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I'm going to wade into something controversial here, so bear with me...
I think Zaid stumbled upon the massive strategic challenge of a cash reparations program focused on slavery and directed at its descendants. https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1294496524085399553
I think Zaid stumbled upon the massive strategic challenge of a cash reparations program focused on slavery and directed at its descendants. https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1294496524085399553
In short, it necessarily alienates lots of groups who feel they've suffered significant injustices due to systemic racism in US history. There are a lot of folks here whose immediate reaction would be to exclaim "that's not true!" They're right, but politically it doesn't matter.
We've romanticized the 19th/early 20th Century immigrant experience, but in reality they had an awful go of things. Not comparable to chattel slavery or genocide, but still awful. And you can't expect these groups to read academic analyses of why these things are different.
Similarly, you can't expect immigrants (including black African) from post-colonial societies to understand why the Jim Crow-era black experience was so much worse than what they've endured.
And fair or not, humans do maintain a mental statute of limitations. The more time that passes since an injustice, we're naturally going to be less sympathetic to moral obligations to redress past wrongs.
Human history has been a never-ending series of conquests of the weak, exploitations, enslavements, & forced assimilations. Things have steadily (if unevenly) improved since the 18th C., but just about every group has gotten screwed at some point and holds historical grievances.
There's just no possible means of fairly accounting for all injustices. Even in the past century, we're talking about tens of millions subject to genocide, hundreds of millions subjected to Great Power proxy wars, billions subjected to exploitative/extractive colonial rule.
America's relationship with slavery is unique and does warrant special consideration as we consider reconciliation, but it's difficult to tell immigrants from LatAm, S/E Asia, & Africa that their historical suffering from imperialism/colonialism doesn't merit consideration.
Cash reparations for Japanese internment was easier. It was given to victims of the program 45 years later, to fewer than 100k people. Cash reparations by Germany for the Holocaust was also easier. The Nazis so effectively exterminated us that only 500k Jews survived of 6M+.
Because black descendants of slavery number in the tens of millions, and leading advocates of cash reparations are expecting 150 years of accumulated interest, you end up with cash figures in the tens of trillions. It's just never going to happen.
And it won't be white folks alone who stop it. It'll be the growing numbers in other US minority groups who feel their "bootstraps" stories of overcoming oppression are comparable to what blacks in America faced pre-1970s. It won't be true, but they'll believe it nonetheless.
I read "From Here to Equality" on reparations early last month by @oh_HOLMES's recommendation, & have been thinking a lot about the issue since. And deliberately avoided tweeting about it while I let it marinate in my head. But I think I've come to several conclusions off it...
The general logic is cogent, but flawed in the sense it diminishes myriad brutal injustices inflicted by this country and others to set chattel slavery and Jim Crow apart as uniquely deserving of incomprehensibly large cash reparations versus other atrocities.
Realistically, I think reparations advocates are actually better off focusing on the injustices committed in living memory and resulting systemic inequities, not slavery and broken promises a century and a half prior.
To the extent they do focus on 1619-1865, make it cultural/educational. I have some major gripes with the 1619 Project, but think the motivations are correct and agree that we do need a proper reassessment of our entire teaching of history.
But ultimately, there's enough bad **** we've done to blacks (slave-descended or not) in the past 75 years that you could make a compelling case for reparative programs, cash or otherwise, off those alone. And that's where I think advocates will have greater political success.
It may not end up being direct cash, but package of expanding affirmative action or racial quotas, black business (not just DBE) set-asides for contracting, corporate hiring and board staffing, educational grants, and housing assistance would be more palatable.
Is it enough? Probably not. But in terms of messaging, a reparations package will be more successful if rooted in class inequalities. It's easier to tell upwardly-mobile immigrant groups "you don't need help" than "you didn't suffer enough generations ago to warrant assistance."
Blacks suffer unequal health & educational outcomes, treatment by employers and law enforcement, and socioeconomic mobility. Even at a federal cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, it's politically less troublesome to address those than put a price tag on past suffering.
Fin.
Fin.
