By Nancy Thorner -
Reparations for slavery is the idea that some form of compensatory payment needs to be made to the descendants of Africans trafficked to and enslaved in this nation as a consequence of the Atlantic slave trade.
In Colonial times the term “triangle trade” was used to signify three major ports of call arranged in such a way to form a triangle. It operated from the late 16th to early 19th centuries and resulted in bring African slaves to our nation. It operated in this fashion:
- From England, textiles, rum and manufactured goods were shipped to Africa.
- From Africa, slaves were shipped to the Americas.
- From the Americas, sugar, tobacco, and cotton were shipped to England.
It is not surprising that this nation’s contentious racial history is serving as a subtext for the Democrat 2020 presidential campaign or that many Democrat presidential candidates are calling for slavery reparation.
Previous Democratic Party leaders have declined to support reparations for African-Americans, including former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, the U.S. federal government has never approved reparations. From 1861 to 1865 the United States even waged a civil war over slavery. Slavery was abolished in most states in1863 and completely abolished at the end of the Civil War with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865.
Various news reports have suggested the taxpayers' tab might run anywhere from $10 billion to $100 billion to issue reparations to all living people who are descendants of slaves or who have suffered from the ills of racial discrimination Researcher Thomas Craemer estimated that it would cost between $5.9 trillion and $14.2 trillion in the journal of Social Science Quarterly, University of Connecticut.
Politically speaking, support for reparations seems to be a big gamble for Democrats to embrace as an issue to will win back blue-collar Trump supporters in the Midwest or Trump-reluctant independents and Republicans in the suburbs.
A 2016 poll by Marist College commissioned by WGBH radio station in Boston found that 68 percent of Americans do not think reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves, compared with 26 percent who said they should. Among African-Americans, 58 percent support paying reparations and 35 percent oppose them.
Democrat presidential candidates supporting reparations
So far, around a dozen Democrats have endorsed some form of reparations, at least conceptually. Of the major candidates, only Biden and South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg have opposed reparations, although both remain open to some sort of “conversation” on the subject.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has introduced a bill (S.1083) that would create a commission to study the issue of reparations. Introduced by Booker in April, his is the only reparations bill ever to be introduced in the post-Reconstruction U.S. Senate. The bill has 12 cosponsors in the Senate.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren likes the idea of reparations not only for American blacks but also, not surprisingly, for American Indians.
California Sen. Kamala Harris thinks reparations might be a course of action to help lift blacks out of poverty.
Former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro is out in front of them all, declaring monetary reparations should be issued to those who have slave ancestors. Not ruling out direct payments to African Americans in reparation for the legacy of slavery, Castro's stance separates him from his 2020 rivals.
Are reparations for African Americans justified?
It can be rightly said that the playing field for African American has not been level from the end of slavery until today, with increased white opportunities, wages, and business profits.
It might also be said that blacks should show some gratitude to those responsible for bringing their ancestors to this country, which resulted in all those black politicians, doctors, lawyers, entertainers, athletes, authors and civil servants, today living the good life in a first-world nation. How does paying people who were never slaves with money taken from people who never had slaves anything but the unfair redistribution of wealth, otherwise known as bribes?
Have Democrats pushing for reparations ever considered the many complexities surrounding the issue, which are far more likely to tear Americans apart rather than contribute to the racial healing necessary to move forward.
- The taxes necessary to pay the billions and even trillions of dollars being casually discussed would totally wreck the economy.
- Who should pay and who should be eligible for benefits? How should we even define “African American,” given the widespread history of rape during slavery and intermarriage since? Modern research suggests that at least a third of African Americans have at least one white ancestor.
- It's often difficult to trace ancestry accurately. Reparations would be an invitation to perpetual litigation.
- There is also the question of whether and how to treat descendants of free blacks or black immigrants who arrived post-slavery.
Roger McGrath in his brilliant article of May 17, 2019 in the Chronical magazine, Getting Real About Reparation, wrote the following:
“Black slavery was established in North America long before there was a United States. The U.S. didn’t come into being until 1788 when the Constitution was ratified. People who talk about “250 years of slavery,” whether they know it or not, are not talking about the United States. Slavery existed in the United States for only 77 years. Before that was the brief period of the Confederation government and the Continental Congress, and before that we were the British North American colonies.”
"The 250-year claim comes from the sale of a handful of African slaves in 1619 in the British colony of Virginia. The slaves were sold by the captain of an English privateer, sailing under Dutch authority, which intercepted and captured a Portuguese slave ship in the Caribbean en route from Africa to Mexico. The captain knew better than to try to sell the slaves at an island port in the Caribbean and instead sailed north to Virginia. But this was not a typical event."
Overlooked historical facts about slavery
I suspect those now talking about reparations know nothing about the historical facts which follow:
Mr. McGrath relates how when Frederick Law Olmstead, the architect of New York’s Central Park, traveled throughout the South on the eve of the Civil War and was surprised to find, again and again, that Irishmen were used instead of slaves for the work of draining swampland, felling trees, digging ditches, quarrying rock, and clearing forests because “it was much better to have Irish do it, who cost nothing to the planter if they died, than to use up good field-hands in such severe employment.
There were also about a quarter-million free blacks in the South. Nearly 4,000 of them were slave masters who owned more than 20,000 black slaves. These black slave masters are omitted from most textbooks in American history
Not only did blacks own thousands of black slaves, so did American Indians. By the middle of the 1700s, various tribes, especially the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast, began to acquire black slaves. By the end of the century the Cherokee owned nearly a thousand and the Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw several thousand more. The numbers grew sharply during the early nineteenth century. When the tribes were removed to Indian Territory, mostly during the 1830s, they took thousands of black slaves with them. Accompanying the Cherokee on their “Trail of Tears” were some 2,000 black slaves. They were put to work on Cherokee farms in the new tribal home, raising cotton, corn, and garden crops, and tending hogs and cattle.
In conclusion
As Michael Tanner wrote about reparations in his commentary of June 26, 2019, The Wrenching Reparations Question:
“In the end, most discussion of reparations seems to boil down to little more than traditional tax-and-spend policies, prettified with new rationales. But government social-welfare programs have a dismal track record when it comes to bridging the racial divide and empowering African Americans. Doubling down on failed programs is not really making reparations.”
Walter E. Williams https://www.creators.com/author/walter-ewilliams in his article of June 26, 2019, Reparations for Slavery, https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/06/19/reparations-for-slavery makes this indisputable claim:
“The nation's most dangerous big cities are Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, Stockton, Birmingham, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta, Chicago and Milwaukee. The common characteristic of most of these cities is that they have predominantly black populations and blacks have considerable political power as mayors, city councilmen and chiefs of police. Energy spent on reparations should be used to solve those problems.
As of 2014, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that's three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution. If money alone were the answer, the many issues facing a large segment of the black community would have been solved.”
