An Unexpected Case for Reparations
Before I get moving with this post, some quick advisories:
- Iâm going to talk about slavery and some people who (still) support slavery.
- Because of the previous item and the divide in American politics, this obviously deals far more with one political party than the other.
- I wasnât able to find Free Licensed reporting on many of the issues involved in this post.
If youâre not in the mood to deal with that, feel free to skip this post or come back when that changes. And please donât blame me for the arguments of the people Iâm about to cite; I find them awful people who shouldnât have any power or a platform. Theyâre cheap toolsâtake that how you willâthat will be discarded when the job is done.
Speaking of people who shouldnât have any power or platformâif youâll allow me the digression, and if not, skipâif you live in the United States and are displeased with the outcome of Donald Trumpâs second impeachment trial, I recommend sending a letter to your Senators, your Representative, and probably your governor and state legislatures (because they know which strings to pull) citing Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
Trump, the rioters, every member of Congress who delayed Bidenâs confirmation or gave Capitol tours, and everybody else who egged on the mob should be barred. Congress can pass routine legislation (meaning that they only need a simple majority), by authority granted in Section 5 of the Amendment, to make sure they abide by it. They should have done this before the trial, because accessories to the crime shouldnât be on the jury, but baby steps are fineâŚ
Background
That all out of the way, to celebrate Black History Month this year, Iâd like to try something that I donât believe Iâve seen before: I want to at least begin to construct an argument in favor of reparations for slavery in the United States, based on the statements of Republican politicians who vocally oppose such things.
I realize that thereâs an entire worthless cottage industry of people trying to catch Republican politicians in hypocritical statements, as if their party platform didnât explicitly become a support of Donald Trump and nothing else. This isnât that, though it bears some resemblance. Instead, itâs an attempt to point out that this can be a bipartisan issue, because even the people who still defend the Confederacy describe slavery in terms that suggest a massive debt to be paid.
The odds that this will produce a coherent argument that should be taken seriously are low, but I still consider it a worthwhile exercise.
If you want a more legitimate argumentâone that isnât building a position on the meaningless words of hypocritesâI recommend the now-classic The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates. You could do worse than read The 1619 Project, too, since many of the quotes I mention are from rich white men childishly furious that the historical documents exist.
The (Alleged) Purpose of Slavery
We can start with New Hampshireâs Werner D. Horn, who in 2019 chose to suggest that âowning slaves does not make you a racistâ on Facebook, now deleted, in response to the idea that calling Donald Trump racist must make the slave-owning Presidents of the United States worse.
In trying to expand on the assertion, he made an interesting and useful point.
It shouldnât be surprising since owning slaves wasnât a decision predicated on race but on economics. Itâs a business decision.
Smarter people than I am have thoroughly debunked the idea that American slavery was somehow not racistâbeing the only historical system of slavery where people were imported by the thousands to be sold like livestock, their descendants automatically property to be exploited or disposed of however the owner pleased, while white people could be no worse than (voluntarily) indentured for a fixed periodâso I wonât dwell on it.
However, consider the premise that these millions of people were forced to labor for their entire lives, because it was just cheaper than hiring free professionals. In modern terms, thatâs called wage theft.
The penalty for willful wage theft violations isâin addition to paying the back wages that are conservatively calculated as trillions of dollars, accounting for interest, but not inflationâten thousand dollars (eleven thousand for minors) and eventual imprisonment. We obviously canât imprison actual slave-holders (since theyâre dead) or their descendants, but thatâs at least tens of billions of dollars owed in fines.
The (Alleged) Need for Slavery
We can also look at Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who claimed that the countryâs architects believed that slavery âwas the necessary evil upon which the union was built.â No record of any of the countryâs founders saying such a thing can be identified, so this is clearly something that Cotton himself believes. James Madison called slavery evil and Thomas Jefferson talked about it being good to hasten its end, but gave no indication of it being needed.
Note that Cotton has also exaggerated his (not insignificant) military service, advocated for treating journalists like foreign spies, and advocated for sending the army to put down the Black Lives Matter protests with âno quarter given.â Heâs no progressive thinker.
And yet, the phrase ânecessary evilâ stands out. If we take it as given that we needed the slaves, then we owe them a debt.
Identifying That Need
What was necessary about slavery, from the perspective of people who support it? We could start with George Fitzhughâs Cannibals all! or, Slaves without Masters (1857), where he says the following:
âŚthey know that men once fairly committed to negro slavery agitationâonce committed to the sweeping principle, âthat man being a moral agent, accountable to God for his actions, should not have those actions controlled and directed by the will of another,â are, in effect, committed to Socialism and Communism, to the most ultra doctrines of Garrison, Goodell, Smith and Andrewsâto no private property, no church, no law, no government,âto free love, free lands, free women and free churches.
In other words, he saw slavery as central to protecting capitalism.
Likewise, abolitionist Theodore Parker characterized the perspective of the Democratic Partyâthen a Southern party run primarily by slave-holdersâas slavery being âindispensable to good government.â
John Townsend put numbers on that perspective.
It means a loss to the planters of the South of, at least, FOUR BILLION dollars, by having this labor taken from them; and a loss, in addition, of FIVE BILLION dollars more, in lands, mills, machinery, and other great interests, which will be rendered valueless by the want of slave labor to cultivate the lands, and the loss of the crops which give to those interests life and prosperity.
Conservative commentatorâand conspiracy theorist and campaign finance felonâDinesh DâSousa often talks about our debt being repaid, because the economy is so much better. Thatâs obviously a dumb position, since anybody showing up to the country now gets the same benefits of that labor without having centuries of labor stolen from their families. But it does help tell us how we should value that labor.
Jon Hubbard has echoed this sentiment, calling slavery âa blessing in disguiseâ for African-Americans. Similarly for megachurch pastor Louis Giglio.
Thereâs a pattern through all of this: The reason that the United States (allegedly) needed slavery was to generate the wealth that makes us a powerful nation today.
Get the Tinfoil Hat
Letâs tease out the idea that Black people are better off from slavery, because it grants them participation in the greatest country in the world. Itâs a dumb argument, but like I said at the top, this entire post is about taking the statements of extremist conservatives and showing the story it tells. And until QAnon came along, who was more of an extremist conservative than Rand Paul?
Paul likes the idea that taxation is slavery. Note that even he means the âtraditionalâ kind of slaveryâwhere you take someone prisoner and either release them when their debt has been paid or at least let their kids goârather than chattel slavery. His father, libertarian darling Ron Paul, got a lot of his support attacking the Federal Reserve on the basis of no taxation without representation. So, we have the idea that taxation is slavery, and taxation without representation is worse.
Interestingly, not only do many Black people (obviously) pay their taxes, but thereâs evidence that the IRS scrutinizes their returns more carefully. So, by Rand Paulâs definition, even if weâre all enslaved because we pay our taxes, African-Americans might be under a more brutal regime. That seems to undercut Mitch McConnellâs deflection that nobody alive today bears any responsibility for slavery.
Speaking of McConnell, he also runs afoul of Ron Paul, because he looked at a bill designed to make voting easier and called it a âpower grab.â Donald Trump admitted that Republicans lose when they donât suppress votes; so did strategist Justin Clark. Mike Lee goes so far as to say that this isnât a democracy. And when these voter suppression cases make it to courts, the courts have seen evidence that the goal is to disenfranchise (predominantly) Black voters.
So, the land of conspiracy theories has made the case that slavery is not a thing of the past and Black people arenât necessarily granted participation, before we even need to reach for solid issues that Republicans almost never talk about, like the effects of redlining, mass incarceration (where we still allow forced labor, by the way), the war on drugs and possible exacerbation by the CIA, or the many instances of police brutality that weâve seen on the news over the last few years.
Going Forward
Implausible as it might seem, we have a pro-slavery argument for the United States paying reparations to the descendants of slaves.
- We couldnât afford the labor at market rates, so we decided not to pay.
- That labor was necessary.
- Without centuries of that free labor, the United States couldnât be a world superpower.
- The effects of slavery linger on to today.
The actual value of that labor is impossible to actually calculate, entwined as it is in so many things, but it has been credibly estimated in the trillions of dollars, which would be equivalent to a significant portion of a yearâs GDP. Itâs a safe bet that we wouldnât pay the whole value; I doubt that reparations ever do.
Even ignoring that, I see some potential pitfalls.
- Money still doesnât account for the persistent trauma living in a world where a person sees a backlash for merely stating that âblack lives matter.â
- Even though it doesnât âfix discrimination,â many peopleâconservatives and probably well-meaning progressivesâare going to want to see it that way, making it harder to get them to take redlining, incarceration, medical discrimination, and other issues seriously.
- While Mitch McConnell is odious on his best days, his point in the difficulty of payment isnât entirely wrong. Slavery stole wages from slaves, but racism doesnât distinguish between the descendants of slaves and a Senegalese immigrant or refugee who just stepped onto American soil. Racists were just as angry that Barack Obama was President of the United States as they would have been if Jesse Jackson had won. And no matter how one slices that reparations pie, someone is going to be angry.
- There are progressives whoâjust like conservativesâwant to replace âraceâ with âclassâ and pretend that having immigrated here voluntarily but poor, or living in a part of the country where the industry that kept the city alive has died, is equivalent to centuries of deliberate oppression. They will push back.
Are those reasons to say no? Of course not. Apart from the moral issues, income inequality has gotten so bad that this might be necessary to keep the economy from falling apart, and unlike some former Presidents, we should probably pay people for the work theyâve done, even if its to their estates. But those are reasons to be careful with the messaging and process. Theyâre also reasons to look past reparations now, to give space to think about what steps need to be taken after.
So, to wrap everything up in a nice little package, I support reparations for slavery, because people who seem to like slavery told me that we should.
Iâm only half-kidding about that. I was personally indecisive since I first heard the issue raised, a few years agoâmostly because of the points I call out at the end of not knowing how to keep the momentum that creates a just worldâbut Tom Cottonâs extremely stupid ânecessary evilâ comment actually told me everything that I needed to hear to make my decision: The United States would be far worse off without the labor of slaves, and it was a wrong enough system that should be righted. We have a debt, and the right thing to do is to pay that debt.
So, conservativesânot that I expect any to be reading thisâif you want to âmake America great,â hereâs the first of many steps: Pay our debts to the people who got us here. Your fellow conservatives have made the case for you, even though they donât think that they did. And if youâre not a monster who believes that slavery was a good thing, thatâs the minimal, most anti-humanist argument to do the right thing.
đşđ¸
Credits: The header image is Desperate Conflict in a Barn (1872) by William Still, long in the public domain.
By commenting, you agree to follow the blog's Code of Conduct and that your comment is released under the same license as the rest of the blog.
Tags: politics rant community