Reparations Will Only Make Things Worse

By Kenin M. Spivak

Sunday, April 10, 2022

 

California’s reparations task force voted last week to recommend that the state pay compensation to black residents “based on lineage determined by an individual being an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” A more extreme proposal to include all blacks was defeated by just one vote, 5–4. The task force was formed in 2020 when Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill passed overwhelmingly by the legislature to study California’s involvement in slavery. Its recommendation will be included in a final report due by 2023.

 

Similar efforts in other Democrat-led states, including Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon, failed. In 2019, Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas) introduced legislation to establish a federal commission to study reparations. The House bill attracted 173 co-sponsors and the Senate bill 20 co-sponsors. During the 2020 presidential primaries, nearly all the Democratic candidates were favorably inclined. The bills remain in committee.

 

Last year, Evanston, Ill., became the first U.S. city to adopt a reparations plan, which would provide up to $25,000 to each black household. The plan has been poorly received and faces an uncertain future. Last week, Berkeley, Calif., allocated $350,000 to fund development of its reparations plan.

 

A 2019 Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that just 15 percent of white Americans favored reparations for descendants of slaves, compared to 44 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of blacks. The same poll found that 64 percent of white Americans oppose a government apology for slavery, while 64 percent of Hispanics and 77 percent of blacks favor an apology. (The poll did not seek views on payment of reparations to all blacks.) The disapproval of 26 percent of blacks is heartening.

 

In 2020, Rashawn Ray and Andre M. Perry, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, delivered the progressive case for reparations, premised largely on the average white family’s having “roughly 10 times the amount of wealth as the average Black family.” The authors point to a 2013 University College London study that placed a value of $3 billion on America’s slaves as of 1860, and conclude that blacks will be unable to obtain “equity” unless that value is restored to the descendants of slaves “in the form of individual cash payments in the amount that will close the Black-white racial wealth divide.”

 

Ray and Perry explained why even rich and famous black Americans are entitled to payments:

 

One key question after deciding what a reparations package should include is who should qualify. In short, a Black person who can trace their heritage to people enslaved in U.S. states and territories should be eligible for financial compensation for slavery. Meanwhile, Black people who can show how they were excluded from various policies after emancipation should seek separate damages. For instance, a person like Senator Cory Booker whose parents are descendants of slaves would qualify for slavery reparations whereas Senator Kamala Harris (Jamaican immigrant father and Indian immigrant mother) and President Barack Obama (Kenyan immigrant father and white mother) may seek redress for housing and/or education segregation. Sasha and Malia Obama (whose mother is Michelle Robinson Obama, a descendant of enslaved Africans) would qualify.

 

In 1988, the U.S. approved payments of $20,000 to each of about 80,000 living Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II, a total of about $1.6 billion. Ray and Perry invoke this program, along with federal support for Native Americans, as a justification for black reparations. They also point to Marshall Plan assistance to Europe, which “helped to ensure that Jews received reparations for the Holocaust” from Germany, as a basis for their claim that reparations “are not foreign to the United States.”

 

The U.S. payments to Japanese Americans were nominal sums to acknowledge the wrongs they had suffered. The U.S. had no role in funding the German post-war payments of about $1 billion, which stretched over many years, long after the Marshall Plan concluded. Federal programs for Native Americans are generally analogues to state programs.

 

Most estimates for the amount that should be paid as reparations range from about $12 trillion to $20 trillion in 2020 dollars, with some who favor reparations advocating considerably more, depending on who is eligible and how the “loss” is computed. For those who base their calculations on the wages, benefits, and other losses suffered by America’s black slaves, the amount of reparations demanded increases each year with inflation and interest rates. Others, such as Ray and Perry, instead seek to eliminate the “wealth gap.” The wealth gap is declining, because the gap in net worth between the average white and black households dropped from about ten times in 2016 to about seven times in 2019.

 

Payment of reparations today neither places liability on the wrongdoers — who are, after all, long dead — nor makes right what any victim of slavery suffered. There is no doctrine in the United States that holds children liable for the crimes of their parents, much less their distant ancestors; nor do children inherit their ancestors’ debts. Race is not an exception, and, in any event, too much has changed nearly 160 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to fairly attribute and allocate damages.

 

Though advocates on both sides of the reparations issue generally agree on the math of slave ownership, they come to different conclusions. In 1860, there were 395,216 slave-owners. That was about 1.4 percent of the total U.S. population, though because the total includes minors, using households may be a more appropriate metric. In the 15 states that permitted slavery, about 5 percent of the population, or nearly a fifth of households, owned slaves. No one in the other 18 states, constituting about 70 percent of America’s population, owned slaves. Assuming comparable household size, about 5–6 percent of all U.S. households owned slaves. Though any percentage is too much, I take away that only a small percentage of Americans were culpable for a terrible wrong, while advocates of reparations see these numbers as an indictment of all Americans.

 

It is fairly observed that the legacy of slavery continued to burden blacks for some time, and that at least until the Civil War, families who did not own slaves often benefited from slavery. This has to be balanced against the high cost paid by Northerners who refused to own slaves. The North abandoned its security and prosperity to field an army of 2.5 million men, of whom 365,000 died in battle, in captivity, or from disease and 275,000 were wounded in action. The direct cost of the war to the North exceeded the $3 billion value the University College London placed on the slaves. The direct cost to the South was almost as much.

 

Those who argue that slavery was fundamental to American prosperity overlook considerable research that cotton was not the main driver of American prosperity before the Civil War, and that after the war, the remnants of slavery slowed growth, particularly in the South.

 

Most of America’s blacks are at least partially descended from slaves; the remainder are descended from free or immigrant blacks. None of America’s Hispanics or Asians, and about 5 percent of American whites, are at least partially descended from slave-owners. As immigration and emigration proceed, those percentages will shrink.

 

California’s reparations proposal would begin endless rounds of grievance-mongering, as many groups could point to historical wrongs done against them, from atrocious discrimination to, in some cases, servitude. Black slavery 160 years ago was indefensible. So, too, was the depravity of U.S. forces in slaughtering Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, most of them women and children, in the Sand Creek massacre. The descendants of the Chinese who helped build the railroads, and of the Irish, Jews, and Italians who came to America only to be ghettoized, scorned, and deprived of advancement, also have grievances. Who should pay whom? My wife’s family, who arrived in 1979, running from a Communist regime that had repeatedly imprisoned and tortured their father for fighting with U.S. troops?

 

When confronted with the complexities of calculating and allocating reparations based on events generations ago, proponents of reparations pivot to generalized grievances about disparate outcomes. This feeds into a victim mentality that dodges discordant facts, such as the substantial number of American blacks who succeed beyond the wildest dreams of most white Americans; tens of millions of blacks who have entered the middle and upper middle classes; the declining wealth disparity; rapidly improving educational attainment of many blacks, particularly black women; and the rapid penetration of political and power structures by blacks, who, with about 12.5 percent of the population, now account for one-third of the mayors in America’s 100 largest cities, 13 percent of House members, and many key roles in the federal government, including vice president, defense secretary, U.N. ambassador, and (soon) 22 percent of Supreme Court justices, among others.

 

There have been trillions of dollars of transfer payments through welfare, food stamps, loan payments, enterprise zones, minority contracting, and affirmative action. Aren’t those reparations? Why would calling payments “reparations” change the outcome? Giveaways create dependency, not a path toward self-actualization.

 

Reparations are particularly inappropriate in California and the recommended criteria illogical. The state was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state, in which slavery was prohibited. The state’s population is about 37 percent non-Hispanic white, 39 percent Hispanic, 16 percent Asian, and 6.5 percent black. Some 27 percent of all Californians were born outside of the United States; and nearly half of Californians under 18 have at least one foreign-born parent.

 

Proof of ancestry will be difficult and subject to fraud. The decision to de-link eligibility from slavery and include blacks whose ancestors may have grown up almost entirely in the 1900s and who have achieved advanced degrees, entrepreneurial wealth, or other successes is glib and arbitrary. Reparations will be funded almost entirely by people with no connection to American slavery and who have their own histories of misery.

 

Reparations are an appalling policy. They deprive blacks of agency, impose liability on Americans with no connection to long-dead slaveholders, belittle the horrendous life experiences of other Americans and their forebears, and pit Americans against each other based on race. Picking winners and losers by race has always been, and remains, an abhorrent idea.