Reparations 2: What are Reparations?

By some accounts the United States is the richest country in the world. But it's population clearly is not similarly the richest. The official US poverty rate for 2017 is 12.3% 1 out of roughly 8 Americans is poor. The homeless are not included in this number, neither are persons in the military or in prison. In 2014 more than 20% of children lived in poverty. For families headed by a woman the poverty rate was 33%. The rate for American Indians is sightly higher. More than half of the poor adults worked, often part-time because full-time work was hard to get; the work they did have paid really poorly.

Are these poor Americans whose poverty is the result of not obtaining full-time work and/or being paid properly called "poverty wages"entitled to reparations?

I raise the question in order to ascertain what we mean by the term "reparations."

Currently reparations are under discussion for African-Americans who have traditionally been and still are over represented among the poor in America. But reparations for African Americans are called for not just because they are often poor in spite of working, frequently more than one job, but because African-Americans were enslaved between the middle 1600s and the end of the Civil War. Being the property of white plantation owners, they could be bought and sold at the whites' will. Husbands were sold away from wives, wives from husbands; children lost their mothers and fathers when their owners sold them to a different plantation, often far away. Black family ties were not regarded as valid or important.

Slave children were not only not entitled to an education; it was illegal to teach them to read and write. When the wife of the owner of Frederick Douglass taught him his letters, she was breaking the law.

Legally liberated at the end of that war, African-Americans were subjected to the so-called Jim Crow regime. Southern states passed the properly named Black Codes – laws that applied only to African-Americans, that made them liable to be arrested for "vagrancy" if they were not working, or subject to arrest for not yielding the sidewalk to white persons, or for looking white persons in the eye. Convicted under any of these laws, they were imprisoned. Prisoners were rented out to white enterprises where once again they worked without getting paid – the condition of slaves. Other "freed" African-Americans worked as sharecroppers where they were regularly cheated out of the pay they had earned for a year's crop of cotton.

Why did African-Americans put up with these gross forms of maltreatment and disrespect? In the period after the end of the Civil War they were the targets of a concerted terrorist campaign. Random African-Americans were grabbed, tortured and hanged. A sizable white audience gaped at their killing; no one reached out to help. Sheriffs and police often were in the audience. No white person was prosecuted for murdering an African-American. This terror campaign has not ended to this day. The murderer of Trayvon Martin was prosecuted but acquitted.

Poor Americans deserve help. They deserve living wages, access to good housing, good healthcare and good schools for their children. After almost 365 years of being treated as barely human, African Americans deserve reparations, compensation for centuries of ill-treatment and insult.

But what form should these reparations take? There are different proposals: Some imagine that every qualified African-American would be paid a certain, probably substantial sum of money. Other projects involve affirmative-action measures which enable African-American students to enroll in good schools, even if they might not be well prepared or if they cannot afford the cost which it would be up to the (white) public to defray. African-Americans are much less likely than whites to own their own home, their wealth is a small fraction of the wealth of average white American families. Reparations might be used to remedy these stark differences. White supremacy that forces young black men and women into unemployment, educational underachievement and poverty makes it extremely difficult for them to develop proper self esteem. Reparations might mean programs to enable these young people to learn to value themselves as they deserve to be valued.

But all of these proposals miss the central requirement. As long as whites can construe reparation programs as white people-helping-African-Americans who are unable to succeed by their own efforts, such operations simply continue poisonous racist thinking. Reparations must repair relations between black and white. Repairing Black-White relations means that White people have to change. They must no longer think that being white means being inherently superior to persons whose skin was darker or who have been accepted as white when earlier their status was, at best, in doubt ( and the decision about their status was, of course in the hands of whites.) Reparations must involve the acknowledgment by whites of their brutality towards African-Americans for more than three centuries. If relations between whites and African-Americans are to be repaired, whites need to change. They must surrender all traces of white supremacy. That is the ultimate goal of reparations.

A five or 10 year program will not accomplish that. Racist thoughts and attitudes are deeply embedded in white consciousness even of those people who mean well, who try to inform themselves about the history and suffering of African-Americans and to try to remedy its effects. It will take generations of efforts to make the line of distinction between whites and African-Americans go away, fade and disappear.

In the meantime the House of Representatives needs to vote on House Resolution 40, offered for many years by Representative Conyers to set up a committee to study the question of reparations, to allow everyone to testify as to what reparations might look like. What would African Americans ask for? What would whites – well-meaning and/or racist – be willing to pay for? The process must begin with a public discussion of the question about the nature of reparations.

“I Never Owned Any Slaves”. Who owes reparations?

In recent months there has been a good deal of talk about reparations owed to African-Americans and, perhaps and to Native Americans. Advocates point to reparations paid to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II and to had to sell their land and businesses, homes and belongings at bargain basement prices as they were hustled into the internment camps. Reparations, advocates point out, are not an unheard of event.

But many Americans regard the idea of reparations as completely ridiculous. They cannot understand how anybody in their right mind would ask white Americans to provide reparations to anyone. Last June Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, was quoted as saying: "none of us currently living are responsible" for what he called America's "original sin." Slavery he said ended 150 years ago. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president.” 

At the same time various news outlets reported that genealogical research showed two of McConnell's grandfathers to have been slave owners who owned 14 slaves, primarily women. That suggests that the family wealth of the McConnell clan derives in part from the unpaid labor of these 14 slaves. If that is the case, if McConnell's family has not in the meantime squandered the wealth derived from these slaves' labor, it is hard to see how McConnell can disclaim any responsibility for the suffering of slaves.

            This story is instructive because it points us in the direction of looking at historical responsibilities. There are many Americans who want to claim innocence of slavery whose property and wealth, and the accompanying well-being, does in part derive from the slaves their ancestors owned.

What is more, many American families who did in fact not own slaves nevertheless profited from the institution. Slaves were mainly employed in the cotton fields. Cotton was a precious product that needed to be transported and traded, that required cleaning and transformation into cotton thread to be then woven into cotton material and tailored into shirts and dresses, sheets and curtains, and many other products. Slaves produced the raw material for a large and complex textile industry. The work of slaves created industries that gave employment and a living to many Americans.

The textile industry was founded in England and grew rapidly thanks to a number of industrial inventions that made it possible to transform cotton into cloth in large factories. Around 1800 some of these techniques were brought to the United States and very soon textiles were the largest industry in the United States. A significant number of whites found work and sometimes became very wealthy thanks to the unpaid labor of black slaves in the southern states. Not having owned slaves does not get any families in the United States or in Great Britain for that matter off the hook as far as responsibility for the exploitation of slaves goes.

What happened to African-Americans once the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution were passed? Many Americans do not know the answer to that question. The older among them experienced the civil rights movement. Younger ones are most likely growing up in cities and towns that have a Martin Luther King Blvd. somewhere or some other commemoration of Martin Luther King. But why were they demonstrating and exposing themselves to the violence of southern Sheriff's and attacks by racist gangs?

The answer to that question is complex. Here are some of the pieces. The 13th Amendment outlaws slavery "except as punishment for crime." The Civil War and Reconstruction were barely over when former slave owners used this exception to the 13th amendment. They passed a number of laws, most of which applied only to black Americans. These laws required, for instance, that all African-American men had to have a job. If they were not employed they could be convicted of vagrancy. According to these laws, black persons could not assemble without a white person present. Preaching or speaking to groups of people was not allowed. African-Americans needed to be employed by a white person or "a former owner"; they were not allowed to rent a home in the town where they worked. It went on and on. It gave the sheriff plenty of leeway for arresting and imprisoning black persons. Black prisoners once again were made to work for nothing. Frequently states rented out groups of prisoners to private companies- a practice that still continues in prisons today. Once once again black people were virtual slaves.

In the years after the Civil War thousands and thousands of African-Americans were tortured by white mobs and then lynched. The local sheriff or police looked on and perhaps participated. No one was ever arrested for what was clearly brutal murder. Whites conducted a deliberate campaign of intimidating black persons.

Only against the background of this deliberate campaign of terrorism – because that is what it was – an intentional process of putting the fear into the hearts and minds of persons of color – can one understand what happened to the black sharecroppers. They worked their land all year and at the end of the year they brought the bales of cotton that they produced to the proprietor of the land, of course a white man. They might have brought in six bales and the proprietor counted only four and paid them a small price for them. Year-by-year white people stole from the black farmers and they were too scared of being lynched or their family harmed to object. Once again black labor was not compensated.

White people became well to-do by consistently stealing from persons of color. Those practices did not end until the 1900s. Many white people are comfortably off today because their grandparents cheated sharecroppers or rented black convicts from the local jail. Thoroughly fed up, millions of African-Americans fled the South to move to Northern cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Life up north was still very difficult and remains so to this day. I will cite two brief examples.

            At the end of World War II a grateful nation passed legislation which promised low cost mortgages to veterans and offered to pay the cost of the education. When black veterans took their offer of a government backed mortgage to the new suburbs and Levittowns, they were turned down. No one was going to sell them a house in a white suburb and black suburbs did not exist. Banks would not lend to black applicants; real estate agents would sell houses to Blacks only in specific, mostly urban and decaying neighborhoods-- a practice known as “red-lining.” When black veterans applied to college, southern colleges and universities would refuse to admit them. Schools that would have them mostly lacked any advanced engineering or doctoral programs.

             Their unpaid labor built the Capitol in Washington DC. It built a thriving industrial nation. But they were excluded from sharing the wealth they produced. This Civil War did not bring them freedom or citizenship. The struggle for black liberation still remains to be won.

There are no white Americans who are not complicit in the oppression of African-Americans.

PTSD

Human beings are capable of unspeakable brutality to one another. The survivors of combat, of sexual and other assault carry the scars of these experiences for the rest of their lives. In our time, there are victims of ethnic cleansing, of racial and ethnic prejudices. Innocent bystanders to incurable hostilities between groups flee the violence. As refugees they live for years in camps, often under barely sustainable conditions.

Ineradicable scars are borne by persons caught up in natural disasters--the victims of wildfires in California and elsewhere, those affected by earthquakes or floods, and now the terrible effects of climate change.

Many of them never quite recover from their dreadful experience. They never quite believe that they are safe. In dreams and in waking the memories of their past fright, of barely escaping when family or friends died – killed, starved to death, succumbing to a disease that could have been cured. They are difficult to live with because part of their horrifying experience is always present; the unspeakable is always happening. They are always sad, they are often self-destructive, some talk about suicide, some actually attempt it. For their family or friends or lovers whose lives have been less burdened they remain incomprehensible and not reachable. Their pain disturbs not only them but their families and friends.

My father who served in World War I only once talked to me about being terribly frightened under fire. But he was depressed, sad, uncommunicative for most of the time. There was then, when I was a young person, no name for his condition. It was just who he was. People either avoided him or put up with how he was.

Today there is a name for his condition and the condition of very many people whose experiences exceeded human tolerance. They are said to suffer from PTSD (Post – Traumatic Stress Disorder). It is regarded as an illness. Persons displaying symptoms of the illness are told to talk to a medical person. They should talk to the doctor. It is worth thinking about the implications of classifying the suffering of the bystanders or survivors as a medical illness.

If PTSD were not classified as an illness, the sufferers of PTSD might instead be regarded as odd and more or less annoying individuals who were best ignored and avoided. Or one might subject them to criticism saying: "Look at these young men and women, they returned from the war, the concentration camp, the ethnic cleansing or what have you and they seem to be perfectly okay, they have families, they have work. Why can't you be like them and stop fussing about the past? Everyone has problems, everyone goes through hard times, we are tired of hearing about yours." We could call them self-indulgent, weak and expose them to general scorn.

Instead we treat them as persons suffering from a serious disease. We express sympathy for their continued pain and we try to help them lead as good a life as they can. That seems to be a definite victory for humanity. We avoid the temptation to be incomprehending, judgmental and cruel and, instead, we extend ourselves with kindness and resources to try to help to make up for the brutality of our fellow humans and often ourselves.

It is important to pay attention to these last words. A good deal of the suffering that afflicts participants with PTSD, that leaves fellow citizens of ours suffering gravely is caused by us. It was our government who sent our soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq and still leaves them there after many years of utterly futile and unjustifiable warfare. It was our government that sent our soldiers to Vietnam to die in a humiliating defeat. It was our government that sent Native American children to schools where they were supposed to forget their own culture, their language, their families and their people. It was our government that overthrew properly elected governments in many Latin American countries, in Iran and elsewhere, replacing them with often murderous dictatorships. It was our government who refused to destroy the train tracks that led to the extermination camps of the Holocaust.

These are important facts to remember but treating the suffering that the survivors of these actions still bear every day as a disease tends to make us overlook our own complicity in these events. We do not ask about the people responsible for people contracting a disease. If I come down with a tick-borne illness no one is going to blame me for dealing with the leaves in the fall where the ticks wait to attach themselves to my skin. Whose fault it is is rarely asked when we talk about the illnesses people come down with every day. This person has high blood pressure, that person walks with a limp, another has cataracts or is hard of hearing. People have colds, the flu, and many other illnesses and no one asks why do you have that?

But in the case of some illnesses that question is important. Why do children in Flint Michigan have an elevated lead content in their blood? Why are many children in poor parts of our towns obese? Why is the suicide rate among veterans higher than among the population in general?

And with that question and the realization that the veterans suicide rate in the United States in recent years has been twice that of the population as a whole we return to our question about the causes of PTSD and who is responsible for it.

There are persons who are directly responsible for the incredible pain suffered in the aftermath of experiences that the human nervous system cannot sustain. Immediately they are our leaders – presidents, generals, industries that profit from wars, from incarceration, from climate change, the persons who sent soldiers off to war or the persons who agitated for a war from which they profited. In the end each of us is responsible if we voted, or perhaps did not vote for these leaders or did not oppose with sufficient force their election and selection as leaders.

Everyone knows that we are all connected and here is one more way in which the life of each of us is affected by everyone else. Everyone is responsible in more or less indirect ways for the lives and experiences of everyone else, as they are responsible for ours. We need to step with incredible care through our lives and consider the effects we have on persons often far away, of persons we will never know. We need, where we can, to remedy the harmful effects of our choices or our inaction. Passivity, inaction, excuses are not permitted. It is immoral to witness the suffering of fellow citizens and to turn our backs claiming that we are not responsible.