some kind of quick-fix solution seems naïve in the extreme.
Further, while the trauma experienced by black people was undoubtedly severe and unique in many important respects, it does not necessarily follow that because of this they should be entitled to cash payments from the government, a precedent that could open the floodgates to claims of reparations from numerous other groups who have experienced injustice and oppression — from descendants of various immigrant groups that faced discrimination to women of all races.
Without diminishing the suffering that African Americans endured, it should be acknowledged that many other people have experienced severe trauma, and in some cases, this was officially sanctioned by governmental authorities. The question would then become what sort of trauma qualifies, how severe it must have been and for how long it was endured. These are fundamentally subjective questions based on personal biases that are often shaped by imperfect understandings of historical events.
Reparations proponents, however, generally dismiss these concerns, downplay the complexities, and maintain that the issue is rather straightforward. The grassroots organization Reparations 4 Slavery, for example, asserts that “the case for reparations to descendants of enslaved people is quite simple: African-Americans were taken from their homes in Africa, enslaved and forced to work for white Americans for over 250 years in abysmal conditions with no remuneration.”
But in fact, it is not that simple. The specific issue of slavery is particularly vexing because even in the United States, there are other groups besides black people who shared similar experiences, while some blacks directly participated in the slave trade — both as slave-catchers in Africa and slave-owners in America. Many whites, meanwhile, came to America under conditions not dissimilar from those that blacks endured.
Indentured Servitude
Although importation of enslaved Africans to America began in 1619, indentured servitude of Europeans was the prominent system of labor in the colonies throughout the 17th century, with more than half of all immigrants at one time falling in this category.
Between one-half and two-thirds of European immigrants to British North America from the Great Migration of the 1630s to the American Revolution of the 1770s arrived under contracts that committed them to an unfree status subject to the whims of their masters for periods of four to seven years. In very real ways, the experience of a typical indentured servant was just as traumatic as an enslaved African, including the treacherous passage across the Atlantic.
The servants were packed tightly into ships for the voyage across the ocean, and sometimes, depending on the length of the journey, there was not enough food. The ship Seaflower, for instance, which departed Belfast in 1741, was at sea for 16 weeks and when it finally made shore in Boston, nearly half of its 108 passengers had died of starvation. Of the 46 who perished, six were eaten by the survivors.
A German passenger named Gottlieb Mittelberger who travelled to America around 1750 described the difficulties of the voyage: “[T]he ship is full of pitiful signs of distress — smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions … Add to all that shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery, vexation, and lamentation as well as other troubles.” Mittelberger also related the tragic story of a pregnant woman who was about to give birth during a storm and being unable to handle the task under the circumstances, the crew cast her overboard. On another voyage, 32 children were overcome by hunger and disease and were tossed into the ocean.
Despite these dire challenges, many poor Europeans were willing to take the risk, largely out of desperation. Cities were teeming with the destitute — people who were persecuted, oppressed, and offered few opportunities to improve their lot in life.
In England, those considered vagrants and beggars could be subjected to punishments such as public floggings, confinement to workhouses, or exile. In these desperate circumstances, many of those defined as “rogues and vagabonds” under English law decided to take their chances as indentured servants in America. Others were tricked into signing contracts that they didn’t fully understand.
When they arrived in the New World, indentured servants discovered that they were considered the personal property of their masters, in some cases even bought and sold on the market and otherwise treated like slaves. As English indentured servant James Revel wrote in a poem published in or around the year 1780,
My fellow slaves were five transports more,
With eighteen negroes, which is twenty-four,
Besides four transport women in the house,
To wait upon his daughter and his spouse.
We and the negroes both alike did fare,
Of work and food we had an equal share
Another indentured servant described the difficult conditions and pitiful rations of food that he was provided: “since I came out of the ship, I never ate anything but peas, and [water gruel]. … There is indeed some fowl, but we are not allowed to go and get it, but must work hard both early and late for a mess of water gruel, and a mouthful of bread, and beef.”
With the primary benefit to the servant having been granted at the outset, i.e., the subsidized passage to America, the dilemma of ensuring that the servant was motivated to carry out his or her duties was significant. Since the servants generally were not interested in being rehired at the end of their contracts, they had little reason to impress their masters by working hard, and masters, for their part, had no incentive to treat their servants well, as it was unlikely that the servants would stay after their terms ended.
Incentivizing indentured servants to work, therefore, was primarily achieved through physical violence. Colonial laws provided masters considerable leeway in beating their servants, and it was also common for servant women to be raped.
White Slavery
While indentured servitude has been loosely described as de facto slavery, there was also de jure slavery that some whites experienced — both in America and abroad.
From the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century, whites living in coastal towns in countries ranging from Italy to Ireland to Iceland suffered raids by Barbary pirates from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli, who captured Europeans and sold them at slave markets in the Barbary states.
Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, estimates that at least one million Europeans were enslaved by slave traders in North Africa over a period of more than 200 years. During colonial times, Americans enjoyed some degree of protection as a result of tributes paid by Britain to the Barbary states, but following America’s independence in 1776, privateers known as corsairs began preying on American ships and capturing their crews.
For nearly two decades, a dozen American ships would be captured and their crews enslaved. This led to the creation of the United States Navy and two wars fought in the early 1800s to stop the enslavement of white Americans by the Barbary states.
Another little appreciated fact is that there were also white slaves in America — mostly convicted criminals who were deported to colonies in the 18th century as a policy to both populate the New World and offer a form of reprieve to condemned convicts. Starting with the adoption of the Transportation Act in 1718, the British began experimenting with convict transport, and for the next six decades — until the revolution broke out in the mid-1770s — more than 52,000 convicts were transported from the British Isles to America, to be sold as slaves to the highest bidder.
So many white slaves were sent to the New World that it led to growing consternation among the colonial elite, with Benjamin Franklin complaining in 1751 that England was forcing these convict transfers against their wishes. “The Government at home will not suffer our mistaken Assemblies to make any Law for preventing or discouraging the Importation of Convicts from Great Britain,” Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette. He lamented that convict transport tended “to prevent the Improvement and Well Peopling of the Colonies.”
In spite of these complaints, as late as 1773, even on the precipice of the American Revolution, a London police magistrate continued to advocate for transporting convicts to America as “the wisest, … most humane and effectual, punishment we have.” Not only did the practice “remove the evil” from England, he reasoned, it “gives [the criminal] a fresh opportunity of being an useful member of society.”
With America seen as an effective and appropriate place of penance due to its hardship and remoteness, the exiles were sent across the ocean with increasing frequency, and the use of convict labor became so popular that it essentially replaced indentured servitude. By the time of the revolution, it is estimated that transported convicts made up a quarter of the British immigrants in America, influencing London’s perceptions of the colonies as a haven of unruly and undesirable elements.
Freedmen, Abolitionists and Black Slaveholders
There are of course important differences between indentured servitude, the Barbary slave trade, convict transport, and African-American chattel slavery. Proponents for black reparations would rightly point out that while the U.S. government fought to end the enslavement of whites by the Barbary states, it largely enabled the enslavement of blacks in the American South, and that the injustices that white immigrants suffered pale in comparison to those endured by enslaved blacks.
For one thing, while African Americans were often condemned to a lifetime of abuse with little hope of improving their station in life, the slave-like status of whites was generally temporary. Enforced service did not apply to the children of indentured servants, so after a generation or two, it is assumed, their trauma would be quickly overcome and whites would be able to enjoy economic and social mobility in the land of opportunity.
But while there might be some truth in this argument, it should also be recognized that many white families continued to struggle for generations, finding themselves disadvantaged and marginalized by an economic system that treated workers as expendable. This, of course, is what led to the rise of the American labor movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, a movement that struggled to gain recognition and was often violently suppressed.
Further, when it comes to the argument regarding social mobility, a similar case could be made regarding some African Americans, a substantial number of whom managed to overcome slavery either by saving enough money to purchase their freedom or by being granted manumissions by their masters upon their deaths or as a reward for hard work. Thousands upon thousands of blacks purchased their freedom during the era of chattel slavery — sometimes with the help of white abolitionists — while at least tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, were freed through manumission.
There was a spike in manumissions, in particular, during the revolutionary era, with the ideals of freedom and liberty inspiring many slaveholders to free their enslaved workers. Historical evidence suggests that thousands of African Americans gained their freedom during and after the American Revolution, and by the time of the American Civil War a century later, there were some 490,000 free African Americans in the United States, either born free or manumitted. While four million remained enslaved, the experiences of these individuals varied substantially, with important regional distinctions and personal variations among slaveholders, some of whom were vicious and cruel, while others strove for some degree of fairness and humanity.
Some slave-owners, for example, allowed slaves to purchase their freedom without issue, while others, out of pure spite and meanness, would never allow it. Some administered harsh punishments and routinely broke up families while others showed some compassion and kept families together. Considering the varied experiences of individual slaves, and the fact that some blacks experienced many generations of freedom before official emancipation in 1865, it wouldn’t seem to make much sense to grant all of their descendants the same sort of financial compensation today. After all, if the objective is to atone for slavery and alleviate intergenerational trauma, shouldn’t those whose ancestors endured more years of slavery and experienced more hardship be entitled to more financial compensation?
Furthermore, while many reparations advocates tend to focus entirely on the negative aspects of American society that allowed for the so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery to flourish for centuries in America, it should also be acknowledged that the practice was controversial from the moment America was founded and that many whites fought against it.
The nation’s first abolitionist organization — and one of the first in the world — was founded amidst the revolutionary fervor in Philadelphia in the mid-1770s. The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, commonly known as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, was established in Philadelphia on April 14, 1775, just a few days before the Shot Heard Round the World was fired in Lexington, Massachusetts.
The abolitionist movement gained traction in the 1830s, becoming more organized and uncompromising, and increasingly embracing the concept of “immediatism” rather than “gradualism.” In 1831, former gradualist William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator in Boston, which became the flagship publication of the radical proponents of immediate emancipation.
Including the participation of both whites and blacks, the abolitionist movement became impossible to ignore. As the United States expanded westward, the question of whether to admit new states as free or slave states became one of the main political issues in the nation, leading to increasingly militant action and armed resistance, most notably during the “Bleeding Kansas” campaign of violence in the late 1850s, as well as untenable compromises that led directly to the Civil War.
While many free blacks worked for abolition and many enslaved blacks undermined slavery through acts of everyday resistance — including sporadic slave rebellions and the most common tactic of running away — other blacks actually participated in the system of slavery by owning other African Americans. Thousands of free people of color in the antebellum South owned slaves, and while some of these black slave-owners may have been benevolent emancipators who purchased their spouses, children, parents, siblings, or friends to prevent them from being sold into a worse situation, others had apparently embraced a culture and economic system based on human bondage.
As African-American historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. has explained, “the percentage of free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia.” Adopting the methods of coercion employed by white slave masters, they sometimes harshly disciplined their fellow blacks and sold them on the market as punishment or for profit.
This underscores the reality that slavery, for better or worse, was a widely accepted fact of life in America. In spite of a vocal movement of abolitionists denouncing the institution’s evils, the general attitudes toward slavery were influenced by an outlook on life that did not place a high value on concepts of fairness and equality, and in which unfree labor was more or less taken for granted in a system of entrenched hierarchy.
Most people accepted the reality that life was characterized by inequality, that class and inheritance of privilege defined their station in life, and that children would go on to basically live the life of their parents. A white child of a tenant farmer living on rented land understood that this is what he would do as well, just like children of black slaves would be confined to a life of slavery.
Most people lived on subsistence wages that provided little opportunity for advancement and were unable to easily change jobs. With these harsh realities prevalent in the country, owning other humans was widely seen as a practical way to get ahead — and this was the case for both whites and some free blacks, as well as a good number of Native Americans who adopted agriculture and embraced “the white man’s ways.”
The historical fact of blacks owning other blacks underlines the complexities and difficulties of assigning all modern-day African Americans, regardless of their specific ancestry and genetic make-up, the status of “victims” who invariably suffer unique forms of intergenerational trauma and must be compensated by financial reparations. While black slave ownership was obviously not as widespread as white slave ownership, it nonetheless underscores the fact that fairly and equitably determining who should qualify for reparations would be difficult if not impossible. Under a race-based system of distributing reparations, presumably, descendants of black slaves and descendants of black slave-owners would both receive the very same cash payment.
The issue of black slaveholders in America — and the wider question of black family lines that enjoyed freedom and economic opportunity from a very early stage in American history — also recalls the reality that the black experience in America has been far from universal, and continues to be highly varied to this day. Just as 200 years ago, when there were free blacks who achieved some degree of economic prosperity and may in some cases have achieved parity with their white counterparts, today there are substantial numbers of African Americans who have attained high levels of wealth and success, and simply have no need for financial assistance from the U.S. government.
According to the most recent data, there are nearly two million black millionaires in the United States and at least nine black billionaires. The idea that a poor white living in an impoverished town in Appalachia — or for that matter a disadvantaged Latino living in the barrio — must be forced to subsidize cash payments to a billionaire like Oprah Winfrey or Michael Jordan is absurd.
There are other ways, of course, to address systemic inequality in America that would be fairer, as well as more effective and less divisive. Rather than focusing on the largely symbolic approach of making direct cash payments to black descendants of slaves, there are targeted approaches that would seek to alleviate poverty across racial lines.
The “10|20|30 Persistent Poverty Formula,” for example, would help to ensure that no communities in America are left behind by directing that at least 10 percent of federally funded development investments be made in communities where 20 percent or more of the population had lived below the poverty line for the last 30 years. A leading proponent of this approach, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), points out that this would help not only “African American communities in Mississippi and South Carolina,” but also “Appalachian communities in Kentucky and North Carolina, Native American communities in South Dakota and Alaska, and Latino communities in Arizona and New Mexico.”
Another way to help lift up black people without the divisiveness and inconsistency of reparations proposals would be to make education more accessible to all. Since education is one of the primary predictors of financial success, placing emphasis on ensuring that African Americans have access to the same opportunities would be more effective than simply cutting a check as payment for the unpaid labor performed by their ancestors.
According to the Hechinger Report, white students are 250 percent more likely to graduate than black students at public universities, a disparity that is attributed to a variety of factors, one of the most acute being the financial pressure of lacking funds or the need to hold down a paying job while in college. Expanding financial aid to disadvantaged students therefore would go a long way toward improving graduation rates and increasing African-American earnings.
These sorts of approaches would also have the benefit of being a unifying cause rather than an alienating one. While America is deeply divided on the question of reparations, with 82 percent of whites opposing them and 77 of blacks supporting them, issues such as education reform enjoy broad support from all races and classes. Nearly all Americans agree that college costs are too high, with 75 percent expressing support for capping the price of tuition at colleges and universities that receive government funding.
People also see a strong role for government in increasing access to education, with a majority of voters wanting government to do more to make colleges more affordable. With this in mind, rather than allowing an issue like reparations to divide Americans, it might make more sense to unite behind a cause like fighting poverty and reforming education, which could ultimately be more effective in remedying legacies of slavery and inequality.
Nat Parry is the author of the just-published book Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era. He is editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader.
