The Case for Reparations

Chelsea Seegars ‘22, Guest Writer

February 16, 2021

“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates writer of the famous Atlantic article The Case for Reparations

In 2019, when I was watching one of the many Democratic Party presidential debates I distinctly remember hearing Marianne Williamson say, “The Democratic Party should be on the side of reparations for slavery,” and being shocked. I had never really considered reparations before that, but after thinking about this topic for a year, I believe that there is a fair case for reparations for African Americans because of slavery, and, honestly, for a lot more discrimination on top of that. For those unaware, reparations are defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. Before I divulge into why I think African Americans deserve reparations I want to cover two things: One—have there been any cases of reparations in the United States of America; and two—do Black people just want reparations all of a sudden or is a longstanding issue?

There have indeed been multiple cases of reparations throughout the history of the United States of America. In 1988, the federal government disbursed more than 1.6 billion dollars (around 3.5 billion dollars today) to 82,000 Japanese Americans for the racist and disturbing decision to send Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II. In addition, the government apologized, describing its actions as “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Another example of reparations was in 1968 in the case of Tlingit and Haida Indians of Alaska v. United States. The plaintiff tribes won a judgment of 7.5 million dollars as just compensation for land taken by the government between 1891 and 1925. There are countless other examples as well, but I want to show that there is a precedent for reparations in the United States of America. Furthermore, there is precedent for Black people wanting reparations too.

After the Civil War, General William T. Sherman introduced the mantra of “40 acres and a mule” in his Special Field Order No. 15 four days after having a serious discussion with 20 Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia according to PBS. This mantra would have redistributed the land of slave owners to ex-slaves. In the end, some land was redistributed, but the majority of the land remained in the hands of slave owners, which produced the devastating sharecropping system. In 1969, the Black Manifesto was launched in Detroit as one of the first calls for reparations in the modern era. The manifesto demanded 500 million dollars in reparations from predominantly white religious institutions and the government for their role in perpetuating slavery. In 2020, the founder of Black Entertainment Television called for 14 trillion dollars to help reduce racial inequality caused by slavery.

The statistics about the wealth inequality between Black and white people can be seen nationally regardless of political affiliation. In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston made a report revealing that the median net worth of a Black Bostonian was 8 dollars compared to their white counterparts’ net worth of 247,500 dollars. Similarly, the Louisiana Budget Project released a report in 2016 stating that the average white worker earns 56,093 dollars in Louisiana, which is more than twice as much as African-American workers who earn 27,537 dollars on average. This situation is not unique to these two areas; this is an issue that is plaguing our whole entire nation, state by state, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood. Slavery was not the end of the government letting people exploit and profit off of Black people. After slavery, there was the sharecropping system. This system was created because there were many former slaves who could not find a job due to their lack of education and qualification caused by racist laws in the South, and many former masters also needed workers. Former slaves rented land from white owners and in return the landowners would receive a share of the crop. Landowners or nearby merchants would lease equipment to the renters, and offer seed, fertilizer, food, and other items on credit until the harvest season. This system doesn’t sound too bad, but there were high interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and immoral landlords and merchants. This often kept farm families severely in debt until the next year, and the next year, until they fell into a never ending cycle of debt. Sharecropping is just the beginning of Black oppression after slavery. There is the problematic clause in the 13th amendment, red lining, Jim Crow, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre, lynching, Emmitt Till, police brutality, the Tuskagee Syphilliss Experiment, the cloning of Herientta Lacks’ cells, the War on Drugs, the school to prison pipeline, and the 1994 Crime Bill; unfortunately, this list could go on and on. I came up with this list in about ten minutes of thinking of examples of Black oppression after the Civil War.

There is clearly enough damage done to the Black community to justify reparations; now the question is how to accomplish that. In 2008, the federal government apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. However, an apology does nothing for the Black community, and is performative activism. How is a decades-late apology going to undo the ramifications of centuries of Black oppression? It does not help nor change the situation at hand. This apology does nothing substantial for the Black community, but financial reparations will. Apologizing is a great first step but it has been 12 years since that apology and nothing has improved for the Black community. Here is one case study that displays the issue, centered on Evanston, Illinois.

Evanston, Illinois is a white university town to which Black people began to migrate in high numbers after the turn of the 20th century. In 1919, the Evanston city council, like so many other towns created a zone to contain Black people. This zone was tagged for disinvestment, keeping many important buildings and such from being developed within it, such as schools, libraries, playgrounds, and grocery stores as stated by the Guardian. This is a close up of the national issue of redlining. Redlining, as defined by the Encyclopedia of Britannica, is an illegal discriminatory practice in which a mortgage lender denies loans or an insurance provider restricts services to certain areas of a community, often because of the racial characteristics of the applicant’s neighbourhood. In the 1930s, the 5th zone of Evanston, Illinois was home to 95% of the town’s Black community. Redlining maps introduced by the federal government graded the 5th zone a D, meaning it was hazardous and home to an undesirable population. 10 years later, banks stopped providing loans to Black families based on those redlining guidelines. In the 1990s, two federal lawsuits were launched against Evanston real estate firms for racist business practices, which ended in large settlements. The effects of redlining can still be felt in Evanston today. For example in 2019, banks gave 1,487 mortgages to people there, only 95 of which were for Black people. Furthermore, the average income of Black families in Evanston is $46,000 less than that of white families, and their life expectancy is 13 years shorter than that of white people. On November 25th, 2019 Evanston began the world’s first legislated and funded reparations program to acknowledge the intergenerational trauma caused by slavery. The 10 million dollar fund will be resourced by their new municipal tax on marijuana. There is also a level of justice to this: the criminalization of marijuana is a major mechanism to imprison Black youth which perpetuates the prison industrial complex. Even though the Evanston city council has yet to come up with exactly how to execute reparations, one of their initiatives is to improve Black housing ownership. Black Evanstonians are now able to gain up to 25,000 dollars in housing assistance. To qualify, residents must be a direct descendant of a Black resident who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969. The resident’s descendant also must have “suffered discrimination in housing as a result of a city ordinance, policy or practice” which can be hard to prove. This case study is not perfect or without flaw, but proves that reparations are a good thing that could help improve the Black community. Other cities are following suit, like Asheville, North Carolina, whose city council voted unanimously to formally apologize for slavery and promise new investments in Black homeownership and business opportunities. Asheville’s city council is the first municipal government in the south and the second in the country to enact financial reparations. Just before the Civil War, 283 white residents of Asheville owned more than 1,900 slaves. Today the city is 12% Black and a quarter of them live in poverty. This is a major step because it is in the Bible Belt.

I wrote this article on behalf of the whole Black Student Union, but I would also want to include their individual thoughts on the matter as well. One member said, “White people should pay us back with the opportunities that they stole from us” and another member added, “it’s hard to determine what these reparations would be; however, this does not mean it’s impossible or not worth the effort.” Even the members within BSU have not reached a consensus on how exactly reparations should be executed. Black people are not a monolith. We do not all think the same, and I do not want anyone to believe that I speak for the whole Black community because I want reparations and I still have some concerns and questions about the execution of reparations too. In this article I wanted to display the reasoning behind the growing call for reparations, and how reparations can be executed. I wanted to prove that reparations are not this crazy idea and that with the right execution it could help bridge the financial gap between Black and white people. If you would like to have further dialogue about this topic, I am always willing to have a conversation with anyone. There was so much more I wanted to include, but I am already overwhelming Kimberly by being around 1,300 words over the word count. I think there is a national sentiment on the Left on how to repay Black people, especially Black women. Putting Harriet Tubman on the 20 dollar bill, albeit a good thing, will not help improve the modern consequences of centuries of Black oppression. We want more than recognition of systemic racism: we want to curb the issues that were created by systemic racism. One of the key solutions is to give Black people the reparations they deserve.

Sources

The Case for Reparations

AIS Press

AIS Press

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