Should reparations be paid to descendants of people who were slaves? According to Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural speech, reparations were already paid by Americans in the form of our Civil War. New research indicates a death toll above 600,000. That was God’s punishment for the sins of slavery.
If you accept Lincoln’s view; reparations is a moot issue. Otherwise, arguments against reparations are very convincing. Should people who never owned slaves, or were even alive when slavery existed, pay reparations, a form of compensating penalty, to individuals who never were slaves? In essence, people who were not victims would receive money from people who committed no crime.
It would be impossible to even administer reparations. Should reparations be paid to descendants of slaves who suffered under the Portuguese, French and early British who experienced slavery in the Caribbean? What about Africans who came to America after slavery was legally abolished? What about the small number of slaves who were owned by freed Africans? What about states that abolished slavery prior to the Civil War? What about people descended from various backgrounds. It would be impossible to figure this out.
However, the argument for reparations should be examined. Basically, it states that slavery was so evil, its effects so insidious, that America has a moral obligation to do something about that. The underlying assumption is that slavery’s effects were long lasting, and that the current problems affecting Afro-Americans are the result of slavery. But what if that is not true and what adversely affects black people today is not a consequence of slavery.
We should remember that American black people today are not a homogenous population. Incomes, educational levels and quality of family life varies. Geography plays a role. There are neighborhoods in Chicago that are safe and those that are not
The longer you go back into the past, the less the influence of a single event has on subsequent history. Historical causation is more like a spider web than a chain. The Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 influenced me to a degree, but not as much as the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881. My grandparents would not have left Russia but for the latter event.
The present wide difference in wealth between blacks and whites is a consequence of a multitude of factors: inferior public schools in urban areas, degradation of the role of males in modern culture, the trillions of dollars spent on wars on poverty which destroyed the work ethic and created an acceptance of the moral hazard of handouts, and the collapse of morality and the family. Acceptance of out of wedlock births has been a critical contributing factor in our current problem along with the absence of two parent households.
The historical events that have adversely affected Afro-Americans are not the consequences of slavery, rather, it was the Reconstruction Era, 1865-1876, which most damaged and delayed the acceptance of black people as equal citizens.
The Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments should have led to black freedom. When the Federal government agreed in 1876 to stop enforcing those amendments, black people were doomed to another 100 years of bigotry segregation, and prejudice.
Within that terrible framework developed all the institutions and policies of repression: the Klan, brutal police behavior, lack of voting rights, sharecropping, schools, segregated schools and businesses, restricted housing , laws against intermarriage, Supreme Court decisions supportive of segregation, and lynchings.
It would take another 100 years before legal change came to uplift the condition of black citizens.
Former slaves after the Civil War wrote petitions to the federal government begging for help to preserve their rights. They were ignored. Why is another story.
Rick Sirvint lives in Rindge.