§1. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt… An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future… Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”
§2. If God wills that it [slavery] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn - with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address
§3. The existence of past injustice (previous violations of the first two principles of justice in holdings) raises the third major topic under justice in holdings: the rectification of injustice in holdings. If past injustice has shaped present holdings in various ways, some identifiable and some not, what now, if anything, ought to be done to rectify these injustices? What obligations do the performers of injustice have toward those whose position is worse than it would have been had the injustice not been done? Or, than it would have been had compensation been paid promptly? How, if at all, do things change if the beneficiaries and those made worse off are not the direct parties in the act of injustice, but, for example, their descendants? Is an injustice done to someone whose holding was itself based upon an unrectified injustice? How far back must one go in wiping clean the historical slate of injustices? What may victims of injustice permissibly do in order to rectify the injustices being done to them, including the many injustices done by persons acting through their government? Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, Utopia
A. Jim Crow Kleptocracy • Legal and Extra-legal theft of Non-white Property
§4. Two racially-different ‘class ladders’ from peonage to full citizenship - whites generally bring generational wealth, blacks generational debt: rooted in the legacy of Jim Crow kleptocracy (rule by thieves); Theft of black property during Jim Crow era: the story of Clyde Ross, a tale of unequal protection under the law, deprived of property by racist courts and extra-judicial lynchings. (a 2001 AP Report documents some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars.) Share-cropping: a neo-feudal form of worker exploitation wedded to Jim Crow racism reinforced with violence; “Contract buying” in the North - all the liabilities of home ownership with all the disadvantages of renting; swindles poor blacks out of home ownership. “From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.” (Coates) “Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.” African Americans left out of the New Deal, The G. I. Bill and Levitttowns, the first suburban housing complexes. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible; No changes since 1970 in the income gap: “As a rule, poor blacks people do not work their way out of the ghetto - and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.”
§5. “According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.”
B. Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history
§6. The Federal Housing Commission’s “red-lining:” The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house; Black neighborhoods (no matter how few blacks or their income) were given “D” rating, ineligible for FHA backing. a racist practice which spread to the whole mortgage industry cutting non-whites out from being able to get loans for purchasing homes. ““A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.” Cut out from legitimate sources of funding, non-whites are easy prey for predatory lending. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
§7. The Contract Buyers League suit against city of Chicago. In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial, according to the jury foreman hopefully ending ““the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.”
C. Precedents for Reparations
§8. Belinda Royall an example of successful reparations at the beginning of the US republic in 1783 Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings by the state of Massachusetts to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations; In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’ ”
§9. French Spoliation Claims During “a seven-year period from 1793 to 1800…France attacked American ships in retaliation for the United States’s neutral stance in the war between France and Britain,” Craemer writes. Though France refused to pay for the damage they caused to people’s property during the war, hundreds of Americans sued their own federal government anyway, arguing that the hostilities, and damages, were ultimately the responsibility of the United States. They claimed that France was retaliating for the United States’s failure to pay back the European country for the support it gave to the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. By 1910, after decades of debate, the United States eventually agreed to pay back $1 million in claims ($38 million in today’s dollars) to hundreds of its own citizens.
§10. West German Reparations to Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. Starting next year, eligibility will extend to anyone who can prove that they hid from the Nazis for at least six months. $89 Billion has been paid out since 1952.
D. Estimates for Slavery Reparations
§11. Gen. William T. Sherman's Special Field Order 15 (Jan. 16, 1865): “Forty acres and a mule” for each formerly enslaved family, setting aside 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land for freed slaves; after Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman's order, giving the land back to its former Confederate owners.
§12. $193 Billion (Boris Bittker The Case for Black Reparations), determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two.
§13. $200 Billion (Charles J. Ogletree Jr.), multiplying the # of African Americans in the US by the difference in white and black per capita income:
§14. $5.9 trillion and $14.2 trillion (Thomas Craemer of UCONN); tabulating how many hours all slaves—men, women and children—worked in the United States from when the country was officially established in 1776 until 1865, when slavery was officially abolished; multiplying the amount of time they worked by average wage prices at the time, and then a compounding interest rate of 3 percent per year (more than making up for inflation).
§15. H.R. 40 Reparations Study Bill To address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.
§16. Native American rejection of reparations for land theft “Reparations are ill-suited to address the harm and damage experienced by people who understand themselves, in a very practical and moral sense, as members of communities that include nonhuman life. For many Native Americans, our land (including the air, water, and biological life on which we depend) is a natural relative, not a natural resource. And our justice traditions require the restoration of our land relationship, not monetary reparations… The tribes of the Great Sioux Nation have steadfastly refused a money settlement for the illegal taking of the Black Hills, which they consider the sacred center place of their creation. - Daniel R. Wildcat, a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation
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