Reparations Reconsidered

8 Replies to “Reparations Reconsidered”

1. Reading The Possessive Investment in Whiteness has given me a completely different light on the concrete evidence and data that shows that a lack of wealth and inheritance has put African Americans at a complete disadvantage when compared to whites. The ironic part about this is that some white families built their wealth from the revenue generated from owning slaves. The Homestead Act of 1863 was the early beginnings of this idea. Owning a house is the single most important asset in hopes of accumulating wealth through the homes appreciating value, and this was stripped when that land was allocated to whites through restrictions on not allowing African American’s to receive some of this land. What I found to be startling is the fact that the average black family earning $60,000/year in income will have $76K less wealth than white families earning the same amount. Going back to my original post, while some people are demanding reparations in the form of social, healthcare, and educational programs, I believe financial compensation would be the easiest and smartest plan of action. This would allow families to start saving and building wealth, which can slowly be passed down from generation to generation. The main issue with determining who is eligible for receiving some sort of compensation would be for the actuary who is pricing this compensation package to be able to determine a specific financial value associated with each individual family. How would they be able to determine whose life was more valuable in today’s dollars and society? This is an issue that continues to puzzle economists and until a solution is formed, it will be tough to convince congress to pass some sort of compensation plan.

2. After reading The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and reconsidering the question raised last week regarding reparations for African Americans, I definitely have a clearer idea of how these African Americans should be compensated. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness has really opened my eyes to how unfairly African Americans have been treated. I believe that we need a combination of financial reparations and certain policies. For example, owning a house is one of the easiest ways to build wealth and pass down wealth from generation to generation. We need to have a housing policy that makes it easier for African Americans to get mortgages, as well as have access to any home they have the means to buy. As was stated in the book, this is not the case by any means, and is one of the reasons African Americans are so far behind Whites when it comes to owning homes. The reason I said we need to have financial reparations as well is because without them, policies like the housing one mentioned above will not be sufficient. African Americans can use their financial reparations for down payments and mortgage payments once they own a home. There will be challenges faced when implementing programs like the ones I’ve mentioned. It will be difficult to determine exactly who was negatively effected and who deserves to reap the benefits of these programs.
   I believe the 9/11 victims were compensated with money rather than programs due to the fact that a large majority of the victims were well-educated, wealthy white collar workers. This means that it was relatively straight forward to determine exactly how much that victims’ life was “worth”. This is not the case when it comes to reparations for African Americans. Most of the hardship faced by African Americans was lack of opportunities and unfair treatment, which did not allow them to build wealth. This is why I believe they must be given programs/opportunities as well as financial reparations.

3. Our current reading has added to my previous perspective about reparations. In my previous post I talked about how I believe that reparations need to take place both by individual compensation and programs for the black community. The individual compensation would go to families who have faced discrimination that can be traced to Jim Crow. The programs would be both for slavery and Jim Crow. However, after reading the majority of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, I’m now concluding oddly enough, that both financial compensation and educational programs, are not enough. The problem of current racism and the enduring legacy of this country’s past with racial discrimination, is even more nuanced than I once believed.
   Now, I think that beyond this, this country needs a nationwide educational program about race. How this would look, I am not exactly sure. However, as we discussed in class, most people don’t even know a fraction of the atrocities that black folks have faced in this country. For example, I don’t believe most people, including myself before coming to college, knew about peonage laws, for example. Most people don’t know about the extent of the housing discrimination, the extent of the amount of wealth that was literally stolen from so many people. The wealth disparity between black families and white families is unacceptable. Therefore, to remedy this, I think the programs and money will help. However, it seems as if this country has amnesia as we continue to have the same conversations over and over again. Black people and white people are living two completely different realities and oftentimes, black people are made to feel like we are crazy, as if our reality doesn’t exist. So, I think that slavery (what really happened) and the various discrimination that black folks have faced should be mandatory curriculum. Although in no way attempting to compare injustices, I know a lot about the Holocaust for example, and I first started learning about it in the fourth grade when we read Number the Stars. I did not learn that slavery literally projected the United States into being the foremost economic power until high school. If I did learn about the atrocities that happened during slavery, it happened through my own curiosity and different museum trips. Therefore, we have to find a way to get people, all Americans to understand. With understanding, people can finally come to some common ground because obviously, around fifty years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, unarmed black people are still dying at the hands of the people and people still say “but…”. Whenever black people do something, the response is “ Well get over it, or I didn’t have anything to do with slavery, or If I had done that then I would have been called a racist”. Maybe if everyone was on the same page about race and its legacy in this country we wouldn’t keep repeating ourselves.
   In all, I think financial compensation, funding for the black community, and some kind of way to educate ALL americans would behoove us all. We compensated 9/11 victims because it was easier. We knew who died, and how much money they were making. Compensating descendants of slaves is complicated because it is hard to prove who deserves what. For example, what about mixed folks? What percentage do they need to be? Would families whose ancestors were in this country get longer get more? What about emotional compensation? What about when white people think that the race thing has been solved because black people got paid, therefore they really need to get over it now? Do all black slave descendants actually need reparations? Will a single mother with two kids a minimum wage job get as much as say Oprah or Beyonce? The questions go on and on. Reparations is messy but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try.

   http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-impossibility-of-reparations/372041/

4. I think a key reason why we monetarily compensated 9/11 families was because the deaths of their loved ones was well-documented and easily traceable. Further, these people’s suffering was highly salient and well understood by all Americans. We also knew exactly how much money the victims had been making, and how much money their family would need. It was obviously a horrendous and catastrophic event, so it only made sense to try to alleviate the suffering of the families. This event happened all at once, while the legacy of slavery has spanned the entire history of our nation. One of the problems associated with the idea of paying reparations to African Americans is that the exact monetary loss for individuals is harder to trace. Opponents to reparations have also argued that the government has already “compensated” African Americans through social programs that benefit them. However, our social programs were created for all Americans, not specifically to help the unique suffering of African Americans, and many programs have even historically discriminated and excluded African Americans, so these social programs alone have not been sufficient to alleviate and compensate for their losses.
   Perhaps we would not be in the situation we are in now if the United States government had granted monetary reparations and land grants to the newly freed African Americans after the Civil War. These people were released and had no money, wealth, or property of their own. Our government “freed” them, but did nothing to help them get their lives started. They were on their own with nothing, and what land and property they did acquire was commonly stolen from them by violent and racist whites, especially in the South. Our government should have paid reparations to these people from the start. It also would have been easier right after the Civil War, because we would have definitively known who the people were who had been slaves. I was saddened in my research that the idea of reparations came up several times after the war, but our government never followed through. For example, President Andrew Jackson vetoed legislation that was passed in order to give freed slaves “40 acres and a mule.” I think that reparations would still be necessary today because of subsequent institutionalized racism, but I think immediate compensation to help newly freed people get their lives started would have been really beneficial. Nevertheless, it is important that our government today begins the process of righting these wrongs of the past by providing formal reparations.
   Discussions of reparations for African Americans is often limited to reparations for slavery, and for this reason, opponents will argue that not all African Americans had ancestors who were slaves, and some emigrated here after the fact. However, society must recognize that reparations do not need to be granted solely because of slavery itself, but because of the legacy of racism it left in this country that hurts all African Americans even today. Slavery left a legacy of racism that hurts all African Americans, even those not descended from slaves, because slavery morphed into land theft, Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, violence, discriminatory housing policy, mass incarceration, everyday racism, etc., which have been directed towards all black people, not just descendants of slaves, and contributed towards their weaker economic situation today. I think that the first step towards providing reparations would be for the government to conduct extensive research on the legacy of slavery so as to figure out a monetary value that should be granted to descendants of slaves, to African Americans whose ancestors lost property because of violence and racism, and to African Americans who were unable to acquire wealth through home owning because of racist housing policies upheld by our own government. Because we may not be able to trace everyone’s ancestry, and to ensure that no one is left uncompensated, it is important that our government additionally compensate all of the African American community in some way to help alleviate their economic hardship, such as funding more programs that are specifically designed to help the black community. So, I think it would be beneficial if we directly compensated families who we know to have suffered from slavery or racist economic policy, and then to also provide compensation to the black community as a whole. I still stand by my ideas in my previous post that an essential piece of the puzzle is for widespread acknowledgement, awareness, and education about the legacy of slavery in this country. It would help move us towards agreement on reparations if more people had a better understanding of institutionalized racism. But after reading The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, I more strongly feel that we need to provide monetary reparations as well.

   http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=124115&page=1

   http://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50th-anniversary/reparations-for-slavery-reading.html

5. After reading The Possessive Investment in Whiteness I still believe that both programs and monetary compensation are the best reparations. Implementing policies like housing programs would help African Americans overcome past discrimination. However, housing policies are useless if African Americans do not have the money to buy the houses. Financial reparations can be used to pay for the homes and will allow African American families to start building up wealth. The are many issues concerning financial reparations. Who receives them? How much do they receive? Does a rich family receive the same amount in compensation than a poor family? There is no information on which families were robbed of their property and therefore it is difficult to determine how much a family will receive in reparations. Compensation is also necessary for emotional harm which will be also difficult to determine. The financial situations of each family may also need to be taken into consideration. A wealthy family may not need as much compensation as a poor family, but does that mean the wealthy family should not receive reparations? Dealing with monetary reparations will be extremely difficult to implement because of these questions.
   The reason that 9/11 families received money instead of programs is because it was easy to determine how much money each family would be granted. There was documentation on the victims and thus it was simple to figure out how much to give their families. This is not the case with African American families as there is no documentation that can help determine how much money each family should be granted. Despite the difficulties, I believe that financial reparations as well as programs would be the most beneficial to African Americans.

6. In clearly laying out the issue at hand, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness has convinced me to support both financial reparations and access to certain program. Before, I agreed with both forms of reparations ideologically, but the scale of it intimidated me and seemed unrealistic to implement. Lipsitz points out specific problems in a manner that makes the issue of implementing and correcting the issues manageable, with facts you can directly cite and place monetary values that can be addressed. The issues are so ingrained in the systems that govern our lives and while problems like mortgage inequity and homeownership are shocking, the problems permeate so far, even into the way our cities were constructed. I64 in Richmond clearly divides (and decimated a neighborhood that was a center of Black culture, dubbed the Harlem of the south) and wealthy white suburbs from lower income and mostly minority neighborhoods. Without access to adequate transportation (a trolly connecting the Westhampton area to the heart of Monument Av. was removed), these people are quite literally trapped with limited economic opportunity, surrounded by crime, little to no healthy food options, limited access to high quality health care, and crumbling schools. This system is deliberate and must be fixed with reparations, for the overall health of our country. Reparations should be seen as an investment; an investment that would create more wealth and social capital.

7. The first thing I would like to stress after reading part of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is that it strongly confirmed my conviction that even in present-day United States it is desirable to discriminate people based on their race – in terms of offering certain advantages to African Americans and other minorities in order to reach higher level of equality. And I say this, although my personal notion of equality between certain groups of people (racial, ethnic, sexual, religious etc.) is very different: Equality is for me when everybody is treated the same way regardless of her/his signs of being member of any group of people. (For example I consider myself being feminist, because I wish that women have the same rights as men, get the same wages for the same work as men etc., but I am not really in favor of quotas for women in politics or business, because I believe it divides people and it is needed to discriminate who is man and who is woman instead of acting regardless of sex.) Unfortunately, as The Possessive Investment in Whiteness confirms, there was and there is so much harm and injustice done towards African Americans that it is not possible to stop it without providing them with some benefits.
   Besides programs the monetary compensation should not be performed by simple giving money to African Americans. Just like all the impacts of amoral policies and actions discriminating against African Americans are long-term, the compensations should be long-term. Of course, it cannot be endless, though and from the very beginning it should be kept in mind that someday the compensations will end. That is why I think, the money should be given for instance as a bonus to wages of those who work only (in cooperation with programs ensuring dignified work opportunities for African Americans and other minorities). In my opinion, all the discrimination was against all African Americans and decades of this situation eliminated the differences between descendants of slaves and freemen or black immigrants arriving to the US after the civil war. And thus reparations should be received by all African Americans, it would be definitely reasonable if the amount was dependent on current family wealth.

8. I believe an efficient mix of programs and monetary compensation would aid the wealth gap between white and black Americans. Programs that would aid in financing higher education and provide funds to buy homes could offer the opportunity to build wealth. However, I believe that monetary compensation would only be beneficial if it went back into black-owned businesses. In other words, it wouldn’t be beneficial to for black people to pour their money right back into a white-dominated economy. This would only further the problem that we are in.
   I also believe that the reason that the 9/11 victims received money is because the majority of the victims were white and whiteness is advantageous in this country. Since white Americans are the majority, they could be empathetic toward those families and there was minimal backlash or resistance to compensation. I believe that any resistance would be labeled as unpatriotic. Also, the agreement for compensation for 9/11 victim’s families was done to prevent them from suing the airline. I suppose no one has thought of suing the federal government for slavery or Jim Crow because of the tantamount amount of evidence that would needed to force a conviction, although we all know that these events happened and fostered inherent discrimination for generations to come.
   Lastly, I agree with Dom that education programs would be beneficial because most Americans do not know how destructive slavery actually was. They don’t know about the possessive investment in whiteness that this country has taken an oath to. However, in the most non-pessimistic way, I don’t believe that it would change anything. Even when presented with evidence of discrimination, most white Americans will not be apt to change because they only recognize their individual actions and not the system at play. This makes it hard to discuss possible remedies because the majority of white Americans will not pay for the mistakes that happened when they weren’t even born. On the other hand, I think the conversation should be started, especially with the divisive presidency ahead of us.

Comments are closed.