It’s hard to adjudicate a legal case when the perpetrator is on the run for decades. Evidence becomes old and scarce. And the drive to create some justice- well, that may even dissipate in time. This is the kind of complexity we see in the conversations about reparations for colonial chattel slavery in the US.
That complexity, though, shouldn’t stop us from advancing the conversation and delivering on it, especially because, factually, it is the amount of time that the US waited to consider and mandate a real solution to reparations that has created that complexity. And waiting longer will only make it more difficult.
We can think of reparations, if we want them to be effective, as a three-part model. First, helping to make whole the countries we diminished. Secondly, addressing and accounting for the value and labor, life, welfare, and freedom of the people impacted. And thirdly, what we do so as to ensure that nothing like this happens again. That reparations model was one that Germany and Japan engaged after the horrors of WWII.
I. Reparations to Africa
The first, simplest part, is our responsibility to the nations in Africa from which the bulk of the slave trade drew. It may be true that this is hard to determine because the records kept by slave traders are so deficient. But historians can pick up the slack.
For example, almanac entries suggest that the populations of other countries at the time rose steadily, along the trajectories they had before the slave trade, but populations in African slave-impacted countries showed a loss of 100 million people, throughout the period in which they were targeted for this trade. This simple model- using widely available population records that show long term growth curves without political intent SHOULD trump the poor record keeping of slave-traders that had little interest in individual lives and often considered “dead cargo” to be inconsequential.
Because regardless of whether they lived or died en route, the land areas across Africa were depleted by millions of workers, thinkers, scientists, poets, parents, statesmen, and inventors, during a time in world history where invention swept the globe and mankind was inspired to build and grow. Would it have made a difference to the development of Continental African culture and development? Without a doubt.
Reparations paid for damage to other countries is fairly transparent. Germany’s billions of dollars paid to other nations after WW2 is an example. They did agree to pay 3 billion Deutsche marks to Israel in installments to account for their behavior toward world Jewry. Remember that this country- Israel- did not exist at the time they hunted, imprisoned, belabored, and killed Jewish people.
The message was clear. The recipient of the restitution- the Nation of Israel- was populated by the descendants of those afflicted and deserved the reparations. It was not necessary that a single Jewish camp survivor was there. The intent was to honestly repair that nation and its people who were historically hurt.
The US can deliver on its reparations responsibility to The African continent, in this first case, simply, by abolishing the entirety of that content’s debt to us (in many cases, servicing that debt has kept entire areas in poverty) while, at the same time, partnering with nations across Africa to build and pay for much needed infrastructure, like continental railroads, over an agreed upon period of time. A successful strategy for the US, in the past, has been to help repair the damaged infrastructure of its wartime allies. This has created opportunity and growth. In this case, an investment, over ten years, for example, of 2 Trillion dollars would have a massive impact on the quality of life across that continent.
If this effort is concentrated in transportation and human services, it removes, as well, many of the objections about delivering material aid in areas in Africa- letting food and medicines move freely. Creating a greater fluidity of movement for Citizens of that continent, as well, would increase business, tourism, and create more freedom.
It is a long term commitment but one we can do.
II. Reparations to Individuals
The second part is reparations paid to individuals and the families of individuals impacted by the injustice.
In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act which compensated over 100,000 people of Japanese descent, incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. This legislation offered a formal apology as well as paying $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim.
This took 40 years but many original internees were still alive. This is often cited as a huge problem in regards to reparations for slavery as no original slaves are still alive. People who have read Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon are familiar with he story of Oluale Kossola, considered by some to have been the last living slave brought from Africa in the US, who died in 1935. Or Sylvester Magee, thought to maybe have been the last living American Born former slave, who fought in the civil war and lived to be 124, passing away in 1971. What looks glaringly obvious is that America waited too long, ignoring the issue of reparations, ruling out easy solutions. The solutions that remain to us require due diligence, thought, and commitment.
Paying families and descendants of families becomes even more complex when the true brutality of slavery is considered. The widespread rape and forced interbreeding between slave “owners” and their “property” existed at a scale that the UN now considers to be genocidal (enforced rape and interbreeding of a captive minority population).
To say that the US got away without paying reparations to slaves by committing a kind of material genocide that obfuscated the family trees of victims and perpetrators is a fair assessment. It’s the mobster version of waiting until all the prosecutors die and killing all the witnesses. It definitely shouldn’t be behavior that is rewarded. The message we do NOT want to set on this planet is that you can avoid responsibility for your crimes if you can just outlive your victims or if you can manage to kill them all.
So how do we manage number 2? It’s clear we are talking about a massive amount of money. 80% of the total number of people who traveled to the Americas between 1500 and 1820 were slaves. This was well over 12.5 million slaves who had survived the journey brought to the US, and immediately were bred to create even more slaves.
The Estimated value of the labor performed by black slaves (both of African Origin and Descent) in America between 1619 and 1865 alone (when we have the best records), was estimated by Harpers based on 222,505,049 hours of forced labor compounded at 6% interest through 1993 and comes to over $97,100,000,000,000.
If this number seems large to you, you may now begin to understand the incredible advantage this country delivered to land owning white men over hundreds of years, where labor was free. Some authors have chopped that down significantly, applying some fantastical dark minimum to the labor expended, as though working for pennies a year weren’t possibly slavery, too.
What we see if we are honest, are millions of people working billions of hours, Wille not being compensated. And we have good solid solutions for this as well. By considering people of African American Descent specifically within neighborhoods that are predominantly African American we can create funded “opportunity zones” for businesses and individuals. These areas are the overlap of Genetic African Americans and people disenfranchised by the value aggregation of large scale white owned businesses.
The US could, again, commit 4 trillion over a 20 year period to fund black owned businesses in those areas, building schools, resource centers, transportation facilities, funding innovation and research, etc.
III. Reparations for Prevention
The third part of reparations, to fund organizations that support the freedoms and rights of the group that was hurt, working to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again, is easier. We can easily identify groups that work for the welfare of African-American people and can work to make sure that the kind of dehumanization and horror never happen again. We can adopt the “Never again” slogan that Conscientious Jewish men and women use worldwide to watch out for offenses against any group and keep vigilant watch in preventing slavery.
Similarly, Germany signed an agreement in 1952, stating that West Germany would pay 450 million Deutschmarks to the World Jewish Congress, a federation which represents Jewish communities, over 12 years. Even if the exact people who were impacted originally were not compensated through this, the repercussions of the Holocaust left Jews needing the kind of help represented by the WJC.
A report by the International Labor Organization found that there could be as many as 40 million people living as slaves today, worldwide. Surely it has to be part of the reparations platform to ensure that we do nothing to facilitate that and work to help find solutions for it. If we don’t fund and support watchdog groups we are failing to truly apologize- with the understanding that slavery is universally bad.
This isn’t some impossible far-away solution. It will cost trillions of dollars. And for the people complaining that you can’t just throw money at a problem, it will have to be money thoughtfully spent in the three areas above. Spent in the ways that solve problems for real. Because the problem is real.
In this country, for centuries, people of color have been cut off from being able to accrue value for their own and their family’s labor. Even after the twilight of American Slavery, black people paid the toll for everyone on the American dream without reaping the benefits. If America honestly hopes dig its way out from under the stranglehold of history it won’t be by ignoring and redirecting. It will be in honesty, revelation, and action.
There is no more running.
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