Reparations for Slavery

One aspect of the current uproar around race is a demand in the US that the government pay reparations for slavery.

The notion is nonsensical.

To whom? There are no former slaves in the USA. To pay reparations to the descendants of slaves becomes a matter of inherited privilege. The Declaration of Independence weighed in against such things in stern terms when it declared that all men are created equal.

And how do you track descendants? As any DNA analysis will demonstrate, essentially no “African-Americans” alive today are of purely African origin. In other words, part of them is slave, and part of them is not—is, possibly, slave owner. Presumably, then, they should pay reparations to themselves, one pocket to the other. 

By contrast, given the demographics, it is exceptionally unlikely that the average non-black American living and paying taxes today had an ancestor who owned African slaves. Most have come more cecently from Europe, and even among those whose ancestors were in North America before 1860, the rate of slaveholding was something like 1%. If they came from Europe, slavery had not been a thing in Europe for the past few thousand years. By contrast, among African-Americans, even their African ancestors were likely to have had African slaves, since slavery was an endemic practice in Africa until recent times. Why then are the descendants of those who did not hold slaves paying reparations to the descendants of slaveholders?

It is true that corporations are considered people; accordingly, the US government can be held liable now for injustices perpetrated by the US government in even the distant past.

But here we have another problem. The US government spent a good deal of money, and lost a lot of soldiers’ lives, to end slavery. The governmental organization liable for slavery would be the Confederate States of America. I hear they filed for bankruptcy some time ago.

Perhaps then government responsibility devolves to the individual states. But good luck figuring out whether, and how many of, a given individual’s ancestors were held as slaves in the sovereign state of Mississippi.

And then, what about others whose ancestors were enslaved? What about the Irish, my own forebears, who were commonly held in indentured servitude, slavery by the UN’s current definition, throughout North America and the Caribbean, and who were dying in multitudes by a largely government-induced famine in the same years immediately before the African slaves were freed in the US? Why reparations for the one group, and not the other?

The natural reaction is to point out that modern Irish-Americans do not need the money. By and large, despite coming from such a dark place so recently, they are doing well. The same might be said of the Jews, who were being dispossessed and systematically exterminated in Europe up to 1945, almost a century after the last slave in the US was freed. Yet nobody thinks the Jews need public money. Or the Armenians, or the Lebanese, or the Ukrainians, or the Cambodians, all victims of more recent holocausts.

Reparations are not called for, would not be just, and, on this evidence, would do no good. It is not the legacy of slavery that is holding African-Americans back.