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Now, let’s say that for years, if not generations, your family and families like yours have been damaged by your country’s political and economic system — by law and widespread practice, with the intent of benefiting families not like yours — then the checks for the harm done would be called reparations.
Beginning with more than two centuries of slavery, black Americans have been deliberately abused by their own nation. It’s time to pay restitution.
Black activists and intellectuals have been making that point with increasing volume over the last few years, turning what was an obscure thought problem into a political issue. The question of reparations has even entered into the Democratic primary, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) struggling to explain to black voters why he has built such a strong social justice platform on every issue but this one.
Sanders was put on the spot last month when a reporter asked him if he would support reparations as president. “No, I don’t think so,” he said, describing the likelihood of congressional passage as “nil” — as if those odds normally stopped him.
Every year since 1989, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has introduced the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. As the name indicates, H.R. 40 does not require reparations. It simply calls for comprehensive research into the nature and financial impact of African enslavement as well as the ills inflicted on black people during the Jim Crow era. Then, remedies can be suggested.
Every year, the bill stalls.
Fifty-nine percent of black Americans think that the descendants of enslaved Africans deserve reparations, according to a June 2014 HuffPost/YouGov poll. Sixty-three percent of black folks support targeted education and job training programs for the descendants of slaves.
Most other Americans still aren’t listening.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most prominent voice now pushing reparations, laid out why black Americans deserve even more than repayment for slavery in a sweeping 2014 article, “The Case for Reparations.” The exploitation didn’t stop with the Emancipation Proclamation, so any restitution must reckon with the discrimination that followed and deal with the living victims of these ills.
Last month, Coates criticized Sanders’ decision to shy away from the issue:
If not even an avowed socialist can be bothered to grapple with reparations, if the question really is that far beyond the pale, if Bernie Sanders truly believes that victims of the Tulsa pogrom deserved nothing, that the victims of contract lending deserve nothing, that the victims of debt peonage deserve nothing, that that political plunder of black communities entitle them to nothing, if this is the candidate of the radical left — then expect white supremacy in America to endure well beyond our lifetimes and lifetimes of our children.Let’s change that — let’s bother to have the hard but necessary discussion of what black Americans are owed for what was taken from them. If reparations ever come, what would they look like?
1. Let’s Figure Out Who Deserves Reparations And Why
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