*sigh*

How is this the "right historical moment" for reparations? The House of Representatives is controlled not just by republicans, but socially conservative republicans. There appears to be a fairly good possibility that republicans will also take a majority of the Senate this fall.

There is exactly a zero percent chance of this House passing anything remotely close to reparations any time in the next several years. There is exactly zero chance that they will even bring it up for discussion.

I'm old enough to have seen the subject of a formal apology for slavery come up every now and again in congress for several decades. Not reparations. Just an apology. Even that has never gone anywhere. One of the strongest reasons against it is the concern that if the government apologizes for slavery, then they will probably have to pay reparations. There have always been a number of congressmen who might go along with the idea of an apology if they can be assured that no reparations would result, and they have never been able to be convinced.

I think you can make a rational argument for an apology or reparations, but I think you have to be delusional to think that this is "the right historical moment".

Looks like reparations may be due all around…

“I would suggest that most living white Americans would be wealthier had this nation not enslaved African-Americans and thus most whites have lost from slavery too, albeit much much less than blacks have lost.”
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalre…

Sounds like we should just carpet the South with government checks!

When will women get reparations for all the unpaid work our gender has performed for millennia?

Pandora's box.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

JFK inauguration - January 20, 1961

Liberals forget such guidance all too often.

Thanks for reminding us to listen to JFK!

popcorn.jpg

heres some gas for the fire:

The country could not and will not agree on reparations for Japanese interment, and thats relatively recent, and quantifiable ( we have detailed records )

Can Asians, Latinos, and women be recused? since presumably they weren't involved. ( white privilege, suffrage, etc )

What about African Immigrants? they are a rapidly growing addition to America, do they get reparations or do they have to pay for them ( since they are largely more successful )

I look forward to all the whitesplainin on the subject.

It's not about cash... It's about access. No more enshrining the stop and frisks, the drug wars, the sub-primes, etc. Access. Access. Access.

The problem with Coates' piece -- aside from the foundation being a random assortment of anecdotes -- is that it ignores a case for reparations just as morally compelling. Let's talk about the need to address the current status of Native Americans . . .

This is a country where social programs are opposed by a significant proportion of voters (people who actually show up to the polls, not all eligible voters) because of the false perception that most recipients are black. Consider me skeptical that, in this environment, a serious discussion of reparations is anything but dead in the water.

@7, actually, Japanese internment is an instructive example. Interned Japanese-Americans actually WERE paid reparations in 1988, of $20,000 each. And one of the significant arguments against it was the concern that those reparations might lead to reparations for other wrongs, such as slavery.

This differs from slavery in a few respects. The Japanese internment was a specific event for a few years, effecting a specific known group of people. There were also quite a few internment survivors still alive to receive reparations. Though we still suffer racism and a legacy left over from slavery, there are obviously no former slaves still alive. The question then of who to pay slavery reparations to, and how much, becomes a complete morass.

I personally knew 5 Japanese-Americans who were interned, and who received reparations (some of whom have since passed away). All of them, without exception, told me that the apology issued by congress and the president were more important than the cash payout. The money didn't come close to compensating them for the losses of their homes, businesses, possessions, and interrupted educations, but it was the acknowledgement of the wrongs committed against them that was most valuable.

Coates' article was an absolute farce, and anyone who ignores the serious flaws in it in order to hail it as some sort of groundbreaking work (hi, Chris Hayes) is being ridiculous.

The obvious missing piece in this post is that the Caribbean nations are seeking the money from European colonizers. It's easy for them to nod in agreement about the subject; it wouldn't be their money. That's not how it would happen in America.

This is such bullshit. I'm half black and half Italian, and if I'm "owed something" by white America for what their ancestors did to mine (or at least people with the same skin color as their ancestors) then by all rights I owe money to western Europe for what my ancestors did to them during the Roman Empire.

And what about us mixed race people? Granted, the liberal establishment believes in the old racist "one drop rule", but still, we do exist. So do we get anything? After all, one half of our DNA enslaved the other half. So instead of forty acres and a mule, do we get twenty acres and a goat?

And if Jamaica is to get money from England for colonialism, then in all fairness Italy should give money to the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, the Balkans, and North Africa for it's centuries of colonialism during the Roman Empire.

Bottom line is in history, SHIT HAPPENS. People conquer others all the time. It happens. Get over it. Better to learn from the past and follow a philosophy of non-aggression and move on then be stuck in it.

Obama's not black, he's mixed race, and his father was not an African-American descended from slaves, he was an African. The fact that Obama's President now has absolutely no bearing on whether this is the "right historical moment" for this doomed project. @1 and others are right: it's not the right moment now any more than it's been the right moment for decades past, because the Republicans (who were Southern Democrats back in the day) would not permit it.

Obviously there's no dollar figure that could possibly constitute just reparations for slavery -- the compound interest on the cunulative value of all labor extracted yields a figure of cosmological scale. Something like two trillion dollars, which I've heard bandied around, strikes me as reasonable. Even that figure seems large until you remember that American corporations currently hold an estimated trillion dollars in overseas tax havens, money that isn't really doing anything socially worthwhile. One could easily enough pass a law appropriating all gray money and then drop, say, $100 billion a year for ten years (take it straight from the DoD -- the Navy and Air Force can take a few fiscal quarters off), for cash payments. Couple that with a broad sentence reduction and re-enfranchisement of incarcerated Blacks, an education program (I'd suggested tuition waivers to state schools), and a grant program for arts and sciences, and I think you're well on your way. The thorniest part is the eligibility issue. I'd suggest keeping it simple: every year lived in America while identifiably black yields X-dollars. Old folks, having lived under lynch law, can justifiably claim greater suffering and so warrsnt more substantial considerations. A harder question: Who is Black and who isn't? I think an expedited court, like the vaccine court, would be needed to make sure payments aren't tied up for decades. The decisions should be swift and final, with the understanding this may leave some folks beyond, but that those folks will likely benefit anyway.

I think that'd be about as ace a program as you could manage. It doesn't make up for four hundred years of the whip and the rope, but I guarantee such an investment would yield tremendous dividends to our society, both socially and economically.

This is a great topic to be fatalistic about.

@ sarah70,
That is correct regarding Pres. Obama. On the other hand, he announced that he selected only "African-American" on the 2010 US Census form. Clearly, racial/ethnic identities can be chosen. I mentioned on another post that AG, Eric Holder also probably wouldn't qualify for reparations as his family as I recall hails from Barbados.

But, I don't understand your point. Are for or against reparations? I don't think a Republican or Democrat Congress has anything to with it. Like Obama, I am against them. I read Coates' article. Although a very good piece, reparations while remotely feasible in the end won't I believe, promote better race relations. Alas, only the descendents not the actual African-American slaves themselves would be eligible. And, even that would be difficult to determine.

Okay.....the point is (and is clearly made in Coates article) that the systematic repression of Black America formally ended when computers were in their infancy. Not so long ago, people. Coates' focus on redlining is the key point. The sole real asset that the 99% actually possess is real estate, and that opportunity was kept out of reach for Black Americans through a host of formal and informal, public and private practices. Coates' is able to present academic research in a popular context that emphasizes how wealth accumulation was sequestered and foreclosed for most of Black America: a century after slavery was abolished.

As to how one repays is a question. At minimum we should acknowledge what our mothers and fathers did a very short time ago?

I think a survivor's benefit should be paid to the heirs of slaves, probably equal to the benefit that's paid to families of soldiers who die in combat. Note that this doesn't mean everyone with African-American DNA gets an equal paycheck. It means that a settlement is paid *per individual slave*, and is distributed among that persons heirs' according to standard legal formula.

To things to note that most people don't quite understand:

1. There were far fewer slaves brought to the U.S. than most people think, fewer than 400,000 actually. (See http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-american…) There were also, of course, those born into slavery whose heirs would also qualify for the survivors' benefit. But overall, we are talking about a number that's a lot smaller than most people imagine.

2. The time periods involved are not as great as we like to think. Americans usually comfortably imagine slavery as something that's lost to the mists of history. How could we possibly pay recompense for these people's lives when it all happened *so very long ago*? But in fact, you only have to go a couple generations back to identify people born into slavery. We are not talking about data that you need archaeologists to reconstruct. The historical record is there.

Yes, identifying the slaves and tracing their heirs would be a challenge, but it is by no means an *impossible* challenge. It would be a big information-management project, all right, mayyyybe comparable to Obamacare (but actually probably not that hard).

It is doable. And we *should* do it.

Too many commentators assume that “reparation” necessarily means “payouts to victims” and since the formula for that seems overwhelmingly complicated, the conversation stops cold.

But reparation can also mean “repair” - specifically to the systemic incentives (such as redlining and related practices) that drove whites to discriminate against blacks as a means of protecting their property values. What if we used reparations to reverse the incentives? Not to pay people directly, but to make racial integration seem like a property value asset?

For example, integrated communities (say, 25-75% black, block by block) could get funding for schools, transportation, broadband, and parks. White people would not need to feel punished. Whites and blacks alike would be rewarded for welcoming each other as neighbors.

And yes, I know, people will ask, what about Asian Americans and Latinos and Indians? My answer is there is not a single vaccine to eradicate smallpox and polio and malaria and AIDS. Reparation for all crimes of oppression should be considered, but each on its own terms. It’s fair to craft a response to the specific enduring damages of African American enslavement.

It is instructive to note the number of commenters here who clearly neither read nor watched Coates on this matter, but feel like they are in a good spot to rebut his position.

@19, that hardly begins to address Coates' concerns about the very real, systemic, and often legally formalised racism that existed concretely until 1960 (with FHA redlining, or Jim Crow policies, for example) and which has continued less explicitly (though just as obviously) in the housing, education, and the criminal-justice systems of America to this day.

Paying out cash isn't even something Coates suggests. Unless it were part of some larger motion to deal with the 150 years of official and semi-official racism targeting blacks in America that followed the ~240 years of legal enslavement of blacks in our society, diluted monetary recompense for slavery would likely be useless.

Those in Excessive Power ( and that includes Economical Power ) have never voluntarily given up any of it. You must fight fire with fire. If it ain't Socialism-in-action, then it is a zero-sum game ( that is, somebody has to lose). What must be acknowledged is this: the status quo is an act of Violence, therefore, a counteract of Violence is Morally acceptable. Indeed: it is Morally mandatory. --- http://www.sevenstories.com , http://blackrosebooks.net

You do know there are even "White" economists who have championed restitution , do you not?

"I reject the entire notion that it's possible to inherit either moral sin or moral victimhood from one's parents. And if you try to put someone else's sin on me and take my stuff, well there's gonna be a fight and I'm gonna perform some original sinning of my own."
—Maetenloch