Reconsidering Reparations

Reparations are back on the table. Or at the very least, they’ve made a return to the dinner conversation. In 2014, prominent journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates penned “The Case for Reparations,” an Atlantic article which argued that black Americans should receive restitution for slavery. The piece was widely discussed but dismissed by politicians across the board. Today, a surge of activism around racial inequality has pushed the Democrats to consider the issue again.

By the looks of it, that activism is succeeding. Whether it’s because they want to appease a passionate base or because they genuinely believe in the idea, several Democratic presidential candidates have voiced some level of support for reparations.

The emotional case for reparations is strong. America’s democracy was built on black laborers’ backs; whites were offered life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness while African Americans picked cotton and bore unflinching barbarism. When slavery ended in 1865, there was no apology for this brutalist past. There was no healing process, reconciliation, or widespread acknowledgement.

Instead, there was a failed Freedmen’s Bureau and a series of exploitative work practices. These set in place the characteristics — both structural and cultural — that underlie racial inequality today. Reparations are an apology and repayment to black citizens whose ancestors were forced into the slave trade. They are the first step in acknowledging as a country that hundreds of years of slavery and institutional racism has caused mass harm to black people.

Yet this is where the impact of reparations end; they are a step, not a program. They are a symbolic gesture, not a long term solution. And in my view, they are a step backwards.

First, there is the issue of practicality: who should be paid, how they should be paid, and who should be doing the paying? Will the money will be manifest in a lump sum payment or a series of government programs? Does it go into communities or family pockets? Should it go to all black people or only the descendants of slaves? What about victims of Jim Crow and redlining, or those who have since left the country? Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for reparations famously included poor white workers. Attempting to decide who qualifies could provide fertile ground for toxicity.

The cost of monetary reparations is estimated to be in the range of six and 14 trillion dollars — for context, the proposed federal budget for 2020 is 4.7 trillion dollars. Worse still, if this amount of money is spread out across the 13.4 percent of the population that is African American, it will not be enough to make a meaningful difference to individual families. It will not lift people out of poverty, nor will it improve life in predominantly black communities.

Then, there’s the political question. Support for reparations has already put a gloss on Democratic candidates with mixed records advocating for people of color. And even in the event that some form of reparations are paid, they will be wielded as a political weapon. Their existence will be used as evidence for the illusion that America has solved the race problem; an invisible cloak for those who want to hide behind the notion that “an irreparable past can be set straight with a handout.”

As a matter of immediacy, don’t be fooled into thinking that this issue will help force Donald Trump out of the White House. If you tell a 40-year-old out of work white working class man in middle America that part of his taxpayer money will help repay the black population, don’t be surprised to see his racial resentments rise. Political battles are won by articulating a vision for all, not by pitting segments of the people against one another. Some proponents have argued that reparations will provide “closure.” They are far more likely to tear healing racial wounds back open.

Finally, there lies the question of what reparations represent.

The answers are not pretty. Inherited guilt. Ancestral claims. Social balance sheets. A national negotiation table. White people born with original sin and patronization as a replacement for progress. Reparations commodify what ought not to be commodified — they divert attention from the obstacles that keep black America where it ought never to have been.

At a time when the president is stoking a narrative of white victimhood, it is easy to understand why a reckoning with America’s past would be worthwhile. But take a proper look at that history and you will see a nation that has made significant progress; you will see that a citizen’s race matters less today than at any point in America’s existence.

Perhaps there was a time when reparations could have worked — a time when the black community’s moral claims would have been best addressed by rebate. The road towards reconciliation would have been quicker and less painful. That it did not happen is a catastrophe, but that window has now passed.

Today’s problems have solutions that don’t bring racial divides nearer to the foreground: fixing the public school system; criminal justice reform; an end to the war on drugs. Money must be invested, but on the state and local level. Not to one segment of the population, but to all those who need it.

There is a time for the symbolic and there is a time for the practical. Today’s political moment is crying out for the practical. America needs cohesion, consolidation, and coalition. It does not need quid pro quo and a reinforcement of racial divides.

If reparations are a step, they are a step in the wrong direction. They were a missed opportunity. They became a forgotten conversation. Now, they are a harmful, impractical, and divisive distraction.

Sahil Handa ’21, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies and Philosophy concentrator in Cabot House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.