McWhorter: Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning

2023/06/24 Leave a comment

Thoughtful discussion of the issues and approaches, and the need to shift the focus to class and class-based orientation to race:

For a long while, reparations for Black Americans has been more a debate topic than a reality. But of late, the reality may be catching up with the debate. Since last year, Evanston, Ill., has been granting $25,000 payments to be applied to housing to Black people and their descendants who were discriminated against during the redlining era. This year, the program has been extended to enable grantees to take simple cash payments. In San Francisco, a task force has suggested that eligible Black people receive onetime payments of $5,000,000 each; a statewide task force has proposed a somewhat more modest plan with a sliding scale of payments topping out at $1.2 million. The New York State Legislature has passed a bill that would create its own commission to consider reparations, and there will doubtless be more such proposals nationwide.

I’ve never been a fan of the idea of reparations. I know that various groups of Americans have been granted reparations in the past, such as the descendants of Japanese Americans placed in internment camps during World War II. And I certainly believe that Black Americans have deserved reparations. It’s more that I have questioned the idea of what I would regard as newreparations. I see us as having already been granted reparations on multiple occasions.

Affirmative action can be seen as an enormous reparations policy, although the term is rarely used in that context. In the late 1960s, welfare payments were made easier to receive and maintain at the behest of organizations such as the National Welfare Rights Organization, in what we would now call reparation for past injustices. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, if we rolled the dice again, could well have been called a “Reparation Act,” linking banks’ requests for mergers and new branches to their assisting the credit eligibility of people in lower-income neighborhoods.

And there are, of course, thorny questions that prevail in any discussion of reparations: If payments are to be made to individuals, what would qualify a person as Black and discriminated against? (William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen’s “From Here to Equality” has a proposal for this.) If payments are to organizations, which ones could we designate as best for Black people and on what basis? (The pioneer analyst of the subject, Boris Bittker, raised this question decades ago.)

But one does not wish to ossify. I’m not interested in contrarianism for its own sake; I seek what is good for Black people. And if 77 percent of Black people approve of something — as a recent Pew poll suggested — I had better have solid grounds to oppose it.

If your opinions never evolve, you’re either not paying attention or not genuinely interested. One example: School vouchers looked very promising for Black kids 20 years ago, and I used to speak up for them despite it making me seem as though I were a Republican. But they do not seem to have had much effect on achievement in the long run, and my enthusiasm has decreased. There’s a reason I haven’t devoted a newsletter to vouchers lately.

Opposition to reparations would make sense if they were actively harmful — for instance, by encouraging a sense of dependence or entitlement — but that seems unlikely of a one-time dispersal. It would also make sense to oppose reparations if the funds seemed likely to go to waste, such as those given with insufficient directives as to what they were to be used for. But the most common idea now, largely sparked by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark 2014 article in The Atlantic, is to focus on housing assistance specifically to compensate for the redlining era, decades in which residents of “Black” neighborhoods were denied mortgages, insurance and other benefits that lead to homeownership.

This newer focus is different from simply sending a check in the mail for racial injustices writ large that were suffered in a distant past. Redlining was not all that long ago. It played a major role in the wealth gap that exists between white and Black people today. And being able to afford better-quality housing would be of concrete and immediate benefit to Black people, enabling them to escape many of the manifestations of inequity based on race.

So I am open to experiments with this new conception of reparations. I could imagine supporting them with articles, talks, podcast appearances and the like. But I would do so only under an impression of a general consensus that these reparations would also offer a form of closure, a signature turning of the corner in American race relations.

Brilliant work by Black intellectuals such as Barbara Fields and Adolph and Touré Reed has long argued that fixing today’s America will require a focus on class rather than race. After reparations, it would be time to stop sidelining this work. Racism and inequity would not disappear. Policies that address those issues and help Black people succeed would of course continue, but they would focus less on race than on specific economic needs, such as fostering jobs that don’t require a college degree, giving preferences in admissions and hiring based on socioeconomics, rethinking the War on Drugs and teaching reading via the phonics method that science has demonstrated to be the strongest tool.

In a scenario such as this one, reparations would serve not only as a compensation for past injustice but also as the start of a new, class-based orientation toward the nation’s progress on race. Is such a compromise possible, as opposed to a continuation of the mantra that “America doesn’t want to talk about race”? I have my doubts. But I would be happy to be proved wrong.

Source: Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning

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No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

And it was under Conservative PM Mulroney that Canada also issued an official apology and payments for Japanese internment in Canada, along with the creation of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation:

Today, as Californians consider a reparations package that could reach $800 billion to pay for the harm the state has done to its African-American population on matters ranging from over-policing to housing discrimination, there’s a pro-reparations argument that needs to be revived. It’s that made by Ronald Reagan 35 years ago.

With California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans getting ready to submit a draft of its report to the state legislature by late June, Reagan’s argument has become more relevant than ever. “For here we right a wrong,” Reagan declared in 1988, as his second term as president was nearing its end. Reagan spoke these words to mark his signing of a bill designed to provide restitution for the World War II internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

At a time when those making the case for reparations are accused of being woke, we forget the heartfelt case for payments combining restitution and reparations that Reagan made without fearing he would lose his credentials as a political conservative.

The decision to remove Japanese Americans from their homes during World War II reflected long standing anti-Asian prejudices. The Roosevelt administration contended that Japanese Americans posed a danger to the country in case of a Japanese attack on America’s West Coast. But there was no comparable treatment of German Americans or Italian Americans despite the United States also being at war with Germany and Italy.

Reagan’s speech is one that few want to recall because of the racism it calls attention to, but the speech is a lesson in how to deal with history we would like to have back. At the speech’s core lies Reagan’s belief that, while we cannot undo the wrongs of the past, we can mitigate their continuing impact.

In his address to the nation in 1988, Reagan managed to apologize for government wrongdoing and argue that his apology left America stronger. “So what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor,” Reagan declared. “We reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”

The timing of Reagan’s speech is noteworthy. It came decades before the Supreme Court in 2018 explicitly repudiated the Roosevelt-era Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision sanctioning the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. In words that echo Reagan’s, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. described Korematsu as “morally repugnant” and “gravely wrong the day it was decided.”

Prior to 2018 the strongest legal dissent from the Korematsu decision was the “confession of error” that the Justice Department issued in 2011 when it acknowledged the misleading role the Solicitor General had played in 1944 in defending the internment of Japanese Americans.

Reagan began his 1988 speech by describing the cruelty of the internment that the government was now seeking to redress. He spoke of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry being removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps solely because of their race.

The rush to internment began on February 19, 1942, 73 days after the United States entered World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Order 9066. The order came with so little planning that for a time Japanese-American families were interned in the horse stables at Santa Anita race track. In his address Reagan believed it was important not to sugarcoat the emotional and economic impact of internment.

The redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War II has meant tax-free payments of $20,000 to more than 82,000 claimants as a result of the 1988 act. The total amounts to over $1.6 billion.

Reagan was not put off by the cost of restitution, which in fact falls short of the amount of money lost by the men and women interned in the 1940s when put in current dollars. At the heart of Reagan’s speech was his belief that “no payment can make up for those lost years.”

Thirteen years after Ronald Reagan’s White House speech, the National Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II opened in Washington on June 29, 2001. Unlike the memorials on the National Mall, the National Japanese-American Memorial does not immediately draw attention to itself. The memorial sits just north of the Capitol on a small triangle of land at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue and D Street.

The 33,000 square-foot park and plaza that hold the memorial invite contemplation. Designed by Washington, D.C. architect Davis Buckley, the memorial, like Reagan’s speech, makes a point of being direct and elegiac about the injustices it addresses. On one of its walls are the names of the 10 internment camps where Japanese Americans were held during World War II, and at the center of the memorial is a bronze sculpture, “The Golden Cranes,” by Nina Akamu, whose grandfather died in an internment camp. Her sculpture consists of two cranes struggling to break free of the barbed wire that entangles them.

“The burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed.”

Ronald Reagan was not able to attend the opening of the Japanese-American Memorial, but he is present there. Words from his 1988 speech are inscribed on the edge of the memorial pool.

Reagan concluded his speech by recalling the time he attended a 1945 medal ceremony in Orange County, California, at which World War II General Joe Stillwell honored a Japanese-American military hero of the war in Europe with a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross. Reagan’s role at the 1945 medal ceremony, like that of the other celebrities there, was a minor one, but decades later, he saw his presence at the ceremony worth addressing.

In doing so, Reagan was not just personalizing his speech. He was making clear a lesson in continuity that is easy to forget: the burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed. It falls on a state or nation owning up to its past.

Nicolaus Mills is author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. He is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

Source: No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

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In Likely First, Chicago Suburb Of Evanston Approves Reparations For Black Residents

2021/03/25 Leave a comment

Interesting practical and focussed approach:

The city of Evanston, Ill., will make reparations available to eligible Black residents for what it describes as harm caused by “discriminatory housing policies and practices and inaction on the city’s part.” The program is believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. and is seen by advocates as a potential national model.

Evanston’s City Council voted 8-1 on Monday to approve the Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program, an official confirmed to NPR over email. It will grant qualifying households up to $25,000 for down payments or home repairs, according to the city, and is the first initiative of a city reparations fund that was established in 2019.

“The Program is a step towards revitalizing, preserving, and stabilizing Black/African-American owner-occupied homes in Evanston, increasing homeownership and building the wealth of Black/African-American residents, building intergenerational equity amongst Black/African-American residents, and improving the retention rate of Black/African-American homeowners in the City of Evanston,” reads a draft of the resolution.

In November 2019, the City Council established a reparations fundto support initiatives addressing historical wealth and opportunity gaps for Black residents, to be funded by the first $10 million in revenue from the city’s tax on the sale of recreational marijuana. The housing program is initially budgeted at $400,000.

Robin Rue Simmons, an alderwoman and architect of the reparations program, told NPR in 2019 that the plan aimed to solve a pair of problems facing the community: Black residents being disproportionately arrested for infractions involving marijuana possession, as well as being priced out of their homes.

“We have a large and unfortunate gap in wealth, opportunity, education, even life expectancy,” she said. “The fact that we have a $46,000 gap between census tract 8092, which is the historically red-line neighborhood that I live in and was born in, and the average white household led me to pursue a very radical solution to a problem that we have not been able to solve: reparations.”

Housing as a top priority

City officials wrote that affordable housing and economic development were the top priorities identified in a series of meetings with community members about what those reparations should look like. Historical evidence made clear the connection between the city’s actions and the suffering they caused, the officials added.

“The strongest case for reparations by the City of Evanston is in the area of housing, where there is sufficient evidence showing the City’s part in housing discrimination as a result of early City zoning ordinances in place between 1919 and 1969, when the City banned housing discrimination,” they wrote.

As part of their fact-finding effort, officials commissioned a historical report on city policies and practices affecting Black residents from 1900 to 1960 and through the present day. The 77-page report, written by Dino Robinson Jr. of the Shorefront Legacy Center and Jenny Thompson of the Evanston History Center, detailed decades of segregationist and discriminatory practices in areas including housing, employment, education and policing.

The authors wrote that in addition to impacting the daily lives and well-being of thousands of city residents, such policies dictated their occupations, wealth, education and property in ways that shaped their families for generations.

“While the policies, practices, and patterns may have evolved over the course of these generations, their impact was cumulative and permanent,” the authors wrote. “They were the means by which legacies were limited and denied.”

To qualify for the program, eligible Black residents must either have lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 or be a direct descendant of someone who did. According to program guidelines, people who do not meet these criteria may apply if they can prove they faced housing discrimination due to city policies or practices after 1969.

City officials plan to implement the program in the early-to-mid summer and say more details will be made available before then.

The national conversation about reparations

The program has the endorsement of national racial justice organizations that advocate for reparations, including the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and the National African American Reparations Commission, the city said.

Advocates hope it will boost similar redress efforts in other parts of the country. Ron Daniels, the president of NAARC, told The Washington Post that “right now the whole world is looking at Evanston, Illinois.”

Dreisen Heath, a racial justice advocate and researcher with Human Rights Watch, wrote in a Twitter thread that while “local remedy is not a replacement for federal action,” it is still important given the harms inflicted on Black communities by various levels of government.

“What happened in [Evanston] today is historic & will help provide a pathway for other cities,” Heath wrote. “It should be treated as such, knowing there is a long way to go for the city of Evanston and the country at large.”

Still, the program is not without its critics.

The dissenting vote on the City Council came from Cicely Fleming, an alderwoman who is Black and who traces her Evanston lineage to the early 1900s. In a lengthy statement, she said she is fully in support of reparations but denounced the initiative as “a housing plan dressed up” as such.

She said the plan allows only limited participation and does not grant enough autonomy to the community that has been harmed — unlike cash payments, for example, which she said allow people to decide what’s best for themselves. (According to the city’s website, it does not have the authority to exempt direct payments from state or federal income taxes, meaning recipients of any such stipends would be liable for the tax burden.)

Some of Fleming’s other criticisms are that the proposal is being rushed to a vote without enough time for community members’ concerns to be voiced and resolved and that its limited scope does not do enough to lay the groundwork for longer-term efforts.

“We can talk more about the program details, but I reject the very definition of this as a ‘reparations’ program,’ ” she said in her remarks. “Until the structure and terms are in the hands of the people – we have missed the mark.”

The program’s approval comes as the topic of reparations — for the harms of slavery and ensuing generations of racial discrimination — continues to gain traction and spark debate in American society.

An opinion poll released last August, following a summer marked by nationwide protests against racial injustice, found that 80% of Black Americans believed the federal government should compensate the descendants of enslaved people, compared with 21% of white Americans.

Several places across the U.S. are considering reparations initiatives of their own, including Amherst, Mass., Asheville, N.C. and Iowa City, Iowa.

Reparations are also a topic of conversation at the federal level, where HR 40, legislation proposing the creation of a commission to study and develop reparations proposals for Black Americans, has attracted renewed interest since its introduction in 2019.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said that President Biden supports the idea of studying the issue but did not say whether he would sign such a bill if passed by Congress.

Source: In Likely First, Chicago Suburb Of Evanston Approves Reparations For Black Residents

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Opinion | The Case for Immigration as Reparations

2019/06/10 Leave a comment

One of the most provocative articles I have recently read, pointing out some of the double standards in immigration policy and debates. But one that has no chance of influencing policy given the implications:

There is a lot of debate these days about whether the United States owes its African-American citizens reparations for slavery. It does. But there is a far bigger bill that the United States and Europe have run up: what they owe to other countries for their colonial adventures, for the wars they imposed on them, for the inequality they have built into the world order, for the excess carbon they have dumped into the atmosphere.

The creditor countries aren’t seriously suggesting that the West send sacks of gold bullion every year to India or Nigeria. Their people are asking for fairness: for the borders of the rich countries to be opened to goods and people, to Indian textiles as well as Nigerian doctors. In seeking to move, they are asking for immigration as reparations.

Today, a quarter of a billion people are migrants. They are moving because the rich countries have stolen the future of the poor countries. Whether it is Iraqis and Syrians fleeing the effects of illegal American wars, or Africans seeking to work for their former European colonial masters, or Guatemalans and Hondurans trying to get into the country that peddles them guns and buys their drugs: They are coming here because we were there.

Before you ask them to respect our borders, ask yourself: Has the West ever respected anyone’s borders?

A vast majority of migrants move from a poor to a less poor country, not a rich one. Immigration quotas should be based on how much the host country has ruined other countries. Britain should have quotas for Indians and Nigerians; France for Malians and Tunisians; Belgium for very large numbers of Congolese.

And when they come, they should be allowed to bring their families and stay — unlike the “guest workers” who were enticed to build up the postwar labor force of the colonizers and then asked to leave when their masters were done exploiting them.

The Dominican Republic, where the United States propped up the dictator Rafael Trujillo for three decades, should be high on the American preference list. So should Iraq, upon which we imposed a war that resulted in 600,000 deaths. Justice now demands that we let in 600,000 Iraqis: for each death we caused there, someone should get a chance at a new life here.

Some 12 million Africans were enslaved and carried across the Atlanticby European powers. Should not 12 million people from Africa be allowed to live in the countries enriched by the toil of their ancestors? Both will be better off: the African still suffering from what slavery has done to his country, and the host country that will again benefit from African labor, but this time without enormous pain and for a fair wage.

Just as there is a carbon tax on polluting industries, there should be a “migration tax” on the nations who got rich while emitting greenhouse gases. The United States is responsible for one-third of the excess carbon in the atmosphere; Europe, another one-quarter. A hundred million refugees fleeing hurricanes and droughts will have to be resettled by the end of the century. The United States should take a third, and Europe another quarter.

A huge bill would come to the West, but it is one it should look forward to paying. Without immigration, America’s economic growth would have been 15 percent lower from 1990 to 2014; Britain’s would have been a full 20 percent lower. Immigrants are 14 percent of the American population, but they started a quarter of all new businesses and since 2000 earned over a third of the American Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine.

Migrants are 3 percent of the world’s population but contribute 9 percent of its gross domestic product. Their taxes prop up the pension systems of the wealthy nations, which are not making enough babies of their own.

If you want to help the poorest people in the world, the fastest way to do so is to ease barriers to migration. Migrants sent back $689 billion in remittances last year, which amounts to three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all trade barriers, four times more than all the foreign aid given by those governments and 100 times the amount of all debt relief.

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U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel – The Washington Post

2016/09/30 Leave a comment

Others have argued differently Black Lives Matter is ‘woke’ to old problems — but still sleeping on solutions – The Washington Post):

Reparations presents the most acute challenge. This sounds sensible enough, but a thoroughly “woke” person might say black America has already received reparations.

They’re not called “reparations,” of course, but that’s just an issue of terminology. Affirmative Action has been reparations; the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act battling redlining was reparations; the original intent of No Child Left Behind was to identify disparities between black and other children in scholarly achievement and therefore qualified by definition as reparations; in the late 1960s, nationwide, at the behest of the National Welfare Rights Organization and other movements, welfare programs were reformed to make payments easier to get. This, too, was a form of reparations.

The UN-affiliated group in contrast:

The history of slavery in the United States justifies reparations for African Americans, argues a recent report by a U.N.-affiliated group based in Geneva.

This conclusion was part of a study by the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, a body that reports to the international organization’s High Commissioner on Human Rights. The group of experts, which includes leading human rights lawyers from around the world, presented its findings to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday, pointing to the continuing link between present injustices and the dark chapters of American history.

“In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent,” the report stated. “Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”

Citing the past year’s spate of police officers killing unarmed African American men, the panel warned against “impunity for state violence,” which has created, in its words, a “human rights crisis” that “must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”

Source: U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel – The Washington Post

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