Why we support reparations
OFFICIALLY, THE US state of California didn’t have slavery. When it entered the Union in 1850, eleven years before the America’s civil war, it did so as a ‘free state’, with a constitution forbidding slavery. “... Neither Slavery nor involuntary Servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State,” the constitution said.
Yet, last week the California assembly passed a law, which was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, committing the state to consider paying reparations to the descendants of its black slaves. “California has come to terms with many issues, but has yet to come to terms with its role in slavery,” said Shirley Weber, the African-American member of the assembly who sponsored last week’s bill.
Despite the declaration in its constitution, California entertained the hundreds of slaves brought into the territory by miners during the gold rush of the late 1840s, and state legislators passed laws targeting slaves who escaped to California.
If California were a country, with its GDP of US$3.2 trillion, it would be the world’s fifth-largest economy, behind Germany and ahead of Britain. Which provides an important, moral and economic benchmark for last week’s decision. For while the findings and recommendations of the colloquium to be convened by the University of California won’t be binding on the state, the nine-member group will be asked to look into, among other things, “the economic benefits of slavery that accrued to the owners and the businesses, including insurance companies and their subsidiaries, that received those benefits”.
ACCEPTANCE OF RESPONSIBILITY
What California is doing – but with a clear acceptance of their responsibility to the descendants of slaves in the Caribbean – provides a template for European countries, especially Britain, for how they might start a movement towards discharging their moral obligation to the region. In other words, this newspaper endorses the idea of reparations.
We haven’t arrived at this position lightly. It is after deep introspection in the face of the global ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, inspired by the death in May of George Floyd, the African American who was killed when a policeman knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes. George Floyd, and the circumstance of his death, have become metaphors for the systemic racism faced by black people, and people of colour, not only in the United States, but elsewhere in the world.
But George Floyd’s death hasn’t only concentrated minds on today’s racism and racial inequalities. It served also to place a beacon on the antecedents of the immediate problems, thereby helping to underline the imperative of justice and the logic of the demand for reparations – a smidgen of compensation for more than two and a half centuries of the loss of the natural right to freedom, to life, to economic wellbeing, and, ultimately, for the attempted diminution of personhood. Fundamentally, slaves, in the West Indies, and where it was condoned, were perceived merely as machinery in the chain of economic activity.
NO HEAD START
It is instructive how differently the protagonists in this economic construct were treated when the system was no longer sustainable. In 1834, at the abolition of slavery, the British government paid £20 million in compensation to the ‘owners’ of the former slaves for forfeited ‘property’. That sum was 40 per cent of the UK government’s annual income and about five per cent of GDP. Calculated on the basis of inflation that would be equivalent today to more than £2 billion. But most analysts say that based on the movement in income and related factors, today’s equivalent would be closer to £17 billion. Some calculations put the figure substantially higher, given the impact on economic activity and the growth in Britain’s GDP over more than 180 years. The payout is credited with stabilising the wealth of many of Britain’s leading families and of helping to jump-start a second industrial revolution.
On the other hand, none of the 800,000 slaves emancipated from Britain’s slave-holding colonies, more than 80 per cent of whom were in the Caribbean, received compensation. More than 300,000 of the slaves – 39 per cent of the overall number and 47 per cent of those in the West Indies – were in Jamaica. And emancipation didn’t mean immediate freedom. For many of the former slaves, there was another four years of free labour under the system of ‘apprenticeship’. The Caribbean received no head start.
In recent years, there has been a slow awakening of the moral conscience in Britain over the travesty of slavery and its aftermath. Glasgow University last year promised £20 million in reparatory atonement for its historic links to, and benefits from, the slave trade. The insurance exchange, Lloyd’s of London, and the brewer, Green King, have similarly promised reparations, while the Bank of England, the central bank, which had several slave-owning governors and directors, has apologised. The British government should do the decent and moral thing with its own apology for its centuries-long embrace of slavery.
Britain must do two other things. It should set its own experts to work on an approach for meeting its clear obligations for reparatory justice, and at the same time begin to seriously engage the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) who have placed the issue of reparations on the agenda. In Jamaica’s case, the Government should use the imminent annual celebration of National Heroes Week to launch a serious discourse on reparations as a principled pursuit rather than its continued caricaturisation as a vulgar money grab. For those who argue that 182 years since slavery is too long for the case to be relevant, may we remind that it was only half a decade ago, in 2015, that the British treasury paid off the last £15 million debt used to compensate the slave owners, many of whose descendants still sustain their wealth.