Reparations committee worth considering
No matter how one joins a family, whether by birth or adoption, they’re your people all the way back, not just now and into the future. Everything the forerunners did is your legacy.
That’s how most people think about it. It’s also a good way to approach nationhood and patriotism. Very few of us in this nation of immigrants are eligible for the Daughters or Sons of the American Revolution, but Yorktown, Saratoga and the Bon Homme Richard are just as vital to our cultural DNA as if we had biological ancestors there.
It’s our country all the way back, not just now and into the future.
Similarly, no one living fought in the Civil War or had anything to do with what caused it, but we have inherited the consequences and they are our responsibility.
That cause was human slavery, an institution so diabolical in modern eyes as to make it difficult to understand why Americans who fancied themselves righteous could have practiced and profited from something so evil for nearly 250 years.
As we have written before, the slaveholders, and for a time most of the nation, relied on racism to rationalize their brutality and hypocrisy. Racism was the caveat, the unwritten codicil, to our founding declaration that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The abolition of slavery did not do away with racism or with the unequal treatment of Americans based on the color of their skin. The effects are everywhere, from the higher COVID-19 death rates among Blacks and Latinos to the terror felt by Black motorists stopped by the police.
Our national family, all 331 million of us, needs an intervention.
That is at hand in Congress in the form of House Resolution 40, the Judiciary Committee’s bill to create a commission to recommend ways of making reparations to the descendants of enslaved people. It deserves serious consideration.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the attitude only among Democrats. One of the arguments some Republicans made in the committee was to say that no one living today is responsible for slavery. In fact, we are completely responsible for the consequences. We cannot let them continue to fester. The bill may not pass even the House, but it deserves to be heard.
If there is to be healing, it can only begin with fact-finding and reconciliation. The bill, first introduced 30 years ago, calls for a 15-member commission to study slavery and racial discrimination from the nation’s earliest days to the present.
That doesn’t necessarily comprehend monetary payments to individuals, as Congress authorized for still-living Japanese Americans who had been imprisoned during World War II. There are daunting practical and constitutional problems to paying money to people for what happened to their ancestors. Even for those who are prosperous? What about people who consider themselves white whose DNA reveals African ancestry?
In 2014, the testing company 23AndMe reported that 3.5% of its clients who identified as white had some Black African ancestry.
Cash payments, however symbolic, could not redress the national stain of racism.
But reparations need not take that form to accomplish a wise purpose. Targeted investments in education and health could overcome racial disparities and break the unending cycles of poverty that began with slavery.
When 4 million American slaves were set free with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the government tried for a while to help them get a foothold in the economy. An agency called the Freedman’s Bureau provided education and help in negotiating employment contracts, but Congress lost interest and let it expire in 1870.
The fabled promise of “40 acres and a mule” was actually an attempt by Gen. William T. Sherman to distribute land seized from or abandoned by Southern slaveowners. But President Andrew Johnson rescinded it, and there were no more systematic efforts to endow Blacks with a stake in the economy that had prospered so long from their unpaid labor.
According to one study, as many as a million freed slaves died from starvation and disease in the aftermath of the Civil War. The sharecropping system, Jim Crow and convict labor condemned most of the others to perpetual cycles of poverty and secondclass citizenship.
John Hope Franklin, the historian who as a child survived a massacre of Black citizens at the hands of whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 100 years ago, wrote in his book “From Slavery to Freedom” that losing the Civil War deepened the contempt many Southern whites felt toward Blacks.
In 1867, he found, former slaves were paid less for their agricultural labor than their masters had earned by leasing them out.
Today, many prosper. But for most, “deep inequities” persist, according to a report of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee last year.
“On average, Black Americans face much more difficult circumstances than their white counterparts. For example, Black Americans take home less income, are far less likely to own their homes and live shorter lives than white Americans,” the report said.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper made similar remarks to his state’s General Assembly recently.
“We must face head-on the stark reality of systemic racism and how it hurts people and leaves them behind — who gets to see a doctor, who gets hired for a job, who gets charged with a crime, who gets prison time, who gets killed,” Cooper said.
The sad truth is that every white child born into our American family starts life with an advantage unavailable to one who is Black. Many Americans are still in denial about that. Many still profess the “lost cause” myth by which the South, which had lost the Civil War, won the ensuing peace.
In Louisiana this week, a legislator echoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ disapproval of critical race theory is trying to pass a bill against the teaching of “divisive concepts” about race and sex. When colleagues questioned him, this is what he said:
“If you are having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery: the good, the bad, the ugly.”
There was nothing good about it, and the evil that it did lives on to this day.