[Any political movement powerful enough to secure policies
sufficient to repair the damage inflicted by centuries of slavery will
also have the power to secure a more radical and enduring
transformation of our social and political order]
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WHAT IS OWED   [[link removed]]

 

William P. Jones
September 8, 2021
The Nation
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_ Any political movement powerful enough to secure policies
sufficient to repair the damage inflicted by centuries of slavery will
also have the power to secure a more radical and enduring
transformation of our social and political order _

, "'freed' slave" by Quasimime is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

 

Reparations are having a moment. This march, Evanston, Ill., became
the first government in the United States to attempt to address racial
inequality by providing mortgage assistance and $25,000 homeownership
and improvement grants to descendants of residents harmed by
discriminatory housing policies in the city. Soon afterward, the US
House of Representatives began hearings on HR 40, which would create a
commission to study reparations for slavery and other forms of
discrimination against Black people in the United States. President
Biden expressed support for the study and reiterated that support at
the commemoration of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Okla., in May.
Meanwhile, California became the first state to initiate an official
task force to study and develop a reparations plan for African
Americans harmed by slavery and its legacies.

FROM HERE TO EQUALITY: REPARATIONS FOR BLACK AMERICANS IN THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
By William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen
Buy this book [[link removed]]

Bolstered by the Black Lives Matter movement and last summer’s
protests following the murder of George Floyd, support for reparations
has also been aided by a growing awareness of the history of slavery
and other forms of racial exploitation in the United States. In the
past decade, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and other Black
journalists have exposed a broad readership to the question of
reparations as well as to the scholarship on slavery’s importance in
the development of capitalism and American democracy, the racial
inequalities inherent to New Deal social policies, and the causes and
effects of mass incarceration. By doing so, they helped shift the
discussion about racial inequality from a question of marginalization
and oppression to a focus on the central role that Black people have
played in the economic and political history of the United States.
Despite the increasing awareness of this history, however, nearly
two-thirds of Americans still oppose federal payments to Black people
whose ancestors were enslaved. Opposition is strongest among
Republicans, who view reparations as overly divisive and unjustified,
but barely half of all Democrats, and only a third of white Democrats,
support them.

In _From Here to Equality_, William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten
Mullen draw on both journalistic and scholarly sources to make a
strong case for cash payments to Black descendants of slaves. To those
who dismiss reparations as a recent claim for an ancient crime, they
point out that African Americans have been demanding compensation
since the end of slavery and that the debt has been redoubled by
officially sanctioned violence and discrimination since abolition.
Likewise, to the “alarmingly large numbers of Americans, both white
and black, who do not believe that racial inequality and
discrimination continue to exist,” Darity and Mullen provide a
detailed analysis of the deep disparities in wealth, income,
education, and other measures of well-being that have persisted since
emancipation.

Yet despite their clear evidence of the lingering effects of slavery
and Jim Crow, Darity and Mullen isolate African American reparations
from claims for compensation by Native Americans, immigrants, and
others. Not only does this risk alienating potential allies, it also
narrows the scope of what the Black freedom movement has almost always
pursued: A radical program for economic and racial justice for all
Americans.

The core of _From Here to Equality_ is a rich historical account of
how the economic inequalities between Black and white Americans were
created and perpetuated through centuries of slavery and the legally
enforced systems of discrimination and political disfranchisement that
followed. Drawing on the work of Anne Farrow, Craig Wilder, Joel Lang,
and Jennifer Frank, Darity and Mullen explain that slavery was
integral to the national—not just the Southern—economy, and that
its proceeds therefore helped establish some of the nation’s most
prominent banks, insurance companies, and universities.

Emphasizing several periods when the United States might have taken a
different path, they show how slavery became more durable and
racialized in the colonial era and then expanded rapidly in the South
after a brief period of ambivalence about it during the Revolution.
They also explain how Abraham Lincoln and other Northern politicians
sought to avoid conflict by appeasing Southern slave owners, and how
their hands were forced by the recalcitrance of the Confederate
states, rising opposition to the war among Northern whites, and the
insistence of African Americans on turning the war into a fight
against slavery.

In Darity and Mullen’s telling, the Civil War was a critical moment
not just because it ended slavery but because it also raised the
question of how the formerly enslaved would be compensated for
centuries of unpaid labor. They cite the testimony of the formerly
enslaved minister Garrison Frazier in 1865, who explained to Gen.
William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that
“the freedom, as I understand it…is taking us from under the yoke
of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own
labor, take care of ourselves, and assist the Government in
maintaining our freedom.”

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This testimony was the inspiration for Sherman’s famous Field Order
No. 15, which would have distributed over 5 million acres of
plantation land to formerly enslaved families along the Atlantic
coast. A version of Sherman’s order was taken up by Congress, but in
yet another missed opportunity to repair the damage done by slavery,
Andrew Johnson vetoed it and returned the land to former slave owners.

But the Civil War was not the last missed opportunity, and a key
component of Darity and Mullen’s case is that “the plunder” of
Black America, as Ta-Nehisi Coates dubbed it, continued unabated
throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Drawing on the
work of Coates and other journalists, sociologists, and historians who
have charted this pillage over the past century and a half, Darity and
Mullen offer a story of dispossession, exploitation, and
disfranchisement whose devastating costs, they argue, also “make the
case for reparations.”

Having explored the centuries of injustice that now demand
compensation, Darity and Mullen turn to the most common objections
that they have encountered in the 15 years that they have spent
researching and developing their case.

Over that period, Darity and Mullen explain, increased awareness of
racial inequality has led to a multiplicity of reactions, from
“challenging the legitimacy of reparations to asking questions about
the logistics of a reparations plan.” Most of these objections are
answered in previous chapters, but they also examine the claims that
past injustices were addressed by emancipation, 20th-century social
welfare policies, and affirmative action, and they show why all of
these are clearly unsatisfactory in the face of the history they have
recounted. Indeed, they argue, many of those initiatives—in
particular welfare and affirmative action programs—not only failed
to end racial inequalities but at times deepened them.

In the final chapters of the book, Darity and Mullen lay out a program
for determining who is responsible for paying reparations, who would
be eligible, how much would be paid, and how the funds would be
distributed.

The detailed history Darity and Mullen present supports the moral and
economic claims for reparations. Yet given the persistent opposition,
it is puzzling that they describe the potential constituency for
reparations in the narrowest possible terms. In written testimony
submitted to a congressional hearing on HR 40, Darity suggested that
the bill be amended to clarify that it would benefit only people who
identify as “black, Negro, or African American” and have “at
least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States.”
Acknowledging that this excludes “post-slavery immigrants” from
Africa and the Caribbean, “whose own ancestors are likely to have
been subjected to enslavement and colonialism elsewhere,” he
suggested they could make their claims against the United Kingdom or
France, but not the United States.

In addition to alienating potential allies, the exclusion of Black
immigrants from reparations obscures not only the consequences of
racism and segregation in the aftermath of emancipation but also the
inherently international character of slavery and the inequalities it
forged. The scholarship that Darity and Mullen draw on emphasizes the
centrality of racial exploitation to the development of the United
States, but it also demonstrates that the national story was, as
W.E.B. Du Bois put it, “but a local phase of a world problem.”

The historian Ana Lucia Araujo, in her “transnational and
comparative history” _Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade_,
shows that the demand for compensation in the United States has always
been related to reparations movements in the Caribbean, South America,
and Africa. That tradition is carried on today by the National
Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, which links demands on
the US government with a transnational movement seeking reparations
for people of African descent.

To limit the scope of what could be an international movement is a
missed opportunity, but it also overlooks the influence of the United
States and its role in international slavery and racial inequality. As
Araujo explains, the US government’s refusal to recognize Haiti
weakened the Black-led republic at a time when it was attempting to
establish economic independence from Europe and was revised only out
of hope that African Americans could be resettled in the Caribbean
after the Civil War. Since then, US political, military, and economic
power has undermined the economic status of former slaves and their
descendants in the Caribbean and Central America and led many of them
to seek refuge and opportunity through migration to the United States.
Certainly, the US government bears some responsibility for those
affected by its imperial power.

And that responsibility does not end with people of African descent.
Darity and Mullen’s account of slavery’s centrality to the
economic development of the United States includes frequent references
to “Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves,” and as Tiya Miles and other
historians have shown, African American history has long been deeply
intertwined with that of Native Americans. Commenting on the
anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, Robin D.G. Kelley noted, “Any
discussion of repair and reparations, of grieving and mourning the
events of 1921 and its aftermath, must grapple with the colonial
violence that made Tulsa or Oklahoma and its settler regime
possible.”

Darity and Mullen acknowledge that Native Americans “could make a
far more costly claim on the American government than black
Americans,” potentially including the entire territory of the United
States. Yet rather than casting Indigenous people as potential allies
in the demand for reparations, they insist that such claims are
“irrelevant” to the specific urgency of “the black reparations
claim.”

Black West Indians and Latin Americans are not the only immigrants
with a potential interest in reparations. Emphasizing the whiteness,
education, and wealth that some immigrants have brought with them to
the United States, Darity and Mullen conclude that “voluntary
immigrants” who arrived after the end of slavery “have benefited
from America’s Jim Crow regime and its established and ongoing
racial hierarchy” and therefore share responsibility for
reparations. But what of the Chinese and other Asian immigrants who
were deprived of legal protections, landownership, and citizenship by
racist exclusion laws; refugees from US military interventions in
Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and Central America; and Mexican “guest
workers” and undocumented migrants who powered the “internal
colonialism” that, according to the historian Mae Ngai, was also
central to the economic development of the southwestern United States?
As Erika Lee’s recent history of xenophobia shows, anti-immigrant
sentiment has often been closely linked to anti-Black racism.

These histories may help explain why Asian and Latino Americans are
far more supportive of reparations for slavery than white Americans,
and why, rather than dismiss all immigrants as beneficiaries of racial
inequality, we should ask which among them might find common cause in
a movement to end it.

In the context of an increasingly racially diverse United States, the
need for allies is an issue of strategy as much as of justice.
Acknowledging that not enough Americans support reparations, Darity
and Mullen caution that their proposals will not be possible without
“a dramatic change” in national leadership and “an inspired
national movement dedicated to the fulfillment of the goal of racial
justice.” With African Americans holding steady at roughly 12
percent of the population, it is difficult to see how they could build
such a movement on their own. Darity and Mullen suggest that support
could also come from “whites descended from slave owners” who are
seeking “atonement,” but guilt seems a weak foundation for a
political alliance. It seems more feasible to build a coalition of
those with an interest in repairing the damage done by slavery and
other forms of racial exploitation.

But if we are to build such a movement, its demands have to go beyond
just one group’s claims and one policy program alone. Darity and
Mullen describe the goal of reparations as “sharp and enduring
reductions in racial disparities, particularly economic disparities
like racial wealth inequality, and corresponding sharp and enduring
improvements in black well-being.” These are admirable objectives,
but even with reparations and the reduction of these racial
disparities in wealth, African Americans would still face other
falling standards of well-being endured by Americans as a whole. For
example, if Black families were equal to white ones, their median net
worth would increase from $23,000 to $184,000, but most of their gains
would go to a few wealthy households: 10 percent of Black families
would control 76 percent of Black household wealth while just 1
percent would go to the poorest half of Black families. To use another
metric, in an economically equal United States, African Americans
would likely still be killed by police and be incarcerated at far
higher levels than citizens of nearly every other nation in the world.
Likewise, they would still likely fall victim to a health care system
that prioritizes profit and a labor market that values productivity
over humanity. Yet Darity and Mullen assert that “once the
reparations program is executed and racial inequality eliminated,
African Americans would make no further claims for race-specific
policies on their behalf from the American government—on the
assumption that no new race-specific injustices are inflicted upon
them.”

In his opening address at the 1963 March on Washington, A. Philip
Randolph characterized the Black freedom movement as a “massive
moral revolution” aimed not only at securing equal access to voting
rights, government services, public accommodations, and jobs, but also
at creating a society where “the sanctity of private property takes
second place to the sanctity of the human personality.” Americans of
all races had a stake in that transformation, he explained, but “it
falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because
our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private
property.” Darity and Mullen draw a far more modest lesson from the
African American struggle against slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms
of racial exploitation. Their demand for repayment of the wealth and
income taken since the nation’s founding is worthy in its own right
and would help address the deep economic disparities between Black and
white Americans. Yet as Randolph suggested, the legacy of these
freedom struggles is far more ambitious and revolutionary than the
simple calculus of compensation.

Any political movement powerful enough to secure policies sufficient
to repair the damage inflicted by centuries of slavery and other forms
of racial oppression in the United States will also have the power to
secure a more radical and enduring transformation of our social and
political order, and it should do so for practical and moral reasons.
To win reparations will require allies who have a shared interest in
addressing the country’s history of racial exploitation, but it will
also need more expansive forms of solidarity and systemic change. As
Randolph observed over 50 years ago, Black people “are in the
forefront of today’s movement for social and racial justice, because
we know we cannot expect the realization of our aspirations through
the same old anti-democratic social institutions and philosophies that
have all along frustrated our aspirations.”

_William P. Jones
[[link removed]] is a professor
of history at the University of Minnesota and the author of The March
on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil
Rights._

_Copyright c 2021 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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