Reparations over formerly enslaved people has a long history: 4 essential reads on why the idea remains unresolved
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Friday, June 2, 2023
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The debate about reparations to descendants of enslaved people rages on.
Key Points:
- The debate about reparations to descendants of enslaved people rages on.
- In California, the state’s reparations task force has estimated that the descendants of former enslaved people living in California should receive a payment of $1.2 million per person.
- Several scholars of U.S. slavery and the history of reparations have written articles explaining what the ongoing debate has been about since the idea first emerged after the Civil War.
1. Despite gains, persistent racial gaps remain
- While researching his book “Making Whole What Has Been Smashed,” John Torpey learned that the idea of compensating freed slaves or their descendants has never really gained much traction in the United States.
- A driving force behind the persistence of reparations talk is just how stark the racial differences remain, Torpey wrote.
2. Righting past wrongs
- Anne Bailey has researched slavery for the past three decades and has concluded that there are many rationales for reparations.
- For one, Bailey wrote, “There has never been a leveling of the playing field, or payments for the debt of unpaid labor over 250 years of slavery.” Furthermore, she explained, Black contribution to the wealth of America has not been acknowledged or given its due.
- “Paying reparations to Americans of African descent could help the U.S. reclaim some moral leadership on the global stage,” Bailey wrote.
- Read more:
Revisiting reparations: Is it time for the US to pay its debt for the legacy of slavery?
3. Slave owners received reparations
- “But what often gets forgotten by those who oppose reparations is that payouts for slavery have been made before,” Craemer wrote .
- “But those payments went to former slave owners and their descendants, not the enslaved or their legal heirs.” A prominent example is the so-called “Haitian Independence Debt” that burdened an independent Haiti with reparation payments to former slave owners in France.
- Another was the British government, which paid reparations totaling the equivalent of about $429 billion in 2021 to slave owners when it abolished slavery in 1833.