Reparations for Slavery Aren’t Enough. Official Racism Lasted Much Longer.
Racial inequality flows as much from policies that came after abolition
By Sheryll Cashin
Do the descendants of slaves deserve reparations? For the first time in a century and a half, there is a legitimate political debate on this question. Many of the top Democratic presidential hopefuls support establishing them in some form, or at least launching a commission to study how it might be done. This past week, on Juneteenth, the House held a hearing on H.R. 40, a bill that would do just that.
But if Americans are now willing to entertain the notion of restorative justice for the legacy of institutional racism, slavery alone is the wrong place to focus. The damage to African Americans goes far beyond abolition in 1865. Efforts to subordinate and economically exploit black people continued through peonage, convict leasing, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlined black ghettos and mass incarceration. The ideology of white supremacy, used to justify slavery, persists. Why should subsequent racist practices get a pass while we zoom in on outright bondage? Anti-black segregation lives on, and the current damage to slavery’s descendants is direct and measurable.
