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Resolved: The United States Federal Government ought to pay reparations to African Americans.

Resolved: The United States Federal Government ought to pay reparations to African Americans...................2

Introduction....................................................................................................................................................3

United States Government..............................................................................................................................5

Ought to..........................................................................................................................................................7

Pay...................................................................................................................................................................8

Reparations.....................................................................................................................................................9

African-Americans.........................................................................................................................................10

Pro.....................................................................................................................................................................11

Contention 1—Tangible Costs.......................................................................................................................12

Contention 2—Racial discourse.....................................................................................................................15

Reparations are good for the economy.........................................................................................................17

Reparations are morally necessary...............................................................................................................19

Reparations key to reconciliation..................................................................................................................20

American wealth is built on black exploitation..............................................................................................21

Reparations are legally necessary.................................................................................................................24

Answer to debt has been paid.......................................................................................................................29

Answer to no recent victims..........................................................................................................................30

Answer to African-American privilege...........................................................................................................31

Services reparations are needed...................................................................................................................32

Con....................................................................................................................................................................34

Contention 1—Logistics.................................................................................................................................35

Contention 2—Black Economies...................................................................................................................37

Reparations aren’t owed...............................................................................................................................39

Reparations won’t make up for slavery.........................................................................................................41

Reparations won’t help black economies......................................................................................................42

Reparations hurt race relations.....................................................................................................................47

Reparations deny black agency.....................................................................................................................52

Answer to American wealth built on slavery.................................................................................................53




IntroductionThis month’s topic is simultaneously timely and timeless. Reparations for the hardships suffered by African-Americans were promised at the end of the Civil War over 150 years ago and remain a contentious issue today. While the debate has been largely academic and removed from legitimate public policy circles, the increased acceptance of white and government culpability as well as the influx of media images depicting police violence and mistreatment of black people have hastened calls for reform. While reparations still represent an abstract and politically difficult policy goal, many scholars believe a public discussion is the starting point of a more concrete solution.

The terms “reparations” and “African-American” are potential sources of contention. While some will define reparations as a strictly referring to cash payments, most acknowledge and accept that reparations could take the form of investment in social programs, tax cuts or non-traditional payments like land or favorable college admission. While some negatives will attempt to restrict the affirmative to direct monetary payments alone, indirect payments through services should be included as long as they are explicitly based on race. The definition of African-American is a question of historical significant; not all black Americans are the descendants of slaves (some are from families that migrated more recently) and not all blacks lived in areas affected by Jim Crow.

Some opponents of reparations use this as a way of decrying the racial divisiveness and imprecise allocation of such a system. Jim Crow reparations present a range of distinct legal and political options that are in contrast to claims made in the lawsuits focusing on slavery claims. Many of the differences are obvious and perhaps explain the greater level of public and scholarly support for one form of reparations litigation over another. In contrast to the slavery reparations context, Jim Crow litigation usually includes a more readily identifiable set of harms, plaintiffs, and defendants. However, the racist and oppressive “one-drop” rule that the government applied for more than a century, which implied that any individual able to trace their ancestry to an black person was considered black, was a tool of oppression to deny rights. It seems fighting that such a rule would ensure broad payouts to confront a broad issue of racial inequality.

The affirmative has a wealth of economic and ethical reasons to support a system of formal reparations. Many scholars have noted that the economic strength of the United States and several other western economies were developed thanks to the institutions of slavery, sharecropping, segregation, redlining and racial profiling. In this view, reparations aren’t so much a penalty but a distribution of monies owed to compensate black people for their historical contribution. While not all problems confronting black people are strictly economic, tax cuts, direct payments and public assistance programs will provide key support that furthers equality goals. Evidence suggests short-term monetary transfers can have a big impact on local economies and families. Most Americans admit that slavery was a morally monstrous system that wreaked severe pain and suffering on America. City councils in Chicago, Dallas, Oakland, and Los Angeles, and other cities in the past year have passed resolutions supporting a federal commission to study reparations. Also, there was no national outcry when the U.S. government made special indemnity payments, provided land and social service benefits to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, Native-Americans for the theft of lands and mineral rights, and Philippine veterans who fought with the American army during World War II.

Legal and moral justifications for reparations are plentiful as well. The Takings Clause of the Constitutions, the United Nations Convention on Genocide, Unjust Enrichment and various local civil rights tort payments




provide ample legal framework for a reparations system that could address tangible wrongs and provide real compensation. Even the narrative stories of those who suffered the worst results of slavery, Jim Crow and white supremacy could be a moving reason for judges to vote Pro, regardless of the economic rationale of reparations. The issue of race-based reparations concerns a fundamental issue of social justice as well: the responsibility that the community as a whole shoulders for the enslavement of and continuing discrimination against African Americans.

The general moral obligation to eradicate racism from our society requires coordinated efforts to work toward correcting the chronic fragmentation along racial lines that exists in so much of our country today. The moral force of reparations arguments is simply to suggest that the African American community cannot shoulder the burden of redeeming American society, as Dr. King put it, on our own. Instead, Dr. King persuasively argues that all Americans must engage as full participants in a dialogue examining the cost of repairing our society to make it a place for all citizens to and their home

While the Pro side of the debate may seem to have a monopoly on pathos in this debate, the Con has significant reasons to oppose reparations. The most common arguments point out the difficulty in attributed blame for historical abuses of black people, especially the most antiquated abuses like slavery where no slave-owners are left to hold accountable. With civil rights laws on the books for the last 50 years, very few of those paying for reparations through taxes ever directly profited from any kind of abuse. This conveniently goes in hand with the argument that contemporary black people have not experienced the kind of abuses they would be compensated for.

There are also questions concerning how persistent this debt really is. Ever since the foundation of government assistance programs in the 1930s, black people have used a disproportionate about of welfare, social security and public school funding relative to the rest of the population. While this cost may not alleviate the burdens of historic racism, they do obscure the modern costs owed. And if one argues these programs did not compensate, it is fair to ask whether any kind of monetary transfer could be more effective.

One of the inherent assumptions of a reparations system is that it would be develop black economies that have been hit by the worst forms of poverty. The Con can dispute this point by pointing to the lack of development stemming from welfare and other poverty alleviation programs. Because reparations would target payments by race rather than economic need, reparations are, at best, an inefficient way of tackling the issue. At worst, reparations may be cost-prohibitive of these other government assistance programs while providing nothing more than a short-term boost in spending money. Data on poverty and African-Americans seems to suggest that sudden cash infusions aren’t typically invested or saved in sustainable ways.

Another compelling line of argument for the Con is to point out the racial divisions imposed by reparations. Not only would reparations make racial identity a matter of great public importance but it would also exclude other underprivileged minorities and further issues of inequality. Victimhood and a lack of agency are often associated with such programs and could have a negative long term effect on the development of black communities the same way welfare has stunted progress.




United States Government

United States Government refers to all federal branches and the states US Legal. No Date. United States Federal Government Law & Legal Definition. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://definitions.uslegal.com/u/united-states-federal-government/

The United States Federal Government is established by the US Constitution. The Federal Government shares sovereignty over the United Sates with the individual governments of the States of US. The Federal government has three branches: i) the legislature, which is the US Congress, ii) Executive, comprised of the President and Vice president of the US and iii) Judiciary. The US Constitution prescribes a system of separation of powers and ‘checks and balances’ for the smooth functioning of all the three branches of the Federal Government. The US Constitution limits the powers of the Federal Government to the powers assigned to it; all powers not expressly assigned to the Federal Government are reserved to the States or to the people.

Government is the primary authority in a given areaMerriam-Webster. No Date. Government. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/government

noun, gov·ern·ment often attributive \ˈgə-vər(n)-mənt, -və-mənt; ˈgə-bəm-ənt, -vəm-\ : the group of people who control and make decisions for a country, state, etc. : a particular system used for controlling a country, state, etc. : the process or manner of controlling a country, state, etc.



http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/government

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/government

http://definitions.uslegal.com/u/united-states-federal-government/


Government refers to all institutions with legal authorityOxford English. No Date. Federal government. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/federal-government

(in the US) the system of government as defined in the Constitution which is based on the separation of powers among three branches: the executive, the legislative and the judicial. This system provides a series of checks and balances because each branch is able to limit the power of the others. The executive branch consists of the President and Vice-President, based in the White House in Washington, DC, and government departments and agencies. The President can approve or stop laws proposed by Congress, appoints senior officials, such as heads of government departments and federal judges, and is also Commander-in-Chief of the military forces. There are 15 government departments, the heads of which make up the Cabinet which meets regularly to discuss current affairs and advise the President. The legislative branch is the Congress which is made up of the two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives which both meet in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. The main job of Congress is to make laws, but its other responsibilities include establishing federal courts, setting taxes and, if necessary, declaring war. The President and members of Congress are chosen in separate elections. The Senate has 100 members, two from each state, both of whom represent the whole state and are elected for six years. The House of Representatives has 435 members, who are elected every two years. The number of members from each state depends on the population of the state, with larger states divided into districts, each with one representative. The judicial branch of government has three levels: the Supreme Court, 13 courts of appeal and many federal district courts. The Supreme Court has nine members, called justices who are chosen by the President and headed by the Chief Justice. The Supreme Court has the power to influence the law through a process called judicial review.



http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/federal-government


Ought to

Ought expresses obligation or advisabilityMerriam-Webster. No Date. Ought. Accessed July 20, 2015. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ought

Used to express obligation <ought to pay our debts>, advisability <ought to take care of yourself>, natural expectation <ought to be here by now>, or logical consequence <the result ought to be infinity>.

Ought to expresses an expected actionMacMillan Dictionary. No Date. Ought. Accessed July 20, 2015. http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/ought

Ought is usually followed by “to” and an infinitive: You ought to tell the truth. Sometimes it is used without “to” or a following infinitive in a formal way: ♦ I don ’ t practice as often as I ought. It is also used in an informal way followed by “ to ” but no following infinitive: ♦ I don ’ t spend as much time with them as I ought to. Used for saying what is the right or sensible thing to do, or the right way to behave. Used when you have strong reasons for believing or expecting something.

Ought expresses a dutyOxford English Dictionary. No Date. Ought. Accessed July 20, 2015. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/ought

1 Used to indicate duty or correctness, typically when criticizing someone’s actions: they ought to respect the law it ought not to be allowed 1.1 Used to indicate a desirable or expected state: he ought to be able to take the initiative 1.2 Used to give or ask advice: you ought to go.




Pay

Pay refers to the exchange of moneyMerriam-Webster. No Date. Pay. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pay

transitive verb 1 a : to make due return to for services rendered or property delivered b : to engage for money : hire <you couldn't pay me to do that> 2 a : to give in return for goods or service <pay wages> b : to discharge indebtedness for : settle <pay a bill> c : to make a disposal or transfer of (money)

Pay is financial restitutionOxford English. No Date. Pay. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/pay

verb (past and past participle paid) 1 [WITH OBJECT] Give (someone) money that is due for work done, goods received, or a debt incurred: [WITH OBJECT AND INFINITIVE]: he paid the locals to pick his coffee beans [NO OBJECT]: TV licenses can be paid for by direct debit MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES SYNONYMS 1.1Give (a sum of money) in exchange for goods or work done or in discharge of a debt: he paid $1,000 to have it built in 1977 [WITH TWO OBJECTS]: a museum paid him a four-figure sum for it MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES SYNONYMS 1.2Hand over or transfer the amount due of (a debt, wages, etc.) to someone: bonuses were paid to savers whose policies completed their full term MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES SYNONYMS 1.3(Of work, an investment, etc.) yield or provide someone with (a specified sum of money): jobs that pay $5 or $6 an hour MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES 1.4 [NO OBJECT] (Of a business or undertaking, or an attitude) be profitable or advantageous to someone: crime doesn’t pay [WITH INFINITIVE]: it pays to choose varieties carefully MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES SYNONYMS

Pay means giving moneyMacmillan Dictionary. No Date. Pay. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/pay_1

[INTRANSITIVE/TRANSITIVE] to give money in order to buy something pay for: [INTRANSITIVE/ TRANSITIVE] to give money to someone who does a job for you [TRANSITIVE] to give someone their salary [INTRANSITIVE/TRANSITIVE] to give a company, institution, etc. money that you owe them



http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/pay_1

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/pay


Reparations

Reparations are monetary payments that correct mistakesMerriam-Webster. No Date. Reparation. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reparation

noun rep·a·ra·tion \ˌre-pə-ˈrā-shən\ reparations : money that a country or group that loses a war pays because of the damage, injury, deaths, etc., it has caused : something that is done or given as a way of correcting a mistake that you have made or a bad situation that you have caused

Making amends or compensatingOxford Dictionaries. No Date. Reparation. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/reparation

1The making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged: the courts required a convicted offender to make financial reparation to his victim 1.1 (reparations) The compensation for war damage paid by a defeated state. 2 archaic The action of repairing something: the old hall was pulled down to avoid the cost of reparation.

Slavery reparations could be either direct monetary or provided through servicesDr. John Pohnpei. Professor at Howard University. November 2, 2013. Define slavery reparation in your own words. Should reparations be paid to African... Accessed August 25, 2015. http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/define-slavery-reparation-your-own-words-should-462007

I would define slavery reparations as money paid out to people who have been harmed by slavery. It would also be possible for the reparations to come in the form of in-kind transfers (like food stamp-type things or vouchers for tuition in college). Reparations are payments made to the victims of some injustice by the people who perpetrated and/or benefitted from that injustice.



http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/reparation


African-Americans

The ‘one-drop’ definition was used to maximize the denial rights—should be used to maximize remediesF James Davis. Writer at PBS Frontline. 2014. Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/mixed/onedrop.html

It should now be apparent that the definition of a black person as one with any trace at all of black African ancestry is inextricably woven into the history of the United States. It incorporates beliefs once used to justify slavery and later used to buttress the caste like Jim Crow system of segregation. Developed in the South, the definition of "Negro" (now black) spread and became the nation's social and legal definition. Because blacks are defined according to the one-drop rule, they are a socially constructed category in which there is wide variation in racial traits and therefore not a race group in the scientific sense. However, because that category has a definite status position in the society it has become a self-conscious social group with an ethnic identity. The one-drop rule has long been taken for granted throughout the United States by whites and blacks alike, and the federal courts have taken "judicial notice" of it as being a matter of common knowledge. State courts have generally upheld the one-drop rule, but some have limited the definition to one thirty-second or one-sixteenth or one-eighth black ancestry, or made other limited exceptions for persons with both Indian and black ancestry. Most Americans seem unaware that this definition of blacks is extremely unusual in other countries, perhaps even unique to the United States, and that Americans define no other minority group in a similar way.

Any American whose family comes from AfricaMacMillan Dictionary. No Date. African-American. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/african-american_2

1 Someone who is African-American is from the U.S., but their family originally came from Africa 2 Relating to the culture of African-Americans.

American citizens with origins in AfricaUS Legal. No Date. African Americans Law & Legal Definition. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://definitions.uslegal.com/a/african-americans/

African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. In the United States, the terms are generally used for Americans with at least partial Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Most African Americans are the direct descendants of captive Africans who survived the slavery era within the boundaries of the present United States. There were many events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by African Americans. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the African-American community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. African Americans make up the single largest racial minority in the United States and form the second largest racial group after whites in the United States. They are also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans, and formerly as American Negroes.




Pro




Contention 1—Tangible Costs

Racist government policy prevented African-Americans from receiving their fair share of the 20th century economic boomJamelle Bouie. Writer at Slate. May 2014. Reparations are owed. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/reparations_should_be_paid_to_black_americans_here_is_how_america_should.html

Black families paid taxes and black soldiers fought for democracy in Europe and the Pacific, but—from low-interest home loans to money for education—they were barred from the benefits of the G.I. Bill. Indeed, the same federal dollars that built the suburbs were used to keep blacks out of them. It was the federal government that “pioneered the practice of redlining,” writes Coates, “selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.” At the same time, “legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated.” The case for reparations, in short, is straightforward. As a matter of public policy, America stole wealth from black people, denied them a shot at prosperity, and deprived them of equal citizenship. And that’s just the 20th century. If you go beyond that—to include all stolen income from the revolution to secession—the balance falls deep into the red. In 1860, translated to today’s terms, slaves represented a staggering $10 trillion in wealth, an incredible sum. If you include compound interest—to represent the compounding plunder of the next century—you are left with an implausibly large amount of money.




Modern de facto segregation, stemming from 20th century laws, makes blacks targets for predatory lendingTa-Nehisi Coates. Writer at the Atlantic. June 2014. The Case for Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

“High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’ minority neighborhoods.” Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.” “We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.” In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.




The harms of slavery and discrimination are ongoingJacqueline Bacon. Scholar at UC San Diego. August 2003. “Reading the Reparations Debate.” Quarterly Journal of Speech V. 89 N. 3. Accessed August 15, 2015. p. 180.

The ways in which historical events and actors are related to one another in the accounts of reparations supporters depend on a perspective based on implicature and the rethinking of responsibility for which Gutie´rrez-Jones calls. Advocates of reparations highlight large, complex economic and power relationships while downplaying discrete connections such as ownership of slaves or direct financial benefit. Economist Julianne Malveaux maintains that the recent identification of insurance companies that “collected profits generated by slavery” is significant because “it rounds out our knowledge about the many sectors of our society that profited from slavery.” Supporters argue that the benefits of slavery extend through white privilege to present-day white Americans whose ancestors never owned slaves. “Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery,” John Hope Franklin asserts. “They have inherited the preferential advantage if they are white, or the disadvantage if they are black, and those positions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century.” In these arguments, history cannot be boiled down to categories such as slaveholder and slave, proslavery and antislavery, even past and present. These narratives challenge the privatized racial view Gresson describes, used by many contemporary Americans to separate themselves from the nation’s racial history. Americans, past and present, are implicated in and affected by racial power and privilege, which complicate concrete notions of guilt, profit, and responsibility.




Contention 2—Racial discourse

We must acknowledge the economic privilege of contemporary whites as a starting point for this debateBelinda Cooper. Writer at the Week. September 2, 2014. Why reparations could prevent the next Ferguson. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://theweek.com/articles/444129/why-reparations-could-prevent-next-ferguson

Transitional justice demands recognition that fulfilling responsibilities to the past requires more than merely lip service from a perpetrator society. Crimes against minority groups in any society bring benefits to the perpetrator group, and compensating for them can necessitate material sacrifice. But remorse often ends where personal sacrifice begins. Marco Williams' 2006 documentary, Banished, tells the story of several black towns in the American South that were ethnically cleansed in the early 20th century. A black family from one of these towns sought to have a father's remains reburied near their new home and was met with sympathy from the white residents of the town — until they asked the town to pay the costs. As in Germany, where polls over the years have shown significant minorities that deny an ongoing financial responsibility towards the victims of the Holocaust, many fail to see why they should be held individually accountable for the acts of their parents or grandparents. The benefits accrued through the injustices of the past are not always apparent. One of the most important aspects of successful transitional justice, therefore, lies in illuminating not only the victims' suffering, but the ways in which an entire society continues to bear the burdens of history. This helps elevate an important point: correcting injustice may require affirmative steps. The U.S. government and society need to recognize — and educate citizens on — the direct connections between continuing racial disparities in this country and the wrongs that gave rise to them, and to talk far more about the responsibilities we all share for repairing the damage. Perhaps Ferguson — which has revealed what can happen when we suppress these conversations — will finally motivate us to think about how to address the harms, whether through material reparations or otherwise. If we're willing to start talking, we'll find no shortage of role models for transitional justice throughout the world to help us take the next steps.



http://theweek.com/articles/444129/why-reparations-could-prevent-next-ferguson

http://theweek.com/articles/444129/why-reparations-could-prevent-next-ferguson


Reparations would create a positive national conversation about raceAngelique M. Davis. Professor at Seattle University. 2014. Apologies, Reparations, and the Continuing Legacy of the Slave Trade in the United States. Journal of Black Studies 45(4). Accessed August 15, 2015.15, 2015.

Fraser’s and Tutu’s comments suggest that bringing forth alternatives to traditional perspectives about race in the public sphere is valuable, even when they are initially subjected to harsh criticism, because the process has the potential to enhance the national conversation about race. In addition, the aspect of the reparations debate that makes it so contentious—its position at the intersection of discussions about race and history—also suggests the power of arguments about reparations ultimately to further discourse about race and racial relations in the U.S. Many who disagree with reparations do not want to hear challenges to historical narratives that are comforting and that reinforce and validate existing power relations. Yet the very arguments that reparations opponents produce to reject alternative historical narratives undermine traditional views of history. If you argue about history, you admit that history is rhetorical. If you criticize the historical narratives of others for not promoting unity, you demonstrate that memory is not value-free. If you are confronted in a debate with stories, evidence, or historical actors that do not fit the frameworks on which you rely, the hegemony of the structures of memory is undermined. If those who offer these different historical narratives continue to bring them forward, you cannot forget the past, no matter how much you want to.

Reparations for the genocidal treatment of blacks must begin on ethical groundsAllan D. Cooper. Professor at Otterbein University. 2012. From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse. Journal of Black Studies 43(2). Accessed August 15, 2015. p. 110.

But independent of the legal argument, reparations for genocide poses a much more powerful ethical argument. Up until now, the fundamental justification for reparations has been economic: African Americans are owed a debt. Reducing slavery to a cost-benefit analysis connotes that the inherent indignity of being a slave is merely a matter of unfair compensation for labor performed. If this was all it was, then the entire working class of America could demand reparations for their lack of fair pay. But slavery was about much more than economic hardship; slavery related to an assault on the humanity and dignity of African Americans. Robert S. Browne (1972) offers this insight: It is doubtful if one can meaningfully discuss the reparations concept solely within an economic context, in isolation from the associated moral and political considerations which are inseparable from a reparations demand. Conceivably, one might successfully demonstrate the Pareto optimality of a capital transfer of a specified size to the black community, perhaps by demonstrating that failure to make such a transfer might result in an economic wastage of even larger magnitude. But to label such a capital transfer as “reparations,” and to justify it solely on the basis of economic efficiency while ignoring the myriad equity considerations which the term reparations implies would be so sterile and mechanistic as to constitute a near insult to the black community’s humanity. (p. 39) Zack (2003) simplifies the argument: “Slavery would be wrong if the labor extracted from slaves had no value and never profited those who extracted it” (p. 140). In short, the fundamental flaw in the “reparations-as-debt” argument, espoused by Randall Robinson and most of the recent proponents for reparations, is that it focuses attention on the net worth of a slave rather than the crime against humanity committed by the perpetrator.




Reparations are good for the economy

Direct payments would rejuvenate struggling economies while limiting the need for long-term government assistanceAlan Gray. Writer at News Blaze. August 5, 2015. Could Granting Blacks Reparations For Slavery Boost America's Economy? Accessed August 15, 2015. http://newsblaze.com/story/20150805193134nnnn.nb/topstory.html

It would be in America's best interest to support this cause because of the economic benefits alone. And I'm fairly sure blacks actually love America, they just hate not having the money to live the way they desire and enjoy the finer things in life. It is Muhammad's theory that his ancestors who were brought to the U.S. as slaves, were more valuable than we have been led to believe. And with some support, blacks will have access to historical records that could prove that fact. They could then legally force Africa to return their inheritance that was unjustly taken from their ancestors (i.e. Reparations). In this, America as a whole would benefit greatly - financially - because the reparations revenue would flow from generation to generation. It would never take from America's economy, but instead would add to it. Paying Down America's Debt The masses of poor blacks could very well become the saviors of the faltering economy and this would eliminate their dependence on government assistance. Next, the government money that blacks wouldn't need anymore could be diverted into paying off America's growing debts, thanks to the president and Congress. Finally, America can begin to replenish its savings account (so to speak). So the economists should think this over, seriously. If they see any logic in it at all, they could construct a detailed outline of what the success of this endeavor to claim reparations from Africa could do for America's Economy. Then blacks could use that outline to gain government support, as well as support from the American people (Blacks and Whites alike). And that support will then energize and begin to assemble the minds it would take to present an effective case that would win in court. New Era Of Racial Peace In America Finally, this age-old discussion would be closed, and America could begin a new era of peace between the races that many believe will only come after this issue is settled. There is one other important thing. As the overwhelming majority of blacks love the democrat way of doing things, they should be happy to pay a large percentage of their windfall profit in taxes, to support any blacks who are unable to get reparations. They can also support poor white people.



http://newsblaze.com/story/20150805193134nnnn.nb/topstory.html


Short-term money transfers can have a major impactJoshua Holland. Writer at Bill Moyers. June 4, 2014. The Past Isn’t Past: The Economic Case for Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://billmoyers.com/2014/06/04/the-past-isnt-past-the-economic-case-for-reparations/

Having some net worth impacts families in several important ways. Wealth provides a cushion against economic shocks. “It’s a risky economy, and everybody needs a buffer,” says Rachel Black, an expert in asset-building at the New America Foundation. “That’s especially true for those living on the financial margins, where a small dip in their income or an unexpected expense could leave them either making material sacrifices — like skipping meals — or not being able to repair the car that they need to get to work.” About one-third of all welfare recipients are African-Americans, a fact that helps perpetuate vicious and bigoted stereotypes about blacks being lazy and “dependent.” But the reality is that hundreds of years of structural discrimination have left black families without the same cushion that even poor white households tend to have, so when things go wrong they’re less likely to be able to get by without turning to public assistance. But the most important way that a family’s wealth affects kids’ chances of getting ahead is through what’s known as “intergenerational assistance.” “Wealth matters in terms of passing on a family business or helping your offspring with a down payment on a home or financing a job search,” says Dalton Conley. “Simply paying for college is a big part of it — if you have a buffer and don’t have to work two jobs to pay for college, you’re much more likely to graduate in four years.” Because chances for young African-Americans to get their degrees diminish without such a buffer, most of today’s proposals for reparations include some sort of college fund to give young blacks the same opportunity to get an education that many white people take for granted.

Reparations would help the economyMichael Maiello. Writer at Reuters. June 4, 2014. Why reparations for slavery could help boost the economy. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/06/04/why-reparations-for-slavery-could-help-boost-the-economy/

Today reparations would affect 44.5 million Americans, most of whom are in a position, or could eventually be in a position, to do far more than spend. The stimulus would lead to both entrepreneurship and investment and potential direct poverty alleviation for 3.2 percent of the total population, assuming that cash-based reparations payments would be large enough to lift even the poorest recipient above the poverty line. This would affect the roughly 27 percent of African-Americans who were below the poverty line in 2012. Put those elements together and there is a prime case for stimulus that would both alleviate poverty directly, and provide payments to people who can either grow their investments or start or expand businesses. Any reasonable program would start with direct cash payments of sufficient largess that it should be able to eliminate any reasonable consumer debts and allow the recipient access to retail banking services (the poor are notoriously under served by financial institutions). This assistance could immediately affect more than 30 percent of the participants in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, boosting them in such a way that they no longer need to receive benefits, according to figures from the Urban Institute. The payments would be a huge boon for the states who administer the block grants behind these programs. Imagine similar reductions in the number of users of food stamps and medical programs.




Reparations are morally necessary

The moral imperative is strong enough to justify reparations and must be discussed separately from economic costsLonnie Bunch. Writer at Smithsonian. June 6, 2014. The director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture joins the discussion around "The Case for Reparations." Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-moral-debt-african-americans-180951675/?no-ist

While the conversation with scholars and ordinary citizens often centers on financial payment, I’m emphasizing that the moral debt is more important. While fairness would dictate that the descendants of the Tulsa Riots of 1921 to see the goal of their reparations campaign be finalized with some remunerations. Yet the moral debate is equally owed. The current discussion of reparations has made me consider how relevant the question remains, given the success and prosperity of the 21st Century. Honestly, we are still grappling with one of the unsolved issues that started the day a handful of Africans stepped onto the shores of Jamestown in 1619. How can America repay those bent backs and calloused hands for their slave labor, and satisfy the descendants that all the chatteled years have value? In his essay, Coates presents us with a clear roadmap on how we got to this point. Maya Angelou, the wise writer, bequeathed us this philosophy: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” In so many ways, the American experience is the African American experience. In every development of our country’s history, every step that has made America better is tied to African American lives, patriotism and sacrifice. Indeed, profits from slavery provided a reservoir of capital that allowed America to grow into a world power. The image of America as a just society is stained by the lack of moral reparations and fair treatment for a group of its earliest and most loyal laborers and residents. What we will have in the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a place for dialogue and the exploration of historical movements.




Reparations key to reconciliation

Reparations are key to racial reconciliationJacqueline Bacon. Scholar at UC San Diego. August 2003. “Reading the Reparations Debate.” Quarterly Journal of Speech V. 89 N. 3. Accessed August 15, 2015. p. 179.

Advocates of reparations, for example, base their arguments on the notion that past and present are intimately connected. At a round table discussion in January 2000, reparations supporter Randall Robinson argued: [M]illions of blacks … remain economically and socially disabled by the long, cruel promise of American slavery and the century of government-embraced racial discrimination that followed it … . A yawning gap was opened. It has been a static gap since the Emancipation Proclamation … . We’re here today to discuss this gap and the lasting social penalties of slavery and how they might be addressed once and for all. There are, for Robinson, no clearly separated before and after categories. The Emancipation Proclamation is not a transitional motif that signals fundamental change; to borrow Hayden White’s terms, there is no dismantling of oppression or recoding of the nation’s fundamentally racist orientation. For Robinson and other reparations supporters, U.S. racial history is still unfolding; a psychological and political burden weighs on the nation that must be lifted if it is ever to achieve reconciliation. This interpretation of the past presents a challenge to the master narrative that Nathan Huggins describes, in which slavery and oppression are “historical accidents to be corrected” and progress is the ultimate motion of U.S. history.

Supporting reparations is a vital way to oppose a whitewashed history that continues to drive racial discrimination.Jacqueline Bacon. Scholar at UC San Diego. August 2003. “Reading the Reparations Debate.” Quarterly Journal of Speech V. 89 N. 3. Accessed August 15, 2015. p. 190-1

Why, then, do reparations supporters have so much faith in debate itself, even contending that a central aspect of what they seek is to bring the issue into the public arena and provoke debate? Recall Randall Robinson’s assertion that one of the goals of the reparations movement can be accomplished by “simply raising the issue and provoking public discussion.” Manning Marable similarly notes, “I would argue that the demand for reparations is fundamentally not about the money. The money is secondary. The primary reason is for the truth to be told.” In a letter to the editor of Newsday, the Reverend John Magisano explains, “I do not see the concept of reparations as being about a placing a dollar figure on the lives stolen for slavery, though that is useful information in quantifying the damage done. I feel that it is about finally getting white America to take responsibility for the institution of slavery.” Various commentators have echoed these views, arguing that the reparations debate will be productive for racial discourse in this country. Mark Brown, who acknowledges that the reparations issue “stirs a negative reaction” in him, nonetheless believes that “what we really need is some sort of national sensitivity training, which the reparations debate could provide.” Journalism professor Vivian Martin argues, “As the discussion evolves, people’s views about the issue will too. Anyone who encounters pieces of the debate and doesn’t walk away a little more educated about the past or see the issue as more complex than he [or she] originally thought isn’t thinking.”




American wealth is built on black exploitation

Determining responsibility is key to addressing economic debtsAngelique M. Davis. Professor at Seattle University. 2014. Apologies, Reparations, and the Continuing Legacy of the Slave Trade in the United States. Journal of Black Studies 45(4). Accessed August 15, 2015.

Finally, by minimizing the continuing legacy of the European Slave Trade and slavery in the United States and thwarting concrete remedial measures including reparations claims, the resolutions serve to absolve White Americans, state governments, and the federal government for their role in these horrors and allow them to continue to benefit from systemic racial inequality in the United States. Some argue that although financial reparations could never compensate for the genocide perpetrated by the enslavement of African Americans, it would be symbolically significant (Cooper, 2012). The question of whether these apologies will lead to tangible benefits for African Americans or serve as a form of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) that ultimately benefits the majority remains. There does not appear, however, to be much political will to address this issue as public reaction to these apology resolutions reveals that vigorous debate remains surrounding whether or not present-day racial inequalities are linked to slavery and if government bodies and individuals today have any responsibility for it.

Slavery and Jim Crow have a direct impact on contemporary economic problemsAlfred L. Brophy. Professor at University of Dayton. June 2011. Slavery Developing Legal Strategies to Advance Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara39.htm

In the case of slavery, the taking has led to institutionalized racism, causing harm to subsequent generations of African-Americans. According to recent census figures, 24.3% of Blacks lived in poverty in 2003, compared with 10.3% of Whites. Education statistics show that where only 78.7% of Blacks have a high school diploma, 88.7% of Whites have obtained this level of minimal achievement. Likewise, only 17% of Blacks have obtained a bachelor's degree or more, compared to 29.4% of Whites. Black per-capita income in 2001 was a mere $14,953 compared with $24,127 for Whites. The percent of Blacks below the poverty level has more than doubled that of Whites for the last 26 years. As would be expected given the previous numbers, the percentage of unemployed Blacks more than doubles that of Whites. More telling, however, is the difference between those who do and do not own homes. In 2002, 47.3% of Blacks owned their own homes. This does not begin to compare to the 74.5% of Whites who owned their own homes. Yet more disturbing are the incarceration statistics. As of the year 2000, there were only 132 more Black males in college than in prison. While the number of Black males attending college has risen only slightly, the number going to prison has increased dramatically over the years. In addition, Black males are more than six times more likely than White males to go to prison. The Department of Justice notes that in 2000, Blacks had a 18.6% chance of going to prison, compared with a 3.4% chance for Whites. Blacks trail Whites with regard to every social yardstick including education, life expectancy, income, and homeownership. These disparities are linked to the legacy of slavery. It is of no consequence to argue which came first, slavery or racism. The result has been the reinforced presumption that African-Americans are inferior, unintelligent, and prone to violence and crime. These disparities stem from the original taking.




Western wealth is largely owed to slave laborEric Williams. Professor at University of Massachusetts. June 2012. Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz by Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.umass.edu/afroam/hor.html

But such sophistry evades the basic issue: who benefited primarily from slavery? Those who were responsible for the institutionalized enslavement of people of African descent also received the primary benefits from such actions. New England slave traders, merchants, bankers, and insurance companies all profited from the slave trade, which required a wide variety of commodities ranging from sails, chandlery, foodstuffs, and guns, to cloth goods and other items for trading purposes. Both prior to and after the American Revolution, slaveholding was a principal path for white upward mobility in the South. The white native-born as well as immigrant groups such as Germans, Scots-Irish, and the like participated. In 1860, cotton was the country's largest single export. As Eric Williams and C.L.R. James have demonstrated, the free labor provided by slavery was central to the growth of industry in western Europe and the United States; simultaneously, as Walter Rodney has argued, slavery depressed and destabilized the economies of African states. Slaveholders benefited primarily from the institution, of course, and generally in proportion to the number of slaves which they held. But the sharing of the proceeds of slave exploitation spilled across class lines within white communities as well. As historian John Hope Franklin recently affirmed in a rebuttal to Horowitz's claims: "All whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery. All blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own. All whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control. "

The wealth gap necessitates a monetary transferAlfred L. Brophy. Professor at University of Dayton. June 2012. Slavery Segregation and Reparation. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29c.htm

The wealth gap holds down entire neighborhoods. Ta-Nehisi Coates told Bill Moyers that a black family “that has an income of $100,000 a year, on average, actually lives in a neighborhood that’s comparable to a white family that makes $30,000 a year.” That’s another manifestation of the black-white wealth gap. Even after the crash in the housing market, most American families hold the lion’s share of their wealth in housing. What’s more, home values are a good indicator of the quality of the local schools. That’s a result of a virtuous cycle — neighborhoods with more expensive real estate have healthier tax bases to fund their schools. Excellent schools then attract buyers and drive up home values. The fact that poorer neighborhoods tend to have worse schools is yet another way that the black-white wealth gap creates an uneven playing field. A modern reparations scheme could help level it. Coates makes an historical and moral case for reparations. The wealth gap is the basis for a practical, unsentimental one. “Even if you could wave a magic wand and make all other forms of inequality disappear today,” says Conley, “it would take a very long time for that wealth inequality to naturally dissolve.” Of course, we see legislatures, even courts, acting on ideas of general culpability in many places. There are many crimes committed by government officials that lead the entire community to be liable for the actions of those officials. After Rodney King obtained a damages verdict, that verdict was satisfied by the taxpayers of Los Angeles. Very few taxpayers were actually responsible for the crime, but they had to pay for the crime. Perhaps many antireparationists will object to that example.



http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29c.htm


The economy’s strength is built on black exploitationRobert Westley. Professor at Boston College. August 2008. MANY BILLIONS GONE: IS IT TIME TO RECONSIDER THE CASE FOR BLACK REPARATIONS? Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara02b.htm

Just as there can be no doubt that such interracial disparities weigh most heavily upon the underclass, there can be no doubt that the persistence of those disparities is due in large measure to legally enforced exploitation of Blacks and socially widespread anti-Black racism. The achievements of Blacks who have prevailed against racist odds to improve their economic condition should not be minimized, but neither should the impact of the history and perdurance of racism on Black economic opportunity be trivialized. Despite well-publicized success cases like Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, and others, Blacks as a group have not reached anything approaching economic equality or equality of opportunity with whites. Given the glacial and limited nature of economic reform, this is unsurprising. Because racism, in addition to its psychological aspects, is a structural feature of the U.S. political economy, it produces intergenerational effects. Highlighting the intergenerational effects of structural racism in the United States political economy, Thomas Pettigrew notes that three useful generalizations can be made about the current situation of Black Americans. First, current statistics on Blacks, when compared to earlier data, show substantial improvement in Black living conditions. However, these same statistics pale when compared to current data on whites. Second, most of the "progress" of the past twenty years reflects the establishment of a solid, sizable, and skilled Black middle class which, crucially, is able to pass on its human capital to its children. Conversely, the most bleak statistics reflect the desperate situation of the unskilled Black poor or underclass. Third, modern forms of racism, to a greater extent than in the past, have become more subtle, indirect, procedural, and ostensibly nonracial. Pettigrew focuses on the analysis of traditional inequality factors, such as income, education, housing, employment patterns, and so forth, and how these factors operate in the context of the new racism. However, the burden of the reparations argument, for which material inequality may serve as a first predicate, is to show that current disparities in material resources are causally linked to unjust and unremedied actions in the past. Rather than merely highlighting intergenerational effects based on traditional inequality factors assumed to be causally linked to past racial discrimination against Blacks, the following discussion seeks to elucidate a key causal element in the maintenance of structural racism: the economic determinant of wealth.




Reparations are legally necessary

The Jim Crow Era represents a clear breach of the UN Genocide Convention.Allan D. Cooper. Professor at Otterbein University. 2012. From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse. Journal of Black Studies 43(2). Accessed August 15, 2015. p. 110.

Still the question remains: Did U.S. government actions after 1948 affect the African American community in a manner justifying a claim of genocide? The question itself requires that we ignore slavery altogether and focus instead on the application of the Jim Crow era of American apartheid. There is already a large literature detailing the atrocities and humiliations of the Jim Crow era in the United States (e.g., Woodward, 2001; Packard, 2003; Wormser, 2003). President Bill Clinton apologized for one of the policies targeted at the African American community that occurred during this time, the Tuskegee experiments that forced nearly 400 African American men to be subjected to syphilis without medical treatment. These experiments began in the 1930s and continued until 1972; one third of the victims died from the program organized by the U.S. Public Health Service (Cooper, 2008, p. 191). Causing serious bodily harm to members of a group constitutes a criterion for genocide identified in the UN Genocide Convention. The bottom line is that from the 1948 Genocide Convention to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, African Americans were subjected to governmental policies that denied them basic civil rights and permitted discrimination in all facets of social and economic life. As a result, the community suffered disproportionate harm in terms of employment opportunities, median income compared to Whites, families living in poverty, incarceration rates, and corporal punishment in public schools as well as disparate access to public facilities ranging from restaurants to lodging to entertainment venues. Hate crimes against African Americans were epidemic; in 2005, the U.S. Senate went so far as to issue an official apology for failing to criminalize lynching during the Jim Crow era, acknowledging that [at] least 4,742 African Americans had been lynched by domestic terrorists (Stolberg, 2005). These lynchings continued through 1968 (Brophy, 2006, p. 29).




Statute of limitations is not a constraint on reparations claimsAlfred L. Brophy. Professor at University of Dayton. June 2008. The Case for Black Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara38.htm

Unfortunately, this pattern of racial violence, and the concomitant denial of a legal remedy, has repeated itself in communities throughout the United States. The Tulsa case is just one example of government-sanctioned collective violence going unpunished because of a procedural hurdle--the statute of limitations. Japanese Americans interned during World War II and Jewish survivors of the Holocaust have also struggled to clear this hurdle. Despite the history of government-sanctioned violence, courts reject reparations claims; and many Americans support these decisions. People are incredulous and unsympathetic to the notion that African-Americans could present claims and seek relief for events that took place decades ago, if not longer. The courts--expressed recently in the Tulsa case--routinely dismiss such claims despite the ability to exercise their discretion otherwise. Reparations litigation is at a critical juncture; the viability of a reparations lawsuit has once again become the focus of intense and serious debate. There is no dearth of scholarship on the broad issue of reparations, but little has been written on the narrow but essential question of whether, as a matter of current public policy, it is legitimate to apply outmoded notions of the statute of limitations to such litigation while simultaneously refusing to consider modern bases for expanding permissible exceptions to the application of statutes of limitations. This Article fills that void, focusing on the limitations issues within the reparations debate. Some limited work has been done on both sides.

Reparations have a firm legal foundation in unjust enrichmentJoe Feagin. Writer at Time. May 28, 2014. A Legal and Moral Basis for Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://time.com/132034/a-legal-and-moral-basis-for-reparations/

A legal basis for reparations could rest in the concept of unjust enrichment, an idea traditionally associated with relationships between individuals. Unjust enrichment involves circumstances that “give rise to the obligation of restitution, that is, the receiving and retention of property, money, or benefits which in justice and equity belong to another,” according to Ballentine’s Law Dictionary. One can extend the idea of restitution for unjust enrichment to the conditions of large-scale group oppression. Implicit in the idea of unjust enrichment is the counterpart idea of unjust impoverishment, the condition of those suffering at the hands of those unfairly enriched. From the 1700s to the mid-1800s, white families and communities were enriched directly, or by means of economic multiplier effects, by slave plantations and related economic enterprises. Economist James Marketti once estimated that the labor stolen from enslaved African Americans from 1790 to 1860 was worth in the range of $2.1 to $4.7 trillion (in 1983 dollars), after taking into account lost interest. Those who have attacked the idea of owing back wages to African Americans, arguing those are too-distant debts, ignore the huge damages done to African Americans during the century of near-slavery during Jim Crow segregation. Millions alive today suffered severe losses under Jim Crow and can actually name who did much of that discrimination and unjust impoverishing. The current worth of all black labor stolen by whites through the means of slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination (plus interest) is estimated by some economists in the range of $6 to $24 trillion. And this figure doesn’t include compensation for great physical and mental suffering and millions of untimely deaths.



http://time.com/132034/a-legal-and-moral-basis-for-reparations/


There is a firm constitutional foundation for reparations in the Takings ClauseAlfred L. Brophy. Professor at University of Dayton. June 2011. Slavery Developing Legal Strategies to Advance Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara39.htm

Frank Michelman has argued that the Takings Clause offers a way to adjust transactions that increase societal wealth but decrease the wealth of particular parties, creating transactions that benefit all parties. He argues that takings should be evaluated under a utility or a fairness analysis, both of which support compensation for slavery. a. Fairness Compensation for the involuntary transfer of property is appropriate if redistribution is unfair. Michelman suggests that compensation is required to achieve fairness under certain circumstances, including ones in which one party suffers an unusually great harm. This analysis dictates that compensation is appropriate where a societal taking has unequally impaired liberties, where harm is disproportionately focused on certain individuals or where "visible reciprocities of burden and benefit" are not present. Slavery meets each of these compensable alternatives. The taking of the slaves' property interest in their self-ownership concentrated harm (loss of identity, decision-making power, lack of physical mobility) on certain individuals (African-Americans) with no reciprocity (uncompensated labor). The benefits accrued affected only one group (the slave owner and arguably, Whites generally), while the other suffered immense harms. The result has been long term inequities, including the impairment of liberties with respect to education, property ownership, and employment opportunities. The fairness analysis therefore provides a takings claim for slavery. b. Utility Under Michelman's utilitarian analysis, compensation is appropriate where the negative effect of an action is greater than the cost of compensation. Michelman argues that it is just to compensate victims because the risk of exploitation by the majority creates a greater disincentive for minority parties to contribute to society. This compensation is due where societal actions cause disproportionate burdens to fall on particular parties, where actions tend to channel benefits and burdens to different groups, and where there has been capricious behavior on the part of the majority. Slaves, in the sense that they were a powerless minority, had their self-ownership confiscated by the exploitive majority. This confiscation of property caused a disproportionate burden to fall on this particular group of people. Once confiscated, this property created benefits to one group, the slave traders and slave owners, while harming another group. The fact that the slaves were grouped together and identified as aninferior race is evidence of the majority's capricious behavior. The utilitarian analysis, like the fairness analysis, also provides for takings compensation for slavery.



http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara39.htm


Reparations for contemporary crimes against blacks provides a template for increased paymentsKirsten West Savali. Writer at the Root. May 8, 2015. Chicago’s Reparations for Police Torture Victims Offer a Glimpse of the Power of #BlackLivesMatter. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/05/chicago_s_reparations_to_black_victims_of_police_torture_offer_a_glimpse.1.html

In an unprecedented move, Chicago’s City Council unanimously passed a reparations package (pdf) on Wednesday that includes a $5.5 million fund for African Americans who were tortured in police custody under the misleadership of former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge. Between the years 1972 and 1991, an estimated 120 black men were brutalized. According to Amnesty International, they endured “electric shocks to the genitals and other body parts, suffocation, mock executions and beatings—all of which often accompanied by racial slurs, hurled by all white detectives.” In addition to a formal apology, each person eligible for reparations could receive up to $100,000 in compensation, as well as counseling services to deal with the post-traumatic stress that their abuse left behind. Some of the men were in attendance at the council meeting, and as their names were called, they and their families stood to a standing ovation. While a round of applause for surviving state-sanctioned torture is not progress by any definition of the word, accolades and money aren’t the extent of the reparations ordinance. Chicago public schools will also be required to incorporate the police-brutality cases into history classes, survivors will be offered free enrollment at Chicago city colleges, and a public monument will be created for the survivors. The whitewashing of U.S. history and disparities in educational opportunities have played huge roles in sustaining white supremacy and pathologizing African-American communities. The announcement from Chicago comes on the heels of Newark, N.J., Mayor Ras Baraka’s announcement of the creation of the city’s first-ever citizen complaint review board, an 11-member panel that will oversee a police department known for brutalizing citizens and violating their constitutional rights. This reparations ordinance is a solid step toward rectifying that. The voices of the marginalized have been heard despite blatant efforts to silence them and soften messages written in despair and rage that span generations.




Tort liability provides a basis for reparationsAlfred L. Brophy. Professor at University of Dayton. June 2012. Slavery Segregation and Reparation. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29c.htm

Corporations, which are really a collection of individual shareholders, are liable for the acts of their employees. In cases of environmental pollution, companies (meaning their shareholders) are frequently held liable for decades following the pollution. For example, in 1994, Mobile Oil Company was held liable for polluting the waters of the little town of Cyril, Oklahoma, as early as the 1940s. It is likely that none of Mobile's shareholders had any direct culpability for the actions of the company's officers who decided to pollute in the 1940s. Yet the shareholders had to pay. Corporate liability is premised on the idea that shareholders, even those who had no direct influence on the decisions, have to pay. In the United States, culpability attaches even without fault in many instances. It is natural to expect that corporations, or government bodies, will have liability for the decisions they made, sometimes decades ago. Reparationists have two responses. First, that governmental bodies, like corporations, have a continuing existence. Governments are liable for the judgments issued against them and, unfortunately, they have to satisfy those judgments using taxpayer money. The new immigrants take their new government subject to the liability existing at the time. We all take America with the good and the bad at the same time. There are a lot of opportunities here; there are also some disadvantages. Reparationists' second response is more general. It denies that the people who are claiming innocence actually are innocent. As Professor Ogletree has recently phrased it, "while black folks were sitting at the back of the bus; generations of white immigrants got to go straight to the front." It is debatable how much privilege some immigrants, particularly those from southern Europe, Asia, and the Spanish Americas, received. But the point is important and worthy of significantly more study. For if currently living whites are the beneficiaries of past discrimination against blacks, then the claims of innocence are harder to make convincingly.



http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29c.htm


Answer to debt has been paid

Investing in schools and affirmative action are window dressing—direct economic empowerment is key to reverse disparitiesTressie McMillan Cottom. Writer at Washington Post. May 29, 2014. No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are. Accessed August 15, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/no-college-isnt-the-answer-reparations-are/

No matter what black college grads do, as a group they are the most sensitive to every negative macro labor market trend. (The report has comparative data.) They are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and hold low quality jobs even when they have STEM degrees. I point out that last bit because apparently STEM will save us all or something. How can I revere education as I do and refuse to accept it as the gospel that will save us from persistent, intractable inequality?Actually, it is precisely because I revere education—formal and informal—that I refuse to sell it as a cure for all that ails us.Degrees cannot fix the cumulative effect of structural racism. In fact, over five decades of social science research shows that education reproduces inequality. At every level of schooling, classrooms, schools, and districts reward wealth and privilege. That does not end at college admissions, which is when all that cumulative disadvantage may be its most acute. Going to college not only requires know how that changes from institution to institution and year to year, but it also requires capital. There’s the money to take standardized tests and mail applications and make tuition deposits. But there’s also the money that levels differences in individual ability. An unimpressive wealthy student can pay for test prep, admissions coaches, and campus visits that increases one’s shot at going to the most selective college possible. If education reinforces the salience of money to opportunity, it is money and only money that can make educational “opportunity” a vehicle for justice. Reparations can do what education cannot do. When we allow education to be sold as a fix for wealth inequality, we set a public good up to fail and black folks who do everything “right” to take the blame when it goes “wrong.”




Answer to no recent victims

Reparations to descendants of victims can be effective Eric Williams. Professor at University of Massachusetts. June 2012. Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz by Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.umass.edu/afroam/hor.html

Most Americans today were not alive during World War II. Yet reparations to Japanese Americans for their internment in concentration camps during the war was paid out of current government sources contributed to by contemporary Americans. Passage of time does not negate the responsibility of government in crimes against humanity. Similarly, German corporations are not the "same" corporations that supported the Holocaust; their personnel and policies today belong to generations removed from their earlier criminal behavior. Yet, these corporations are being successfully sued by Jews for their past actions. In the same vein, the U.S. government is not the same government as it was in the pre-civil war era, yet its debts and obligations from the past are no less relevant today. 5. The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury As noted in our response to "Reason 4," the historical precedents for the reparations claims of African Americans are fully consistent with restitution accorded other historical groups for atrocities committed against them. Second, the injury in question--that of slavery--was inflicted upon a people designated as a race. The descendants of that people--still socially constructed as a race today--continue to suffer the institutional legacies of slavery some one hundred thirty-five years after its demise. To attempt to separate the issue of so-called race from that of injury in this instance is pure sophistry. For example, the criminal (in)justice system today largely continues to operate as it did under slavery--for the protection of white citizens against black "outsiders." Although no longer inscribed in law, this very attitude is implicit to processes of law enforcement, prosecution, and incarceration, guiding the behavior of police, prosecutors, judges, juries, wardens, and parole boards. Hence, African Americans continue to experience higher rates of incarceration than do whites charged with similar crimes, endure longer sentences for the same classes of crimes perpetrated by whites, and, compared to white inmates, receive far less consideration by parole boards when being considered for release. Slavery was an institution sanctioned by the highest laws of the land with a degree of support from the Constitution itself.



http://www.umass.edu/afroam/hor.html


Answer to African-American privilege

African-Americans shouldn’t be compared to international blacks but to European immigrants—the disadvantage is clearJamelle Bouie. Writer at Slate. May 2014. Reparations are owed. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/reparations_should_be_paid_to_black_americans_here_is_how_america_should.html

One of the great principles of American law is the equal protection principle, which requires that similarly situated people be treated alike. Have people who are making reparations claims been treated differently and worse than others? If there has been unequal treatment, then that may be a separate basis for reparations. The issue ought not to be how people would be living if their ancestors had not been brought to the United States or freely immigrated but how they are treated relative to other people here. While David Horowitz is fond of pointing out that the average annual income of residents in Benin is less than one thousand dollars, that has little relevance to how people are treated in the United States. Life is better than it would be in another country, but the relevant comparison group is other citizens of the United States. The fact that voting rights are denied to serfs in Russia does not mean that people of Russian descent in the United States are not entitled to vote, or do not have a claim if they are denied the right to vote. There are other ways of paying the debt, though, besides cash payments. Part of the argument that reparations have been paid is the assertion that the Civil War paid that debt. Lincoln scholars are particularly active in advancing the argument that the Civil War was part of abolishing the debt to African Americans. David Horowitz' formulation is that white Christians began the antislavery movement, which ended more than two millennia of slavery. That interpretation leaves a great deal out of the historical record, of course. The Christian nations of Western Europe and North America contributed to the market for slaves; they provided an incentive for African nations to enslave Africans and then those western countries participated in "one of the greatest crimes in history." To credit the United States with abolishing slavery does not quite wipe the slate clean. For there would have been no need for abolition of slavery in the United States unless it had been imposed by law here. Even if we say that the United States fought a war to free slaves, which only begins to describe the process of the Civil War, we cannot ignore the reasons why that war was necessary.




Services reparations are needed

Reparations are needed for health disparitiesVernellia R. Randall. Professor at University of Dayton. November 2007. Using Reparations to Repair Black Health. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/health/01status/status07.htm

But a livable wage is not enough also needed is the elimination of racism. Racism in American society effects socio-economic status, education, health care, employment, . . everything. One place that is particularly important for health is the location of environmental hazards and toxic dumps in Black communities, the workplace hazards and the hazards in the home. Studies have documented that hazardous waste landfills are disproportionately placed in African American communities while poor communities are not disparately burdened. In fact, studies have concluded that race more than poverty, land values, or home ownership is a predictor as to the location of hazardous facilities. Race is independent of class in the distribution of air pollution, contaminated fish consumption, location of municipal landfills and incinerators, abandoned toxic waste dumps, cleanup of superfund sites, lead poisoning in children, and asthma.

African-Americans are uniquely exposed to harms that could be reduced with reparationsVernellia R. Randall. Professor at University of Dayton. November 2007. Using Reparations to Repair Black Health. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/health/01status/status07.htm

In addition, African Americans are disproportionately represented in jobs with the highest environmental hazards, such as fast food and pesticide-intensive farm labor, rubber making, coke production, battery manufacturing, lead plating and smelting, and industrial laundering. . African-American men have a 27% greater chance than white men of facing safety hazards and a 60% greater chance of facing health hazards in the workplace. In fact, even when you control for the level of job training and education, African-Americans find themselves in substantially more dangerous occupations than whites. Finally, for African American children, lead poisoning in the home is a significant health issue. The blood lead levels in urban African-American children under the age of five significantly exceed the levels found in white children of the same age living in the same cities. This disparity persisted across income levels. Thus, for families with incomes less than $6000, 68% of black children compared to 36% of white children had unsafe blood levels. In families earning more than $15,000, 38% of black children and 12% of white children had excess levels of lead. Given the above, reparations could be used to remove toxic dumps and landfills from African American communities or completely relocate the communities to safe environment; to make workplace safer and to eliminate lead paint from housing. Such actions will have a significant effect in removing the health deficit.




Reparations could be used to build health facilities in black neighborhoodsVernellia R. Randall. Professor at University of Dayton. November 2007. Using Reparations to Repair Black Health. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/health/01status/status07.htm

If African-Americans fail to seek early health care, they are more likely to be sicker when they do enter the system; and the cost for the patient to receive service and for the system to provide services at that point is likely to be greater than at an earlier state. Therefore, not only does the loss of services significantly increase health care costs to African-Americans, but also, it increases health care costs to the society in general. Another devastating trend that affects the access of African-Americans to health care is the privatization of public hospitals. Quite a few hospitals (public and non-profit) have elected to restructure as private, for-profit corporations. As public hospitals, many were obligated to provide uncompensated care under the Hill-Burton Act. As private hospitals, these institutions are most likely to discontinue providing general health services to the indigent populations, and essential primary health care services to serve African-American communities. The problem of limited resources is not new and has plagued the African-American community since slavery. Historically, African-American communities attempted to address the problem by establishing African-American hospitals. At one point more than 200 hospitals were located in predominately black communities. African-Americans relied on these institutions to "heal and save their lives." Now, these institutions are almost non-existent. By the 1960s, only 90 African-American hospitals remained. Between 1961 and 1988, 57 African- American hospitals closed and 14 others either merged, converted or consolidated. By 1991, only 12 hospitals continued to "struggle daily just to keep their doors open". As a result of closures, relocations, and privatization, many African-Americans are left with limited, and difficult access to hospitals. Thus, reparations would provide for hospitals, clinics, alcohol and Drug Detox centers, dental health clinics and mental health clinics in the African American community.




Con




Contention 1—Logistics

Determining who gets paid will require a form of antiquated racial categorizationFoundation for Economic Education. June 30, 2010. What’s Wrong with Reparations for Slavery. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://fee.org/freeman/whats-wrong-with-reparations-for-slavery/

If the proponents of reparations take to the courts, it will be interesting to see their principle for determining who is entitled to what. For many reasons that will be a Herculean task. Because of centuries of migration, conquests, and intermixing, racial purity is more of a social construct than a biological fact. Intermarriage between whites and blacks in America over the past two centuries has produced a large population of individuals who defy the stark dichotomy. Racially mixed populations in other parts of the world, such as in Latin America, have created classifications to describe themselves based on racial portions as small as an eighth. However, the practice of racial classification has evolved differently in the United States. In an effort to deny inheritance rights to illegitimate progeny born by slave women, racist plantation owners in the antebellum South created the dreaded “one-drop rule” to discourage the courts from calling their miscegenational offspring anything but Negro. The nomenclature of this racist practice has survived to this day and is embraced by both blacks and whites, who for the most part are unaware of its discriminatory beginnings. Consider how Vanessa Williams and Colin Powell are labeled black despite their interracial heritage. With so much racial intermixture, will those who dole out the potential reparations demand certificates of racial purity? The thought is preposterous.




Some African-American subgroups are privileged over other minoritiesJohn Hawkins. Writer at Town Hall. July 26, 2014. Reasons Reparations For Slavery Are A Bad Idea. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/07/26/5-reasons-reparations-for-slavery-are-a-bad-idea-n1867139/page/full

On the other hand, if you fast forward to today, it’s extraordinarily difficult to show that anybody’s problems were caused by something that happened almost 150 years ago. Keep in mind that there were white indentured servants forced to work alongside slaves back then. There were white Americans who were kidnapped and enslaved by the Barbary pirates. There were Japanese and Italian Americans who were forced into internment camps during WWII and many of them actually had their property confiscated and sold. The relatives of many Jewish Holocaust survivors live in America as well. So while black Americans have been treated worse than any other group in America, there are a lot of other groups that have seemingly bounced back with little damage from how they’ve been treated in the past. Additionally, while black Americans are indisputably doing worse than most other groups in America, there are certain subsets of African-Americans that are doing just fine. For example, black female college graduates make 102% of what white female college graduates earn. African immigrants also outperform black Americans who were born here in a number of ways. A new paper (pdf) from University of Chicago PhD candidate Alison Rauh finds that black immigrants tend to be more successful than black Americans. They out-earn black natives (after accounting for age) and are more likely to be employed. This is not surprising; white immigrant groups outperform their native cohort too. But what’s most intriguing is how their children fare. The children of black immigrants are more likely to go to and complete college than native blacks (and whites) and are less likely to drop out of high school. The children of black immigrants also earn more than native blacks or first generation immigrants. If there are certain subsets of black Americans who are doing well, that suggests that there is no one universal factor like slavery that can be blamed for the difficulties black Americans face.

Assigning responsibility and injury will be impossibleAllan D. Cooper. Professor at Otterbein University. 2012. From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse. Journal of Black Studies 43(2). Accessed August 15, 2015. p. 110.

To reiterate, reparations have been justified because slavery constituted an exploitative theft of the value of African American workers. The descendants of these slaves have been denied the inheritance that the current generation of White Americans has enjoyed from their respective ancestors. Be that as it may, U.S. courts have consistently ruled that the descendants of slaves have yet to demonstrate “standing” (they have not demonstrated that the defendants personally injured them) and that these descendants have taken too long to file their claims. Opponents to reparations have a legitimate case when they assert that (a) there is no single group responsible for the crime of slavery; (b) there is no single group that benefitted exclusively from slavery; (c) only a minority of White Americans owned slaves, whereas others gave their lives to free them; (d) most living Americans have no connection (direct or indirect) to slavery; (e) the historical precedents used to justify the reparations claim do not apply, and the claim itself is based on race not injury; and (f) the reparations argument is based on the unsubstantiated claim that all African Americans suffer from the economic consequences of slavery (Horowitz, 2002, pp. 12-15). In short, the economic basis of the reparations claim is highly problematic and has failed to earn the minimum standard for standing in the American judicial system.



http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/07/26/5-reasons-reparations-for-slavery-are-a-bad-idea-n1867139/page/full



Contention 2—Black Economies

Reparations won’t be effectively invested for a lasting impactKyle Smith. Writer at Forbes. June 19, 2014. Why Reparations Wouldn’t Work. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2014/06/19/why-reparations-wouldnt-work/

Investing preferences would also play a major role in the capital accumulation that might follow reparations payments. A 1999 paper by economists Yaw A. Badua, Kenneth N. Daniels and Daniel P. Salandro found that black investors are more risk-averse and focused on safety than white investors, and perhaps consequently place a higher percentage of their assets in property than do whites. They predicted that these preferences would cause an increase in the wealth gap between whites and blacks. So it has come to pass. In 1990, median household net worth among black Americans was about $4,418 — one-tenth of the same figure for whites. Two decades later, that figure had reached only $4,955. Yet among white households, median net worth skyrocketed from $45,740 to $110,729 in the same period. Black America missed out almost entirely on the massive stock market boom of the past quarter-century. “If particular population subgroups tend to be more risk averse in their asset and liability choices, their long-term wealth will be expected to be less than households who choose to be less risk averse,” wrote the economists. “For instance, households that preclude stocks from their portfolio will undoubtedly have less wealth over the long run, because the long term return on common stock investments are higher than the long term return on less volatile investment opportunities.”

Reparations might affect the flow of other assistance programs which have a more sustainable impactNoah Millman. Writer at American Conservative Magazine. June 8, 2014. Reparations Could Widen, Rather Than Heal, Racial Rifts. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/06/08/are-reparations-due-to-african-americans/reparations-could-widen-rather-than-heal-racial-rifts

Reparations for slavery are often analogized to reparations for the Holocaust – and prima facie the comparison is quite strong. But Holocaust reparations were negotiated between two distinct political communities, West Germany and the State of Israel. Reparations for slavery would, by contrast, be paid by the United States government to the individual descendants of former slaves. The formal distinction between citizens that reparations would require would inevitably clash with the ultimate political goal of the movement: political reconciliation based on a shared understanding of history. The push for reparations might stiffen opposition to programs designed to address disparities and become the basis for further conflict. This is the most serious problem with the reparations movement. The practical objections, by contrast, are more readily addressed. It is true that establishing the liability of specific individuals or institutions is impossible at this late date; that’s one reason why lawsuits related to the harms of slavery have not fared well at trial. But slavery could not have persisted without state protection, and nothing prevents the federal government from simply assuming the liability for the institution as a whole. A proper accounting of the cost of slavery could run into the tens of trillions of dollars, but so does the value of federal assets like mineral and energy rights. If reparations were structured as ownership of a securitized pool of these assets, financing would not prove an insurmountable challenge.




Determining payments by racial category rather than examining all factors of marginalization will only worsen inequalityJonathan Blanks. Writer at Rare US. July 19, 2014. America owes black people more than it has given—but reparations aren’t the answer. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://rare.us/story/america-owes-black-people-more-than-it-has-given-but-reparations-arent-the-answer/

While reparations are about injustice and atonement, any program aimed at black America ought to look to ameliorate the problems currently faced by black folks—particularly the most marginalized. That means, inter alia, fixing a system in which blacks have a harder time finding work and continue to live in fear of the police. There is a very real danger that any reparative program would disproportionately benefit those of us who, while not far removed from slavery, have made it to the middle class (or higher) while further marginalizing those who have suffered the most over the years. To wit, if the widespread socio-political mobilization Coates has supported in subsequent interviews is to be most effective in combating today’s societal ills, it would best be aimed not at remuneration for black folks, but for correcting the ills that currently afflict them. Indeed, if the solution to cyclical poverty were simply a matter of an infusion of cash, the government should just give $100,000 to every person under a certain income level and destroy (or, at least, reset) the social safety net regardless of race or history. But I sincerely doubt the problems attendant to cyclical poverty would be solved by such an infusion and thus I find reparations an inadequate approach to dealing with American racism, let alone the related but broader problem of poverty. This, I think, is where I depart most sharply from Coates. One of the problems with any top-down social program is the unintended consequences on the margins. Whether intentionally or not, policies with the best intentions may exacerbate some of the very problems they mean to address. Take, for example, the recent proposed minimum wage increase. The proposal, according to the CBO, would raise many wages not only for minimum wage earners, but many already making above the minimum who would likely see a pay raise. However, this benefit for several millions comes at the estimated permanent job loss of 500,000 positions.




Reparations aren’t owed

African-Americans are privileged over all other black peopleFoundation for Economic Education. June 30, 2010. What’s Wrong with Reparations for Slavery. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://fee.org/freeman/whats-wrong-with-reparations-for-slavery/

Part of the problem is the perception that “black” and “poor” are synonymous. In the 1960s it was politically expedient to associate the state of being poor, uneducated, and oppressed with being black. The civil rights establishment found this association rhetorically necessary to focus public attention on the plight of southern blacks and to engage the emotions of the white majority against overt southern racism. However, this political strategy had an unexpected impact on the emerging black middle class. According to the black-equals poor logic, when the black middle class achieved more opportunity and became more educated and affluent, it essentially became less “black.” This perhaps explains the black establishment’s attitude toward Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Essentially, black identity was hijacked and frozen during the 1960s. Is there a legacy from slavery that has hindered the economic progress of blacks today? Let’s consider the numbers. Major marketers have long constructed a black “gross national product” (GNP) from government statistics to gauge the financial power of black Americans. This is actually a misnomer since it tries to measure the total products and services consumed, not produced, by the black community. This statistic is often cited by black political leaders to persuade corporate America to produce more goods suited to the preferences of blacks. It turns out that if black Americans constituted their own country, they would have the 11th largest economy in the world. In addition to being a wealthy demographic group (richer than 90 percent of the people in the world), blacks in America have a longer life expectancy than African and Caribbean blacks, as well as whites in many parts of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Black Americans have higher rates of literacy and achieve more postsecondary degrees as a percentage of the population than blacks in Africa. Black Americans’ upward mobility from Reconstruction to the present is a testament to their creativity and ability to adapt. Reparations are not only unnecessary as a financial corrective, but they would also be an insult to the multitudes of successful black Americans who lifted themselves out of poverty before and after the civil rights movement.




Failing to account for black privilege represents a binary approach racial identityKevin D Williamson. Writer at National Review. May 24, 2014. The Case against Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/378737/case-against-reparations-kevin-d-williamson

But dealing with that reality inescapably entails treating people as individuals, and treating people as individuals makes reparations morally and intellectually impossible — even if we accept in toto Mr. Coates’s argument that the brutal imposition of white-supremacist policies is the entire basis for the relative social positions of blacks and whites in the United States in 2014. Which is to say: Even if we accept the facts of aggregate advantage and disadvantage with their roots in historical injustice, the aggregate cannot be converted into the collective inasmuch as neither advantage nor disadvantage is universal on either side nor linked to a straightforward chain of causality. Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not. Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress.

American whites already paid a heavy price in the civil warDaniel J Berger. Professor at Louisiana State University. 2014. Reparations for Slavery: They have already been paid. Accessed August 15, 2015. https://www.bluffton.edu/~bergerd/essays/reparations.html

About 11% of the total population (counting men, women and children) of the 1860 United States was in military service for some portion of the war; from the Confederate States considered separately, about 13% of the total population was enrolled. Of those enrolled in military service, the vast majority were White and all were male. (3) Of the (overwhelmingly White) men enrolled in military units, Union and Confederate, 14% died of their wounds or of disease; another 11% were wounded but survived. (4) In Confederate units, deaths approached 19% of the men enrolled, an order of magnitude higher than the death rate in any other American war. This amounted to an aggregate 550,000 dead and more than 400,000 wounded from military units alone. Civilian casualties are unknown, but were certainly very much lighter than in 20th-Century wars. Nevertheless, it is worth repeating that more Americans died in the Civil War than in all other wars the United States has fought, combined. Even if one leaves Confederates out of the total, the number of U.S. soldiers who died closely approaches the total of U.S. deaths in the Second World War--out of a population 1/6 as large. The monetary cost of the Civil War, North and South, is estimated at $44.4 billion in 1990 dollars. This breaks down to Union costs of more than $1000 (1990 dollars) for every man, woman and child in the Union; and Confederate costs of well over $2000 for every man, woman and child in the Confederacy. This is only the direct, billed cost of military pay and supplies, excluding veterans' pensions which typically add a threefold increase. Nor does it include the many millions (in 1864 dollars) of damage done to the infrastructure of the Confederacy--and of Union border states--during the war; each million amounts to about $9 million in 1990 dollars. We could conservatively estimate that the total monetary cost of the Civil War was on the order of $200-500 billion in 1990 dollars, and perhaps as high as one or two trillion dollars.



https://www.bluffton.edu/~bergerd/essays/reparations.html

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/378737/case-against-reparations-kevin-d-williamson



Reparations won’t make up for slavery

Making white people pay generalizes participation in slavery—very few profitedJohn Hawkins. Writer at Town Hall. July 26, 2014. Reasons Reparations For Slavery Are A Bad Idea. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/07/26/5-reasons-reparations-for-slavery-are-a-bad-idea-n1867139/page/full

The Civil War ended in 1865; so all the slaves and slave masters are all long dead. Moreover, even in the South, depending on which numbers you believe, somewhere between 80-95% of white Americans never owned slaves. There were also several thousand BLACK AMERICANS who owned slaves -- yes, really. Certainly they would be more responsible for slavery than a white man who didn't own slaves, right? Getting beyond the South, why would a white northerner from a state that didn't have slaves owe "reparations" for slavery? For example, what wrong would a Republican abolitionist -- who hated slavery, voted for Abe Lincoln, and fought in the Civil War -- have done that would require "reparations?" We don't hold people responsible for what their ancestors did and even if we did, most white Americans, even in the South, didn't own slaves. So 149 years after the Civil War ended, there simply is no way to hold the people responsible for slavery accountable for what they did. Victimizing people who did nothing wrong today to make up for a wrong that was done 150 years ago wouldn't make anything right.

The impact of slavery specifically disappeared long agoPeter Flaherty and John Carlisle. Researchers at National Legal and Policy Center. 2013. The Case Against Slave Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://nlpc.org/sites/default/files/Reparationsbook.pdf

Sacerdote finds that the economic disparities between the descendants of former slaves and the descendants of free blacks (pre- 1865) largely disappeared within just two generations following emancipation. Thus, the injustices visited upon one generation seem to have little if any harmful effect on that generation’s grandsons and granddaughters. “The rich existing literature on social mobility and income mobility would suggest that such convergence (i.e. recovery from slavery) may take place rather rapidly,” writes Sacerdote.68 Sacerdote studied the matter by comparing outcomes for former slaves and their children and grandchildren, to outcomes for free blacks and their children and grandchildren. The study takes into account literacy, schooling status, occupation and socioeconomic status. Sacerdote used census data from 1880 and 1920, grouping people into three generations to examine outcomes for those born before 1865 and their children and grandchildren. He found that in 1880 there was a huge literacy gap between former slaves and free-born blacks, but that the gap narrowed considerably over the next two generations. In a similar vein, children of former slaves were less likely to be enrolled in school than children of free blacks in 1880, but by 1920 the gap largely disappeared among grandchildren of blacks born into slavery and the grandchildren of free-born blacks. Grandchildren of slaves were 6 percent less likely to be enrolled in school than grandchildren of free blacks, but this effect goes away completely after controlling for region. Regarding income, former slaves—not surprisingly—worked in occupations with lower median income than those of blacks born free. But between 1880 and 1920, the income gap had substantially narrowed. The literacy gap between blacks and whites also substantially narrowed from the first generation of children born after the Civil War to the next generation. By 1920, the effect of slavery status on literacy disappears completely.



http://nlpc.org/sites/default/files/Reparationsbook.pdf




Reparations won’t help black economies

The distinction between poverty and racism proves that monetary payments are ill-suited Kevin D Williamson. Writer at National Review. May 24, 2014. The Case against Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/378737/case-against-reparations-kevin-d-williamson

If the enduring disparities in economic outcomes were the only concern, or even the main concern, at issue here, then our policy menu would be relatively straightforward. Blacks are disproportionately poor, and policies that encourage economic growth and robust employment, which is the only meaningful long-term anti-poverty program, should benefit blacks with roughly the same disproportion. Indeed, that has been the case for some periods in the past: Black households saw stronger income growth than did white households during the Reagan boom, and from 1990 to 2000, Census figures report aggregate growth in the black median household almost twice that of white households, 23 percent in constant dollars for blacks vs. 12 percent for whites. Had those trends continued, the racial difference in median income would have been wiped out in about 40 years. But if there were a policy or a set of policies that could be enacted guaranteeing the economic growth of that unusual decade, then they already would have been made permanent. The path from policy to outcome is a crooked one. It is true, as Mr. Coates argues, citing Lyndon Johnson, that “Negro poverty is not white poverty,” at least as measured by many critical metrics — concentration, mobility, various life outcomes controlled for income, etc.

Direct cash payments fail—welfare provesJohn Hawkins. Writer at Town Hall. July 26, 2014. Reasons Reparations For Slavery Are A Bad Idea. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/07/26/5-reasons-reparations-for-slavery-are-a-bad-idea-n1867139/page/full

Just giving people money seldom helps to fix their problem. That’s why America’s “war on poverty” has been an utter and complete failure. After doling out more than 21 trillion dollars over the last 50 years, we’ve done nothing to reduce the poverty rate. Shortly after the War on Poverty got rolling (1967), about 27% of Americans lived in poverty. In 2012, the last year for which data is available, the number was about 29%.’ In fact, it’s entirely possible that the poverty rate would be LOWER today if there had never been a “war on poverty.” You can see this same dynamic with aid to Africa. After handing out more than a trillion dollars, much of the continent has gone BACKWARDS over the last 10-15 years. Even winning the lottery doesn’t tend to make a generational impact. A paper by economists Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph Ferrie traced the results of the Georgia land lottery down the generations. They found that, “one generation after the distribution of the Georgia land, sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren.”

Lottery-style payments, the predominate suggested plan, will not have a sustainable economic impactKyle Smith. Writer at Forbes. June 19, 2014. Why Reparations Wouldn’t Work. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2014/06/19/why-reparations-wouldnt-work/

The reparations plans that have been suggested, however, would work a lot like lotteries. Coates suggests a large lump sum distributed to a single generation over a period of “a decade or two.” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie suggests either a cash boost for existing government social-welfare and infrastructure projects (which might sound too indirect to count as reparations, at least to the average American) or “baby bonds” which black








Americans, who have been given low-yield government-guaranteed savings funds at birth, would be able to cash in for perhaps a $60,000 lump sum at age 18. Both of these ideas sound like lotteries. What happens to lottery winners? Do they and their descendants go on to a permanently higher socioeconomic bracket? A survey of Florida lottery winners shows that this group is twice as likely to go bankrupt as others. The primary difference between winners of large sums and those who won smaller prizes is that the winners of large sums isn’t in bankruptcy rates but in timing: big winners took a bit longer to go bust. Lottery winners (contrary to myth) are actually older and more affluent than the typical American, but The Wall Street Journal summarized the research as follows: “Sudden wealth only exaggerates your current situation. If you’re unhappy, bad with money and surrounded by people you don’t trust, money will make those problems worse. If you’re fulfilled, careful with money and enjoy a life of strong relationships, the lottery could make those strengths better.” Economists often cite the study of the Georgia land lottery of 1832, in which hugely valuable parcels of land were distributed randomly. What happened to the descendants of these fortunate few? Are they the richest families in Georgia? No. A paper by economists Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph Ferrie traced the results of the Georgia land lottery down the generations. They found that, “one generation after the distribution of the Georgia land, sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren.” Bleakley believed that a large sum of literal capital was, across generations, less relevant than human capital in the building of wealth: “We see a really huge change in the wealth of the individuals, but we don’t see any difference in human capital,” he noted. “We don’t see that the children are going to school more.”




Most impoverished people mismanage money when they get a large cash influx Noah Millman. Writer at American Conservative Magazine. June 8, 2014. Reparations Could Widen, Rather Than Heal, Racial Rifts. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/06/08/are-reparations-due-to-african-americans/reparations-could-widen-rather-than-heal-racial-rifts

In the first place, cash reparations in the form of a single windfall payment could be disastrous for some. Whether the payment is modest—say, $10,000 per black adult—or much larger, the potential for waste, fraud, and victimization is extraordinarily high. Look no further than the world of professional athletics: as record breaking contracts continue to get headlines in sports media, more former athletes than not are flat broke two to five years after retirement. Rock stars, lottery winners, and other instant entrants into the so-called One Percent—irrespective of class and race—mismanage their money and find themselves broke in a short amount of time. Many of the most disadvantaged black folks could be busted after a temporary boom, and still without the jobs or skills that could lead to greater long-term prosperity. It’s not enough to wonder whether moving heaven and earth to get a payment would be “worth it.” Rather, advocates should consider whether or not such a payment by itself could ultimately do more harm to the intended beneficiaries. Reparations as smaller annuity or monthly payments presumably would be less likely to create the windfall problems, though certainly poor investment decisions—such as trading rights to those payments in exchange for a lump sum from a third party—would likely occur. However, payments such as these may, without change to older law, disrupt public assistance outlays or perhaps housing for the neediest black Americans. Such payments would unlikely be enough to live on by themselves, thus trading welfare for reparation payments is unlikely to substantively improve life for those whose life could be most improved by additional income.

Focus on race ignores the historical underpinnings of capital – examining class division must precede examining racismByron Ofari. President of Cal State Black Student Union and Writer at Black Liberation. 2014. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://archive.lib.msu.edu/AFS/dmc/radicalism/public/all/blackliberation/AAN.html

Revolutionary nationalism, both in theory and practice, is a far reaching variant on the traditional concept of black nationalism. Revolutionary nationalist, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism. Generally speaking, cultural nationalists have a one-sided view of American society. The struggle for black liberation to them would be won if only white racism were eliminated. Such a view is absurd. Revolutionary nationalists have clearly seen that white racism is only a convenient tool used by the corporate power structure to divide the working masses in America while maximizing profits. Cultural nationalists also tend to identify only with the liberation struggles on the African continent rather than to see the need for a total world revolution.




There are too many issues to be covered in a single payment scheme—future movements may meet less supportJonathan Blanks. Writer at Rare US. July 19, 2014. America owes black people more than it has given—but reparations aren’t the answer. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://rare.us/story/america-owes-black-people-more-than-it-has-given-but-reparations-arent-the-answer/

I would argue that reparative payments would effectively signal that ‘The Debt’ America owed to its black citizens will have been paid and any further complaints or need of assistance will be met with contempt and rejected. Such a debt is moral in nature and thus should not be reduced to a financial sum to be haggled over. That amount will never be enough, and without systemic change, any payment may be detrimental to societal changes we need. Take police misconduct. Historical, anecdotal, and statistical evidence strongly suggest that blacks, particularly poor blacks, have and continue to disproportionately suffer from police brutality and aggressive (and often, illegal) tactics. In recent years, primarily through the drug war, these behaviors—once primarily limited to inner cities and black neighborhoods—have bled into white enclaves and onto college campuses. Given the statistical correlation between first contact with the court system and future socio-economic outcomes, particularly among people of color, a serious rethink of our current law enforcement regimes—from laws to funding to procedures governing police contact with the general public—is among the most pressing issues facing young black men in America today. To me, this is of far more pressing importance to American blacks than whether Coates and I each receive a check from the government for the past disadvantages inflicted upon our families. This isn’t about “white backlash”—it’s coalition building. Everyone should benefit from criminal justice reform. All people in poverty should benefit from economic reform. All children should benefit from education reform.




Reparations won’t be translated to sustainable economic successWilliam Darity, Bidisha Lahiri and Dania V Francis. Professor at University of Alabama. May 2010. Reparations for African-Americans as a Transfer Problem: A Cautionary Tale. Review of Development Economics. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/227376841_Reparations_for_African-Americans_as_a_Transfer_Problem_A_Cautionary_Tale

Second, and perhaps more important, this model provides a cautionary note towards the design of a reparations plan. If one believes that one important purpose of repa-rations is to bridge the income and/or wealth gap between blacks and nonblacks, then the way in which reparations are financed and carried out, as well as the economic conditions at the time of the payment, greatly affect success in achieving the goal. We have shown that if blacks do not have productive capacity in place prior to the repa-rations payment, there will be no ultimate effect on black income.We also have shown that reparations payment that either mandate or provide incentives for blacks to use the payment towards goods and services produced by nonblacks will increase the income of nonblacks while possibly decreasing the income of blacks. Both of these results run counter to the goal of closing the racial income gap. Black income will rise under a reparations program designed to induce blacks to spend largely on black commodities, while inducing nonblacks to finance the repara-tions payment primarily by reducing consumption of nonblack commodities. A reparations policy designed to improve the productive capacity of blacks also would increase the relative income of blacks but would impose a secondary burden or adverse terms-of-trade effect on blacks. Unless the latter effect is unusually large the net consequence of this type of program would be to close the gap. Thus, our paper uncovers some of the complexities of the effects of a reparations program and under-scores the importance of carefully considering the form reparations should take in order to achieve a narrowing of racial income or wealth disparities in America.




Reparations hurt race relations

Legal remedies will promote cultural blindness and academic elitismKimberly Wedeven Segall. Professor at Seattle Pacific University. 2002. Postcolonial Performatives of Victimization. Public Culture, 14(3). Accessed August 15, 2015. p. 617-8

Law complicates postcolonial identifications. As recent criticisms of the U.S. court system reveal, legal language and narratives, as cultural constructs, influence national history and constructions of identity. In postcolonial states, the globalization of legal systems closely follows the development of nation-states, international trading demands, and government transitions after civil war. The constitution of courts in postcolonial and postwar societies begets transitional amnesties, reparations, or silent amnesia, and public hearings and mandates inaugurate forums for testimony that have powerful effects on the way stories of the past will be reconstructed or obliterated. Indeed, these postcolonial legal narratives and identities set precedents for national identifications and bolster the central democratic state. The conventions of legal discourse and procedure also constrain subject narratives—through, for example, the imposition of time constraints, formalized qualifications for benefits, codified identifying language as deployed in legal mandates, and narrative formulas that require condensed beginnings and conclusions, not to mention the hermeneutics of audience expectation and media interpretation. To ignore the cultural invasion of legal forms and local adaptations to them—as exemplified in the operations of the postcolonial performative of victimization—thus courts the charge of a cultural blindness, an academic imperialism.

Reparations accentuate racial divisions and obscure contemporary problemsAlfred L. Brophy. Professor of Law at University of Alabama. Spring 2004. The Arguments Against Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29d.htm

But there are significant costs to reparations. They may tend to divide people along racial lines, for recalling past tragedies are, indeed, painful. Even more than recalling the past tragedies, however, reparations will require the government to draw further lines on the basis of race. For many reparationists see reparations not as a way of achieving integration and a color-blind society; they see it as a way of achieving further race-conscious action. Eric Yamamoto is one of the rare reparationists who takes seriously the disadvantages of reparations. He acknowledges the potential of reparations to lead to feelings of victimology and political backlash. Victimhood is not just a mind set, however. There are other problems with it. Reparations talk can be distracting. Reparations may cause people to focus on past injustice, at a time when the energy should be focused somewhere else.



http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29d.htm


Discourse over of racism is more significant—it would be curtailed by reparationsKimberly Wedeven Segall. Professor at Seattle Pacific University. 2002. Postcolonial Performatives of Victimization. Public Culture, 14(3). Accessed August 15, 2015. p. 617-8

The cursory narrative structures and victim identifications of a legal ritual such as that inaugurated in South Africa provide an overt way to speak of the tragedy of the past, often for the first time in public. Law thus structures a space for the marginalized to speak and augments acceptance for these tragic tales, breaking the silence often surrounding atrocity. However, these public spaces and processes, frequently marked by implicit performance and language demands, select for specific victim-acts. The complexity of postcolonial acts resides in temporality. While the term victim may capture the helpless psychological position of a subject during the moment of torture and terror, the second performance of identity under the structure of law enforces a continued victimization role. Public performers, Erving Goffman argues, must maintain a group identity for staking convincing claims, as in the case of reparation. This second “staging” of victimization resubjects the individual to feelings of helplessness, feelings that may only be altered in legal, local, or artistic settings if the subject is given the agency to perform complex roles—not just “victim,” in other words, but “fighter,” “survivor,” “healer,” “community member.” While law establishes a precedent of relating injury, artistic performances can trace unfinished traumatic hauntings, the ghostly memories not yet put to rest by the state-sponsored forum. Because of the paradoxical nature of trauma, which is virtually unspeakable because of the shocking nature of its originary event and which, when spoken, must be approached through continually changing and revised memory forms to avoid reentering shock, traumatic narratives challenge law’s desire for stasis and reflect both the influence of and resistance to postcolonial victim-acts. Trauma attains permanence, Mbembe argues, through embodied memory, as made evident in Africa’s fractured countries and wounded bodies. Yet cultural contestation over the interpretation of injury, and trauma itself, presents a site for possible resistance and change.




Reparations are so divisive that they could only be paid unwillingly, defeating any chance at reconciliationAlfred L. Brophy. Professor of Law at University of Alabama. Spring 2004. What's at Stake? Why Are Reparations Controversial? Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29d.htm

Reparations payments--even apologies--are deeply controversial. When the Mobile Register polled Alabama citizens on the issue of reparations in the summer of 2002, it found that the question of reparations was the most racially divisive issue since it began polling. (See Table 1.) The differences between whites and blacks outstripped even the gap seen during the civil rights struggle over integration. Why is it that only five percent of white Alabamians support reparations for slavery, while sixty-seven percent of black Alabamians support them? Why did some whites become so enraged at the mere suggestion of reparations that they could not complete the survey? Lest one think that Alabama is out-of-step with attitudes in the United States, that racial gap is fairly constant nationwide. According to a study by Harvard University and the University of Chicago that researchers reported in the spring of 2003, only four percent of whites support reparations payments. (See Table 2.) The opposition even to apologies, which are free from financial obligation, suggests that something very important is at stake--it is how we view ourselves and our place in the world. It is, in short, about what is known as the culture wars--a conflict between liberals and conservatives over how they view issues as diverse as abortion, religion's role in public life, affirmative action, and the United States's culpability for racism. Reparations touch on these issues in several places. Reparations relate to how we view the United States's history--is it a narrative of the United States as a place of opportunity or oppression? They also relate to how we view the legacy of slavery and what we should do about it now. Reparations are more controversial--that is, more people oppose them--than most issues in the culture war. There is some basic parity in many issues relating to the culture war. With reparations, at least judging by public opinion right now, there is little parity. Reparations are simply viewed with disdain by many. What else is it? It is a conflict that appears frequently when race enters political discussion--of fear of issues of group identity and group liability. So frequently, group members see themselves as being asked to pay more than their fair share. And group members think that they are receiving less than they deserve. Those sentiments are heightened when one deals with racial group identity.





Reparations will complicate race relations and prevent collective action to help the most disadvantaged Alfred L. Brophy. Professor of Law at University of Alabama. Spring 2004. The Cultural War over Reparations for Slavery , 53 DePaul Law Review. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29d.htm

Reparations may also lead to an increased division in society. At a time when many people think we ought to be moving in the direction of a colorblind society, reparations talk makes that difficult. Or at least it raises the prospect of continued focus on race. At the same time, two groups of commentators, reparationists and some conservatives, see reparations as a way of ending the significance of race. For reparationists like Rhonda Magee-Andrews, the author of one of the most important articles ever written on reparations, the prospects of reparations offer the hope of someday, perhaps someday soon, ending the legal significance of race. We may be able to get to the point at which the damage has been repaired. Then, as Magee-Andrews argues in a recent pathbreaking article, "The Third Reconstruction," maybe then we can move on to a focus on helping those in the community who need help the most. The central element of attention will be need. There are also conservatives, with whom Magee-Andrews shares little in philosophy, who see reparations as a way to end the focus on race. Once there is a reckoning, the reparations can be paid and the government will stop paying attention to race. There will be no more affirmative action or other race-conscious action. However appealing such a world may appear, as a simple solution to age-old problems, it is unlikely that reparations offer that kind of closure. Difficulties of racial equality are unlikely to be solved overnight. The reparations movement may end with some further recognition of the role of slavery and Jim Crow in American history. There may also be payments to a limited class of identifiable victims and perhaps payments to aid those most in need. There may never be a complete accounting of the costs imposed by hundreds of years of forced labor and decades of gross discrimination in voting rights, education, and employment.





Reparations will forestall racial conciliationAlfred L. Brophy. Professor of Law at University of Alabama. Spring 2004. What's at Stake? Why Are Reparations Controversial? Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29d.htmThe third subcategory is that reparations talk divides people along racial lines. It makes blacks think that whites as a group are their oppressors; it makes whites who have no responsibility for the sins of the past feel like oppressors and plays on feelings of guilt. That division falsely (in the minds of reparations opponents) continues the harmful focus on race. At a time when the government and everyone else should be moving toward a colorblind society, reparations talk reemphasizes race. It reestablishes racial divisions that we are eliminating (or at least ought to be eliminating). All of this leads up to the cultural war at stake over reparations. Reparations are not just about redistribution of wealth, though they certainly are controversial for that reason alone. Reparations, and the apologies that surely precede them, are about a microcosm of how we view United States history. Do we see the United States as a place of plentiful opportunity, where people can go as far as their ability and energy will take them, or as a haunted landscape full of oppression? Do we view the chasm between black and white wealth in this country as the fault of blacks and the Great Society, which intervened in the mid-1960s, to destroy the black families and the economic progress they were about to make? Or do we view it as a legacy of past state-sponsored discrimination and racial crimes? That self-image, and the accompanying narratives we tell ourselves about how we view our own accomplishments carry powerful weight: I'm wealthy and well-educated because of my merit, not because of the fortunate circumstances of my birth, or I'm poor and poorly educated because of a racist society, not because of my lack of ability or motivation.




Reparations deny black agency

Defining the African-American experience through suffering denies agencyMarybeth Gasman. Professor at University of Pennsylvania. 2006. The Journal of Higher Education 77.2. Accessed August 15, 2015. 317-352

In many ways, Jencks and Riesman followed a long line of research (including the Moynihan Report) by generally liberal thinkers who did a disservice to Blacks by attributing all of their current problems to the legacy of slavery—thereby denying them agency and overlooking Black accomplishments since slavery (Moynihan, 1965; Stuckey, 1987). 8 The problem with this understanding is it has a tendency to see Uncle Tom–like behavior (and other forms of self-hatred) in current Black leadership: hence Jencks and Riesman's mischaracterization of Black colleges as not being incubators of civil rights protest. This understanding also tends to ignore the contemporary context—that is, the effect of recent history, and the role that Blacks played in these events. This is not to say that Blacks did not suffer debilitating effects, both from slavery and segregation. Nor is it to say that Blacks have only themselves to blame for current troubles. But to characterize these problems as an unchanging holdover from a time long passed is to deal African Americans a double blow: first, to depict them as putty in the hands of an oppressor, then to deny them the ability to grow and adapt to freedom. For a fuller understanding of Black agency, researchers must look at the situation from multiple perspectives.

Reparations mark blacks as victims and discourage community developmentAlfred L. Brophy. Professor of Law at University of Alabama. Spring 2004. What's at Stake? Why Are Reparations Controversial? Accessed August 15, 2015. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/repara29d.htm

Despite the marked socioeconomic progress black Americans have made in this country over the past half century, the reparations movement, at bottom, encourages minorities to believe that they are really lost souls. The leaders of this movement do not talk about how such a distant crime has led to specific damages in present lives of most minorities. For them, feelings of victimization in general, not damages in the specific, are the point. So they fervently maintain that all full-grown, capable minorities ought to blame the missed opportunities of their lives on the slavery that transpired centuries ago as though their pains were interchangeable with those endured by slaves. The final group of arguments are at the center of the culture war. They revolve around a consideration that reparations talk divides the country along racial lines. By talking about the past and by focusing on past injustices, blacks alienate themselves from the rest of the country. Reparations talk leads blacks to see themselves as victims who deserve government payments. Within the genre of "reparations are divisive," there are several subcategories. First, that blacks have a cult of victimhood. Perhaps the best-known proponent of that cult of victimhood is Professor John McWhorter of the University of California at Berkeley. Even talk of reparations or the sins of the past causes African Americans to focus improperly on the task at hand: gaining an education and rising economically. The second subcategory is that focusing on the injustices of the past alienates blacks from American society, at a time when they should be focusing on the benefits that American society has to offer.





Answer to American wealth built on slavery

Slavery was a strain on the economy and didn’t contribute to contemporary wealthPeter Flaherty and John Carlisle. Researchers at National Legal and Policy Center. 2013. The Case Against Slave Reparations. Accessed August 15, 2015. http://nlpc.org/sites/default/files/Reparationsbook.pdf

Slavery absorbed southern savings, preventing the accumulation of non-human capital and holding back the growth of manufacturing. More specifically, historians contend that capital was “frozen” in the form of slave labor, making it unavailable for other forms of investment. Half of the South’s assessed worth was tied up in slaves and close to half in land itself. Although the South earned as much as $60 million a year in the 1850s from cotton, tobacco and rice exports, almost all investment went back into slaves and land, leaving little for manufacturing.79 A poor transportation network also hindered southern modernization. There was a distinct lack of main lines connecting cities to markets in the West, and the manufacturing base was very small compared with that of the North. In A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War, historian John Majewski writes that the central problem was Virginia’s slave economy. The slave system discouraged the growth of an investor class that could provide funds for transportation projects, or the growth of a consumer class to provide passengers for such projects.80 This was far different from the situation in the North. For example, in Pennsylvania in the 1830s and afterward, financiers from Philadelphia funded enormous railway projects that extended far into the Midwest. This gave entrepreneurs access to new markets, leading to selfreinforcing growth.81 Bateman and Weiss observe that the industrial output of the West (the modern-day Midwest) was growing rapidly, which indicated that industrialization was progressing from East to West (where slavery did not exist) rather than from North to South. The Northeast and West were “uniting economically into a system markedly unlike that of the South—an inwardly directed manufacturing economy inimical to the economic interests of the export-oriented, slave-based, agrarian system.”82



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