Reparations: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

It isn't Charity; It's a Debt That's Owed

Good on you, Virginia. A statue of General Robert E. Lee, one of the largest Confederate monuments in the South, was removed from its pedestal in Richmond today. It will be replaced by something far more reflective of the current culture of Virginia, and of the United States.

When I was running for president I had an interesting experience of voters on issues related to race. I had become known for bringing up the subject of reparations on the Democratic debate stage, and I continued talking about the issue throughout my campaign.

I would walk into a room filled with all white audiences in states like Iowa and New Hampshire - places where one wouldn’t necessarily expect to meet a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of reparations - and encounter more intelligence and openness to the idea than one might expect.

Kristin Cato

What I came to believe is that the average American is not racist, but that Americans are woefully uninformed and uneducated about race in America. I found that giving people a ten minute history lesson made a huge difference in their understanding, and then to their political views.

It’s true that when I first brought up the topic most people would look at me dubiously, guarded, with their arms folded in front of them. But things would often change as I continued to speak.

 “Okay, now let’s think about this. The first slave ships were brought to America in 1619, and slavery here wasn’t abolished until  1865. That’s almost 250 years of enslaving people within the most heinous form of institutionalized evil you can imagine. Historians believe there were between 4 and 5 million enslaved people at the time of abolition." 

Arms are loosening now…

“After the war, troops were stationed in the South to ensure that slavery as an institution couldn’t re-establish itself. And General Tecumseh Sherman promised every formerly enslaved family of four, forty acres and a mule with which to restart their lives.

“But Lee’s surrender at Appomattox; the Emancipation Proclamation; and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments - as important as they all were to abolishing slavery, no external remedy could abolish racism. The slave owning class of Southerners, now bitterly defeated and humiliated, just waited their turn to get back at those who they felt had ruined their lives.

People are leaning forward in their chairs…

“The twelve years during which Northern troops were stationed in the South - an era known as Reconstruction - was one in which great dreams for post-war equality were both furthered, and suppressed. During the time of Reconstruction formerly enslaved people, called Freedmen, rose to high levels of political power from local to federal positions. Yet once the troops were withdrawn from the South, Southern legislators worked vigorously to squash such progress, enacting Black Code laws to ensure limited political, economic and social opportunities for formerly enslaved people in their states. Very little of those “forty acres and a mule” had actually yet been distributed, and among those that were the vast majority of land was reappropriated to its former owners.

“Thus began another hundred years of institutionalized oppression against black people in the South - a period of segregation, Jim Crow laws and all manner of brutal persecution that went unchallenged in any systematic way until Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the 1960’s.

At this point I can see on people’s faces that wheels are turning. I don’t know if people were necessarily thinking, “I never knew,” but at least they were thinking, “I never put all this together before.”

“So that would be almost 350 years of institutionalized oppression. Please take in for a moment what that means in simple human terms.

“Now we’d all agree of course that if you’ve been kicking someone to the ground - and certainly 350 years of oppression is a lot of kicking - then you owe them something. You owe more than to just stop kicking; you owe it to them to help them get back up.

“With the Civil Rights Act in 1964, we did stop kicking: the Act dismantled legalized segregation. And in 1965 we passed the Voting Rights Act (now gutted by the Supreme Court) to ensure universal access to the polls.

“But just as Lincoln’s assassination undermined efforts at greater equality in 1865, Martin Luther King’s assassination did something very similar in 1968. Yes, we stopped kicking a lot of people. But we did not help them get back up. The financial gap between blacks and whites, for obvious reasons present at the end of the Civil War, has been perpetuated by economic and governmental policies ever since.

“As a Jew, I’m aware that Germany has paid $89B to Jewish organizations as reparations since WW2. While financial remuneration doesn’t mean the Holocaust never happened, and reparations can hardly heal all the wounds that the Holocaust created, such restitution has gone far toward furthering emotional and psychological healing between Germany and the Jews of Europe.

“By the mid Twentieth Century the idea of reparations was hardly considered a fringe idea; it’s a common way that one people, having wronged another, seeks to make amends for having done so. While WW2 was over in 1945 and Germany has at least tried through reparations to heal its relationship to Jews, our Civil War was over in 1865. Yet we’re still passing on the most toxic baton from generation to generation, not having made a fundamental effort at financial restitution that could help interrupt a pattern of terrible pain that has gone on far too long.

“Black families earn on average 15 per cent less than whites, and reparations would be a stimulus to our economy as well as a meaningful effort to make amends for a great moral wrong. It isn’t charity; it’s a debt that’s owed. We can investigate our white privilege all we want but at some point we just need to pay up. If you’ve stolen a thousand dollars from me, I’d like more than apology: I’d like my money back.

“Until some generation of Americans stands up and says, ‘We’re going to be the one to do this,’ the issue will continue like a splinter that grows more infected and increasingly painful until it is removed. I suggest we be the generation to do that.”

In town after town, in churches and bookstores and auditoriums, I saw white people who might not have known what to think about the issue of reparations before - who might even have been slightly hostile to it - slowly and then quickly rise in standing ovation to the idea.

If we start to speak to the nobility and conscience in people, who knows what might be possible. If we give people the option to actually do the right thing, who knows what they might be willing to do. When we respect people’s capacity for an enlightened response, they’re more likely to respond in an enlightened way. No one can tell me reparations is a bad idea, or a politically impossible one. I think reparations is an idea whose time has come.