Reparations: Don't Go There

[Recently the old topic of possible reparations for slavery has been bobbing up in the news again, in a Mother Jones Article that defends Bernie Sanders against criticisms levelled by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the most prominent current advocate of reparations. Coates wrote a long, passionate essay on the topic in 2014 that has become one of the most famous articles ever to appear in The Atlantic. As it happens, I responded to the Coates article, all but invisibly, in The Vocabula Review. So I will go ahead and paste that piece here, my lazy-man's post for the beginning of the month. I do so with a little trepidation, both because it's pretty long-winded and because I know some good friends will find my take pretty retrograde. "Opposition is true friendship."]

Reparations: Don’t Go There

 

Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you. — Satchel Paige  

History is more or less bunk. — Henry Ford 

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 June's Atlantic Monthly cover story, "The Case For Reparations," by Ta-Nehisi Coates, impressively reopens a question that is as old as the country itself: whether African Americans should be compensated for centuries of racial injustice. Early on, the essay set records for hits at the Atlantic website, and print and online responses have been proliferating ever since. Some of these credit the piece with transformative, landmark significance.

Yet it is a little hard to say just what Coates has added to the topic. The article is not at all what it sounds like — a systematic proposal and rationale for a reparations program — but a long meditation on black history, rambling, passionate, anecdotal, often moving, but rather diffident and at worst simply unclear as to what it really intends. At one point the author tosses out a figure of $34 billion annually, in 1973 dollars, "for a decade or two," as a possible budget for a reparations program, but that kind of detail is mostly absent. What Coates really cares about, he says, is not such nitty-gritty, but the "conversation" he wants America to have about slavery and its sequelae; that, and the mere principle of having America try to undo the wrong done over the centuries. (Adding some substance, perhaps, to the official apologies made by the House and Senate, if anyone noticed, in 2008-2009.)

The essay makes a convincing case that slavery contributed far more  powerfully to the early growth of the country than whites (at least) generally believe:

Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America — and much of the Atlantic world — was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. . . .

 By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. . . .

 . . . . white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. . . .

Yet such ideas are anything but new with Coates; on the left, these days, they are more or less doctrine. What seems newer, to me at least, is the way the article presses the argument on through the twentieth century, pointing to the Jim Crow foundations of Roosevelt’s New Deal (that liberal touchstone), giving a harrowing account of racist banking and housing practices in late-century Chicago. Tough stuff, this, for the white conscience. Apparently the reparations meter did not shut off in 1863 or 1868 or 1964, but has been running steadily right up into our era of renewed voter suppression, widespread de facto segregation, and mass black incarceration.

Coates I think is dead right that this story needs to be told, and told again: it is the necessary history we too often suppress. But does the rubric of reparations add anything to the tale itself? As if sensing that it does not, Coates lets the concept drift. By the end of the article, "reparations" stops meaning anything specific and becomes a grand metaphysical something or other that promises a new day for America:

What I'm talking about is more than recompense of 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. (70)

 All this sounds great; who could argue against "spiritual renewal"? But by all the odds, by any logic I can see, talk of reparations (let alone the reality of any program) promises no such thing, but only an endless squabble, ever more petty and divisive, over who owes what to whom.

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 The problem is one of slippery slopes, of elephants in the room, and finally of basic premises. Once we set about compensating people for injuries not precisely their own, but inflicted vaguely on their ancestors or "race," where do we stop? Shouldn't Native Americans, in their hundreds of tribes, be first in line ahead of African Americans, as they were not merely kidnapped, exploited, robbed of their lands, and horribly brutalized, but nearly exterminated? What about the Irish, the Germans, the Swedes, the Poles, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Jews, and all the other minorities that have been unfairly treated at some point? What about women, who have been barred from the workplace, kept from voting, abused by cruel spouses whom the law failed to punish? What about Catholics, Mormons, Quakers, Christian Scientists, Wiccans? Any of these could make a case for having been persecuted at some point, their sufferings abetted by an always imperfect government and court system. What about gays and the handicapped? (It is hard to imagine America, as Coates might say, without its John Wayne ethic, implicitly patriarchal and homophobic and “ableist,” firmly in the saddle till quite recently.)

What about indentured servants who came over with the early colonists and were effectively slaves for many years? What about the poor in every age, always bullied and cheated by the rich? How do we appease the ghosts of New England children worked to death in the mills, of West Virginia coal miners coughing their way to early graves? What about the country of Mexico, unfairly attacked in 1846–1848, then savagely despoiled of territories including New Mexico, where much later I grew up, very glad to be a U.S. citizen, never suspecting that I owed it all to some very bad behavior by the Polk administration? What about global warming, which the Third World with some justice blames on the First, in a rising chorus of cries for aid?

The problem is not that no one deserves reparations, but that nearly everyone seems to.

Such difficulties grow still more acute when we try to leave the level of grand abstraction, where we think of groups and races as prime actors in the shadow-drama of history, and get down to cases. Just who will pay what to whom? Here is Coates, skillfully finessing such questions:

 

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice of reparations are the true sticking point . . .

 

Practicalities? The cited questions are nothing of the sort, but the crux of what has been proposed, the what not the how. There is a reason Coates has to feint and dodge. As Kevin Williamson remarks in a tough-minded (and to me, nearly sufficient) response to Coates in The National Review, “treating people as individuals makes reparations morally and intellectually impossible.” There is simply no way to deduce the justice due to an individual from reflections (however lyrical and gripping) on the history of his so-called race, or of any other category to which you have decided to assign him. Guilt and merit, debt and moral desert, are irreducibly personal, the product of one's very own choices and deeds and experiences.

The idea of repaying person X for injuries done to person Y is, to most people, moral cockamamie. Yet that is what any reparations scheme, at this late date, would entail — the perplexing reality that emerges when one tries to implement the seemingly reasonable ideas of “repaying Black America” or “compensating African Americans for their sufferings.” In a reparations chat room I visited at one point, one poster snapped, “The debt owed by my unborn child is exactly zero.” What sticks in the craw, for some people anyway, is the latent implication that debt implies guilt, and that guilt now descends inexorably from the group to the individual, never mind her own acts: a new liberal-left doctrine of original sin.

 The whole discussion tends to start ugly and get uglier. A question that always comes up is what to do with instances like Colin Powell and Barack Obama, who self-identify as African American but whose forebears made it to this country only within the last generation. Should their shares be pro-rated, compared to that of people who can somehow show descent through generations of American slaves? Or do such latecomers somehow inherit all the sufferings of "the race" as a whole, and the same claim to restitution? With the president specifically, there is of course the question of how much his white "half" owes his black, and whether the debt simply cancels itself out.

One extant proposal tries to solve the conundrum of eligibility with a two-part protocol:

First, individuals would have to establish that they are indeed descendants of persons formerly enslaved in the United States. Second, individuals would have to establish that at least 10 years prior to the adoption of a reparations program they self-identified as ‘black,’ ‘African American,’ ‘Negro,’ or ‘colored.

This sounds reasonable and fair — for about a second. One problem with the first criterion is that it makes no distinction between those who can claim a single slave in their ancestry and those who can claim thousands. In fact in America most people are “born into the cause,” like the Jarndyce heirs in Bleak House, in at least some measure, simply because the math of heredity works that way. At a conservative estimate, fourteen generations now separate us from 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to America. If a young American alive today could make an exhaustive ancestry search back that far, she would in theory discover 16,382 ancestors (two to the fourteenth power) scattered through the centuries, with half that number alive all at once in 1619. The totals would need to be reduced to account for inbreeding (e.g., the marriage of cousins) along the way. Even so, the numbers would be huge, and the odds that none of one’s ancestors were slaves are vanishingly small, for almost anyone.

So if we are really going to insist that suffering and injury create an entitlement that mysteriously passes on through the loins, generation after generation, the question becomes one of percentages: how much of the ancestral grievance have you inherited? How black are you, really? Do we conduct melanin assays, or what? If you are going to launch a vast benefits program based on race, that seems to be where you are headed. 

As if sensing the problem, criterion number two tries a different approach: let reparations eligibility be determined by the act of “self-identification” in the present, sustained for at least ten years. In some ways, indeed, this seems a more promising tack (more on this in a moment). In others, it boggles the mind. How can the mere act of self-identifying, or anything else I do or fail to do now, make me a victim (or not) of crimes committed and suffered long ago? If it is really present status that determines eligibility and desert, why bring up history at all?

An associated minor question is whether the reparations benefit should be means tested. I would not like to be the politician who had to explain to a white kindergarten teacher why her taxes were being raised to provide a race-based payout to, let's say, Herman Cain or Oprah Winfrey. Well, no problem; we can simply curtail benefits above a certain income level. But the very existence of such African Americans — rich, famous, influential — undercuts our premise of universal victimhood and hints at flaws in our accounting methods. A true tally of anything must subtract payments made from the balance still owing, but in this case we hear only of debits, and of a balance that always grows. The death of something like 700,000 whites in the Civil War, largely a struggle to end slavery, seems to make no dent in the huge principal, nor do any of the advantages that America has at least sometimes conferred on blacks as well as whites. For that matter, there is the nasty question of whether some debits should be made to the debits. Should the burning of Los Angeles in race riots be scored against the total to be allocated to African Americans? Has anger over the OJ verdict been fully amortized? Should the black incarceration rate count as evidence of continuing racial injustice (as I believe), or will someone take it at face value and dock the black team for a disproportionate rate of black-on-white crime?

But reparations writers all seem to agree that the final tally, if it ever comes in, will be unimaginably huge. Coates’s guess of $340-$680 billion is a lowball figure. Something in the one to three trillion dollar range seems to be closer to the going price. One ebullient article insists that, with compound interest, “it is possible to derive figures into the quadrillions,” but offers to settle the tab at a fire sale price of $1.38 trillion, remarking that such a payout will “probably not . . . destroy the economy.” Ka-ching. 

 

          3

 

Such problems are so obvious that liberals (in whose ranks I count myself) often seem to be bending over backwards not to see them. The idea of reparations is received with vague courtesy, not because it makes sense but because you are anxious not to offend, or wish to convey support for the basic idea of racial equality. This leaves the field open to the far right, who have no such compunctions. A little gem in the Neanderthal mode, as deft as it is unfair, is a blog post from 2002 by Fred Reed, aimed at Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor of African American studies (who would much later have a famous beer with President Obama). With apologies, a snippet that seems instructive:

 

On the Web I find that Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, is demanding that whites pay reparations to blacks ....

Tell you what. I believe in justice. I'll give you a million dollars for every slave I own, and another million for every year you were a slave. Fair enough? But tell me, how many slaves do you suppose I have? In round numbers, I mean. Say to the nearest dozen. And how long were you a slave?

Oh.

In other words, I owe you reparations for something that I didn't do and didn't happen to you. That makes sense. Like lug nuts on a birthday cake.

The tone is toxic, but the shot finds its particular elephant rather well: with the real victims and perpetrators long gone, we are trying to compensate and punish stand-ins, and the idea just does not add up.

But in assailing Gates, of all people, Reed badly mistakes his target. In 2010, Gates published a New York Times article, "Ending the Slavery Blame Game," that deals mostly with difficulties in the concept of reparations. That the essay took courage to write is shown by the acrimonious counter-fire it soon attracted, for example in a long online critique by Molefi Asante.

Gates quietly points out that for centuries slavery was business as usual in Africa, and that a huge majority of slaves taken to America — perhaps 90 percent — were originally captured by other Africans — not by viciously greedy whites, as in the TV series Roots and, it seems, the imaginings of most pro-reparations writers. It is comforting in various ways, to blacks and whites, to imagine those eighteenth-century slavers as heartless, barely human predators. The more difficult part of the truth may be that they were middlemen doing what people always do: participating in the world as they found it, with a keen eye for their own advantage: a cruel bunch, but not exactly monsters. Apparently some of those who arrived in America in chains had themselves been slavers, till their plans miscarried and their intended victims turned the tables on them. Some slaveholders in the New World were themselves black. Life, as they say, was cruel. In the Middle Passage and on the plantations, commercialization increased the horrors of the vile old system to extremes too brutal even for the minimalist norms of the time; but it was by that very token that the reaction came on at last, and it was not so long (1807, 1865) before the system collapsed. A point often made by conservatives is that the impetus for this, the unheard-of idea of abolishing slavery in a world that had always known it, was mainly white, Christian, and European: the kind of pigeonholing that the topic always encourages.   

Gates stops short of dismissing the idea of reparations, finding it still worth discussion, leading perhaps to some kind of "symbolic" restitution. Reed, though, in his earlier assault, speaks as if Gates were the most uncompromising pro-reparations firebrand, turning up the ridicule full blast. This, too, seems instructive. The topic is simply polarizing. Try to find a middle ground, as Gates does, and you get withering fire from both sides.

At the heart of every pro-reparations statement I have seen (here, for instance) is a naïve moral absolutism that reveals itself in rhetoric of crime, sin, guilt, redemption, and so on. Writers simply take it as given that slavery was a hideous and unparalleled crime, that this is obvious, that there is no need to explain. They seem to assume that life has a baseline of niceness and decency and good fortune from which any departure can be scored as an aberration; and it is this assumption, powerful though unstated, that sets the reparations tally going.

Moral relativism is problematic too — it can justify anything — and no doubt we are right to look back with anger and disgust at the slaver, the overseer, and the Jim Crow landlord. But if you really mean to quantify the damage and evil they did — assigning a number, compounding interest — it is not realistic simply to abstract their misdeeds from history and proceed as if they had happened yesterday. You need to enter more fully into the moral and material contexts of the malefactors’ times, asking unpleasant questions like, Realistically, what would the victims’ fate have been otherwise and What were the standards of the day, trying to exchange your fantasy baseline for a real one, one that allows for all the defects of human nature and merely human systems of justice. You will not walk this road for very long before you rediscover that horrific platitude of the slaveholder and the segregationist, Well, the Negro is better off here in America than he ever would have been in Africa. That remark is so offensive, notice, not because the historical logic is really faulty, but precisely because it refuses to let go of history, in a way that delivers a tremendous insult in the here and now. Rather than starting fresh, it tries to define the African American as a permanent debtor, inferior forever. But isn’t that what the reparations argument now tries to do to whites?

Such things tend to go unsaid not because they are not thought and felt, but because the social and political terrain is so tricky. Get a comma wrong, and you seem to be advocating slavery, murder, rape, the whole package.

In this kind of rhetorical predicament, feeling that the reparations issue defines him as guilty and indebted no matter his personal acts or intentions, what the white liberal or conservative (it no longer matters) finally wants to say is something like this: "Look, I'm sorry for what some of my ancestors did to some of your ancestors (and vice versa, because no doubt our family trees cross at some point). But that was them, not you and me. Also, life is rough, people are beasts, and what whites did to blacks was pretty much what blacks would have done to whites if they could have, probably. Maybe it is even what one of us would do to the other right now if society collapsed and things got desperate. But has it all turned out so badly? If the slavers — black slavers — had never come, would you have a better life today in Mali or Rwanda or Zimbabwe? From here on out, I’ll try hard to be fair if you will. But I flatly deny personal responsibility for anything I have not personally done. Best I can do."

 Ugly enough for you?

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 But there is no need to take the debate to such wounding extremes. One of many things I learned from Coates's article is that the NAACP formally supports reparations. So I looked up the association's 2010 resolution on the issue, and found this to be pretty much the nub:

 BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the NAACP call upon the United States Government and several foreign countries which participated in or benefited from the African slave trade ... to make such investments to improve the conditions of 2010 African-Americans through better schools, health clinics, job training, environmental cleanup ... to allow the people of color damaged by slavery's policies to develop the health and economic standards of the entire country ....

What instantly strikes me is that there are no remedies here — none! — that I do not support on other grounds entirely: simple fairness, simple social justice going forward. More help for a badly disadvantaged and still-persecuted minority? More funds for schools, clinics, job training, and environmental cleanup? Of course! Why didn't you just say so? My tax check is in the mail. Just don't call it reparations. The NAACP seems to have found the worst, least convincing argument possible to support its goals: a strange thing.

It is too simple to say that justice is (in Saussure's terms) synchronic rather than diachronic, a creature of the now, a matter of timeless structures rather than unfolding processes. Justice of the judicial kind, at least, always begins with a backwards foray, very tightly focused, to unearth specific injuries that can then be redressed in the present, providing a hopeful standard for the future. The question, though, is how far back justice can reach, and how wide it can spread its nets, before the enterprise becomes speculative and arbitrary, more likely to do harm than good. That is why statutes of limitation exist.

 Coates cites one instance that suggests the limits of what the law, faced with overwhelming historical and existential wrongs, can reasonably hope to accomplish. In 1783, Belinda Royall, a freedwoman who had spent 50 years as the slave of one Isaac Royal, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature, which in that day incorporated functions that would be taken over by the torts court in our own, for support in her old age. Coates comments on the outcome:

Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.

 

But this is not really a case of reparations at all. The award was no grandiose attempt to repay black people generally for a century and a half of unpaid labor, much of it done by dead ancestors, but a specific, modest award of damages, for clearly enumerated injuries, made to a direct victim soon after the event, and paid by the one who had wronged her and benefited by it. Even here, one suspects that the outcome could have been different if Isaac Royall had been alive to contest the suit. He had, after all, broken no laws.

The criminal or torts court does what it can do, but it is a poor model for schemes of overall social justice; it scales up very badly when one tries to incorporate multitudes of people and vast stretches of time. If it is social justice you are shopping for, the synchronic mode really is better. You need to face the future with the sort of resolute cheerfulness, almost disingenuous, almost amnesiac, that was shown for instance in Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Lay out the entire scheme of social relations in a big chart and decide what looks right or wrong right now, then make the changes that seem least unfair. You will fail of course, but tomorrow you try again, and then again, and you may make progress. When you have constructed a present that looks even somewhat fair, that will be time enough to worry about the past, which is far less fixable.  

Reparations is not a conversation endlessly deferred and postponed, but one we have been having for centuries. Our problem now is how to desist, not how to recommence.