If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.
Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people— years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this. Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the s.
The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject.
The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks—yet by the s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks.
The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured. Massey writes. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle.
Think of his North Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their home—taken from them. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.
You will never own anything, nigger. W hen Clyde Ross was a child , his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K.
Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built.
In the s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income.
Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same. Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans.
But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. T he early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty.
These laws reached their apex in the midth century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags. We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us.
But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.
Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.
The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution.
What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
W e are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge. In , when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, , as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people.
Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks.
Two hundred civilians and police officers were wounded. Nearly people were arrested. Knesset business was halted. Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take.
No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants.
One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships.
The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45, jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations.
We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened.
But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna which insured slaves and Lehman Brothers whose co-founding partner owned them also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration.
A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced.
An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. I n , Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation.
Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods.
As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.
Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In , the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. But the damage had been done. In , half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between and were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone. Clyde Ross, photographed in November in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied; mortgages were effectively not available to black people.
Carlos Javier Ortiz. Explore Redlining in Chicago. Interactive Census Map. The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives.
Click the image above to view the full document. We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors.
This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands.
To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse. Just enter your email and we'll take care of the rest: Subscribe Please enter a valid email address. Apple reportedly tells workers they're allowed to discuss conditions and pay The statement comes despite employee claiming labor violations.
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