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.

Reparations for Slavery

Does someone deserve reparations for living here?

A coalition of 14 Caribbean states, including Jamaica, is now asking for reparations for slavery from Britain, France, and Holland.

I suppose I should support the campaign. For, after all, if these folks deserve money from modern Britons now for a policy that ended in 1833, I should surely score something nice for the longstanding occupation and mass starvation of my ancestors in Ireland, right up to the 1920s. And then there is the matter of the Irish slave trade.

If only it weren’t for the obvious injustice of the claims.

After all, not a single Briton living today has owned a slave, and not a single Jamaican can claim to have been enslaved. So why should either accuse the other of guilt or responsibility? If this is just, should modern Jews then bear responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?

The advocates of reparations say, ““You can’t have it both ways,” … “Your [British] society was developed. You are enjoying a lifestyle because of the blood, sweat and tears of people in the past.”

Yet this was a past that ended almost two hundred years ago. If it is really responsible for Britain’s current relative wealth, and Jamaica’s poverty, then how to explain the current wealth of Germany, for example, who was never involved in the slave trade, and has risen from utter desolation as recently as 1945? The same could be said for most of Europe, and Japan; or for any number of immigrant families who arrived destitute on America’s or Canada’s shores, and in two or three generations were quite well-off.

The demand overlooks the fact that, in world terms, Britain, France and Holland were actually among the first countries to abolish slavery. It persisted much longer in Africa: in Niger and Mauretania, into the 21st century. Had their ancestors not been transported to the new world, it would probably have taken several generations longer for African-Caribbeaners to have achieved freedom from the practice.

The demand for reparations also overlooks the fact that Britain left the ex-slaves and their modern descendants in possession of several new democratic nations. And that the citizens of these countries, on the whole, are better off financially as well as in terms of personal freedom than African-Caribbeaners would be if they were now living in Africa. Jamaica’s GDP per capita is higher than almost all black African countries, and a full ten times greater than the ethnically comparable nation of Liberia. And Jamaica is one of the poorest of the former British possessions in the Caribbean. The GDP per capita of the Bahamas, for example, is three to four times larger again.

Obviously, such variations in the economic welfare of otherwise similar states have nothing to do with slavery two or three hundred years ago. They have to do with good and bad governments today.

Unfortunately, it is entirely in the interests of bad governments and corrupt elites to demand reparations for slavery. Not just for the free cash, but to distract attention from the real problem, and their own culpability.