There’s plenty of precedent for paying reparations
Reparations, claimed a commentary in California’s largest newspaper, are the answer to Black protesters’ demands for racial justice.
Nonsense, responded many others, in letters to the editor and online comments. Modern whites, Asian-Americans and others had nothing to do with slavery, which ended long before anyone alive today was born.
It’s a subject so potentially consequential that Gov. Gavin Newsom, in one of his quieter moves of the fall, signed a new law creating a nine-person state panel to study the concept.
This was because there can be little doubt that many consequences of more than 200 years of black chattel slavery live on today. Whenever academic performance is measured, blacks trail far behind whites at every grade level. The number of black children born out of wedlock tops all other care and pensions for elderly racial and ethnic groups in this Holocaust survivors around the nation. And so on … world.
What does all this have to do How discriminatory was the with slavery? The new state task Japanese-American internforce might find connections — ment? Virtually all Nisei were or not. interned, but no group pun
For sure, there is plenty of ishment or other scheme inprecedent for the federal govterfered during World War ernment paying reparations to II with the lives of Germangroups against which it discrimAmericans. inated in the past. The Office of This was pure racial discrimRedress Administration, set up ination: While not a single Japunder President Ronald Reagan anese-American was ever impliin 1988, paid $20,000 to each cated for anti-American activJapanese-American person sent ity, plenty of German-Americans to internment camps just after promoted Nazi goals in this Pearl Harbor. If actual prisoncountry. The recent Showtime ers in those camps were no lonseries Penny Dreadful depicted ger alive by then, their heirs got some of their activity in Califorthe money. nia.
Long before Reagan’s adminMeanwhile, no American govistration carried out those repernment has paid reparations to arations, Japanese-Americans former slaves or their heirs. Nor during 1948 and 1949 received has there been a formal apology more than $37 million in fedfor slavery. Not even for the fact eral compensation for lost propthat African Americans stem erty. The payments were similar from the only major immigrant in kind, if not quantity, to the population to arrive in America $89 billion Germany has paid against its will. since World War II to compenDescendants of slaves may sate murdered Jews and their still be paying for some deliberheirs. Germany still funds home ately cruel slaveholder practices.
If modern blacks perform worse academically than whites, might that be because literacy was forbidden to most plantation slaves in the antebellum South? Learning to read was punishable by whipping and sometimes death.
Many slave owners also tried to prevent development of strong family ties among their chattel. Parents were frequently sold away from their children. Married couples were often sold apart. Both disasters could strike the same family.
Slave owners were trying to prevent any education ethic from arising among their property, while also working to prevent development of strong families.
Despite this, many Black families have developed constructive traditions of their own while creating a Black middle class.
If these values are not universal among Blacks, might that be the direct product of deliberate policies maintained for centuries?
Germany paid reparations to its Jewish victims and other formerly enslaved laborers who made up one-fourth of its work force during World War II. So it’s fair to ask why the USA has never recognized its own sins.
One mission of the reparations task force should be to determine as much as possible the effects of slavery on modern African Americans, and to separate those factors from things for which people can be held to individual account.
California — which entered the Union as a free state — should never attempt to take on this entire responsibility. But consideration of reparations must start somewhere, and the California task force can at least build a body of evidence for or against the need for and justice of reparations.