The Case for Reparations: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans (2019)

“Ta-Nehisi Coates is right to argue that ‘the idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.’

Many—perhaps most—countries have rapacious and violent histories that they cover, in time, with a fuzzy blanket of benevolence. We brought the natives religion, or railroads. The natives were no angels either, and besides, our neighbors were worse. In the end, the attempts at justification come to little more than everybody does it, and we weren’t as bad as some. American sins are not worse than those of other nations. They are simply more jarring because, unlike the foundation of other nations, America’s took place amid a fanfare of ideals. Other nations commenced by believing in nothing but themselves; only America began its morning by pledging allegiance to a set of principles.

That Native Americans had a right to life, and African Americans to liberty, was a truth whose self-evidence eluded the Founding Fathers. From its inception, the United States of America insisted on ideals it refused to realize. Yet those ideals refused to fade. Sometimes they merely served the cause of self-delusion, but sometimes they retained enough weight to guide every progressive movement from abolition to the present day. Given that fact, recognizing the justice of reparations is a recognition of the need to rethink American history.

Over decades, such rethinking has taken place in departments of history and postcolonial studies; only occasionally has it penetrated popular consciousness. Very simple truths, like the fact that the Civil War was fought over slavery, need to be reestablished again and again. Descendants of Confederate soldiers have self-serving reasons for denying that their ancestors fought and fell in service to a criminal enterprise. It’s natural to defend the honor of your forebears, if only with arguments so facile that a well-educated child could see through them. He fought for states’ rights. States’ rights to do what?

Sadly enough, the view that the Civil War was not fought over slavery has also been supported by intellectual trends on the left; in recent decades, we’ve become cynical about any claims suggesting that people take risks on behalf of moral principles. Not conservatives, but people who call themselves progressive are often most intent on deconstructing the heroic Union narrative of the Civil War upheld by William James. It’s easy to show that, unlike James’s youngest brothers, the majority of those who fought for the Union were not in favor of emancipation. It’s easy to point to Lincoln’s statements denying racial equality. John Brown he was not, though Lincoln came to echo Brown in his somber Second Inaugural Address. Before the war began, preserving the Union was paramount. Only as it came to its bloody end was emancipation a central goal—partly due to the courage of two hundred thousand African American soldiers who fought for it.

The cause of the Civil War lies in the logic of slavery itself. When the war began in 1861, the slave system provided much of America’s wealth. During the political battles of the 1850s, only slavery’s expansion into the new territories was explicitly contested, whether in the halls of Congress or on the plains of Kansas. Just a minority demanded abolition, but because cotton production exhausted soil quickly, the slave system could not continue to enjoy massive profits without extending west of the Mississippi. The need for more land meant that the system had to expand or end, a fact recognized early by those who fought so hard, in the 1850s, to establish slavery in Kansas and California . . . .

Some early Americans found the idea of reparations natural. Long before forty acres were promised to liberated families, some Quaker communities made membership contingent on compensating one’s former slaves. In 1810, Yale president Timothy Dwight wrote, ‘It is in vain to allege that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we . . . . We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances, and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors . . . . To give [slaves] liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.’

You cannot choose your inheritance any more than you can choose your parents. You can only choose your relationship to them. . . . Most states require that debts be paid before deceased people’s assets are distributed to their heirs. It’s an aspect of law that is based on intuitions about fairness: you have no right to enjoy the benefits of an inheritance without assuming its liabilities as well. There is no corresponding moral rule; unlike personal property, historical debt can rarely be quantified. Yet the intuition embodied in the law is one we preserve.

Coates’s argument is as simple as it is eloquent. Slavery was, among other things, the theft of black labor that produced enormous wealth. For some early white observers, honor and justice demanded that at least part of the wealth be given to those whose labor produced it. If it can be proved that legal measures created to subjugate African Americans persisted a century after slavery was abolished, the debt that was owed to enslaved people should be paid to their heirs. . . .

Aside from the legal claims that reparations for slavery have no precedent, arguments against reparations include a mixture of moral and practical claims. I want to reply to the most important.

1. The Africans were slave traders too, often selling captured members of other tribes. Since they were just as complicit, Europeans should not be held responsible.

This argument is sometimes dismissed by pointing to the differences between African slavery and the chattel slavery practiced in the Americas, but the history of neoslavery sketched above shows those differences to be irrelevant. Whatever the relative merits of African slavery may be, Africans did not develop Jim Crow, convict leasing, segregation, or redlining. The strongest case for reparations is based on the fact that subtler forms of subjugation were developed when slavery was abolished, creating conditions that continue to affect lives today.

2. Reparations would enforce a narrative of victimhood that is unhealthy for its proposed beneficiaries.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, a culture of victimhood is indeed unhealthy. But objections to that culture can become reasons to support reparations, as long as that support is properly grounded. Proper grounding would come with an apology and a full description of the wrong that was done. Unlike welfare or affirmative action, reparations would be seen as a straightforward payment for an overdue debt. If our forebears failed to pay it, the responsibility to do so devolves on those of us who benefit from that failure, whether the benefits come directly from wealth or other privileges gained from belonging to the white majority of a powerful nation.

Interestingly enough, white conservatives in favor of reparations, like Charles Krauthammer and Ross Douthat, have argued that reparations are preferable to affirmative action programs because the latter convey the stigma of ongoing victimhood rather than the straightforward acknowledgment of a debt that is owed. I don’t accept their proposals, largely because the amount of compensation they proposed is far too low, but affirmative action has indeed proved to be notoriously problematic. First, it’s not clear that it helps those most in need of support. Giving preference in education or employment to members of disempowered groups so long as it’s arguable they are equally qualified necessarily benefits the best qualified members of those groups, not those who need basic remedial education and other forms of support. Moreover, even when they have been faithfully applied, affirmative action programs can harm those they are designed to benefit. Don’t tell me you never wondered: Did he get that prize for the quality of his work or for the accident of being born black? (This question can be asked by black as well as white folk, women as well as men. Even those who are oppressed may take the view of the oppressor: that’s how ideologies work.) I cannot count how many Germans suspect I got my job for the dubious privilege of being Jewish and female; usually the suspicion is only insinuated. But that suspicion infects relationships between members of different groups, feeding resentment on one side and self-doubt on the other. Honest payment of a debt that both parties recognize avoids this. Sidestepping concepts like ‘trauma’ and ‘victim,’ reparations are supported by simpler ideas of justice. . . .

4. My family had no slaves. They didn’t even come to America until slavery was abolished.

Most nonblack Americans are descended from people who came to the country in the waves of immigration that began after the Civil War. Nevertheless, in taking on the benefits of citizenship, they took on its responsibilities as well. It’s usually only first-generation immigrants who consciously take on those responsibilities—if people fleeing poverty, or worse, reflect on such responsibilities at all. Most of us are citizens without active consent. We had no choice about the place where our mothers happened to give birth, and we could not possibly consent to it any more than we could consent to being born. Some of the most important things that determine our lives are entirely contingent, in ways that can be tragic or wonderful. We may begin by understanding our debts to the past by analogy with familial inheritances, but our responsibility to our nation’s past is political. As Ashraf Rushdy has argued, to be a citizen is not merely to take responsibility for your country’s history since the moment you, or your ancestors, claimed its citizenship. ‘When citizens accept responsibility for their nation’s past, what they are doing is affirming that the past matters for the kind of encumbered, historically meaningful citizenship they desire.’ Political identity cannot merely be a matter of acquiring the benefits that accrue to possessing one passport or another. Though the individuals responsible for slavery and all that followed are long gone, many of the corporate entities, public and private, that legalized and profited from slavery still exist. So do descendants of those who still suffer discrimination because they are part of a group that was brought to America in chains.”—Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019)