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Columnists debate: Reparations
February is Black History Month. This month, SCSU will celebrate both the progress made in achieving equality for African-Americans and revisit the terrible injustices of the past. What, if anything, should be done to remedy those injustices? Should some form of payment be made to the descendants of slaves?
Reparations even the starting blocks
by Ibrahim Bah
Despite credible progress toward the improvement in repairing past injustices, blacks and whites today have far from an equal share of social resources. Reparations would adjust those discrepancies and give blacks a fair start.
The debate over repaying blacks has taken numerous directions in which elite groups have attempted to cash in on reparations by polarizing the debate. Some have been so out of touch that they've sought for individual checks. If anything, reparations should not be making financial transactions and commodities out of past injustices.
However, the government's refusal to accept repairing the damages incurred by slavery has led to public manipulations of the debate. Statistics have unfailingly proven that blacks are plagued with social, economical and political backwardness because of their high rates of crime and poverty. America needs to help blacks by providing a remedy for their lost opportunities.
Many claim reparations have been paid in the form of welfare, civil rights legislation and so on. But regardless of whether slavery had existed, the government would have created those programs to accommodate citizens of all races. Civil rights laws redirected America by ensuring the natural rights of blacks as well as women and other minorities. Repaying blacks through such things as education will make them more likely to wind up on a list of entrepreneurs than a prison roll call. History has unquestionably shown the more educated the more likely citizens participate in shaping nations.
Others insist that reparations are unfair because the money will be coming from citizens whose generations immigrated long after slavery ended. However, they fail to realize that money for reparations will come from black taxpayers also. When post-slavery immigrants became American citizens, they inherited both our nation's benefits and its past troubles.
Still others claim that no one group in America is responsible for slavery. It could be possible that no one group is responsible for slavery. But slavery was a crime against humanity committed by this nation under the support of the government.
America has come from a great deal of history in which it has become a model in eradicating social injustices of all kinds. People who minimize the idea of repaying blacks, whose opportunities were locked in the vaults of oppression and persecution for nearly 400 years, fail to see that slavery in the U.S. cannot be equated to any world crime so far. Reparations could be the only way for America to reconcile its ugly past with blacks.
Slavery has left a scar of an insurmountable debt of justice owed to blacks. If America can donate $2-6 billion each year to Israel and pay $1 billon per month while it liberated Afghanistan, it can certainly afford to help its own citizens. Anything less would be inhumane.
Reparations rob Peter to pay Paul
by Justin Byma
Should African-Americans, the descendants of slaves, be paid reparations for the horrible injustices suffered by their ancestors?
No. The problems with the reparations claims are clear. First, it is nearly impossible to figure out who deserves the reparations and who should pay for them. Second, the United States did not prosper from slavery.
With the millions of immigrants who have streamed across our borders over the last century, it is unfair to assign collective guilt or victim status based on the color of one's skin. To hold the federal government accountable for slavery is to say the same for the citizens of this country, not one of whom has ever been a slave or owned one.
Similar complaints have already been raised in federal court, but this time the accused are American corporations who have benefited from what the lawyers call "unjust enrichment." They say that certain corporations profited from slavery while it was legal to do so.
But these lawsuits are no more than a game of robbing Peter to pay Paul where no one knows how much to pay Paul, how much to steal from Peter or even who Peter and Paul really are.
Slavery is not simply an American or western institution. It is as old as civilization itself. What is unique about the American version is that it so pained our national conscience that we ended it.
In fact, conscience and self-criticism are perhaps the greatest attributes of the United States of America. There are places in the world today that still condone the practice of slavery; Sudan and China come to mind. Will the leaders of the civil rights industry bring down their mighty swords upon modern slavery?
No. They won't because it's all about money. The logic of this movement tells them America earned her great wealth on the backs of slaves. By accepting this premise, they argue that slavery is an efficient economic system.
However, as George Mason University Economist Walter Williams argues, even at the height of slavery the wealthiest states were those that had abolished slavery decades earlier: New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The poorest states were Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. Slavery was an economic impediment that left the South without an incentive to modernize and mechanize its agrarian economy.
This is probably the most obvious paradox of the reparations argument. Rather than create wealth, slavery, as an institution, retarded economic growth. The truth is the United States prospered in spite of slavery, not because of it. To allege otherwise and to base a lawsuit or claim entitlement from the government on such a blatantly incorrect assumption is foolhardy.
No one is entitled to anything solely for being part of a group. Those who argue for reparations deny the importance of the individual and assert the dominance of a group, a race. Thereby, they desecrate the visions of the leaders we honor this month.
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