Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 28: Reparations-a complicated project

The 1619 Project has been closely associated with the “reparations” movement for African-Americans for slavery and later discrimination, a civil-rights effort with a long history.

In July 2019, thousands of Americans took to their television sets, phones, and laptops to watch Ta-Nehisi Coates, Danny Glover, and Cory Booker testify before Congress, demanding reparations for slavery. There was a time when this debate was on the fringes; now it was national. Today, close to a dozen presidential candidates have promised reparations if elected. National opinion on the matter has been polarized, however. And it isn’t just Americans that are tuning in.

When Danny Glover was introduced, it was not just as an award-winning actor, but as the chair of the board of directors for Trans-Africa, an organization representing Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. But not much was said about his nod to the CARICOM reparations commission, and its chairman, Hilary Beckles, who was also present. The Commission was set up by 12 Caribbean states to demand state-level reparations from countries that benefited from the enslavement of their ancestors.¹

As Mohammed Elnaiem writes, “The idea of reparations for slavery “was ‘invented’ by emancipated slaves themselves. … The case is not new, and in the United States it started on the day after the Emancipation Proclamation, when the first slave demanded remuneration for all of the unpaid work they had done.”

It is a difficult subject, in both the more narrow version of reparations for slavery in the US and the broader claims for reparations that Elnaiem mentions. It has become a more familiar subject within the last decade. It’s one thing to have a case like the recently-settled Dominion lawsuit against FOX News, in which a particular harm is identified, vetted in the courts, and a specific financial settlement imposed.

But an issue like reparations for slavery, which ended in 1865 in the US, is much more complicated, from quantifying the harms to identifying the recipients of the compensation. Looking at the issue in the 2020 US Presidential race, P.R. Lockhart² identified a 2014 essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates³ as having given the issue new salience among a larger audience.

The political demand for reparations can also affect views of history. Obviously, the greater the harm, the larger the compensation due. As discussed in earlier posts here this month, historian James Oakes has called attention to the challenge of identifying just how much the country as a whole, as well as individual businesses and industries, benefitted from slavery is a major challenge.⁴

Some approaches to reparations stress a broad definition which would include improved history teaching and changes in public memorials and funding of housing and public education that provide a disproportional boost to the well-beings of Black Americans and other minorities. Euphemisms like “restorative justice” or “reparative policies” are also used. But whether that makes the idea more broadly acceptable or just serves to water down the whole concept is an open question.

Here is a presentation by Aleida Assmann on the concept⁵ of “repairing the past,” taking into account the experience of German reckoning with the Holocaust and the Nazi era more generally, as well as the ongoing re-evaluation of European colonial history. But she also discusses national identity narratives in the United States at some length, including the effort by the Cheney-Bush Administration to establish a new Patriotic History in the US for the Global War on Terror⁶:

Donald Shriver has also written about restorative justice and “repairing the past”:

There are few subjects so fraught with ambiguity than that of "repairing the past." Some pragmatists would label it as a non-starter: the past is gone. lt is not there to be repaired. … Since about 1990, the world has seen multiple, diligent human efforts to revisit, uncover, and revise the collective pasts of societies whose members have been horribly, unjustly damaged. Court trials, truth commissions, history revisions abound. lt is as if the post-Soviet 1990s had freed citizens of all levels to look hard at the monstrous horrors of the twentieth century, which to date set the record for numbers of human-enacted killings of each other. These efforts altogether may be grouped under "transitional justice."⁷ [my emphasis]

Martha Biondi was writing in 2003 that the idea of reparations “has surged to the forefront of antiracist advocacy in the black world, particularly in the United States.” ⁸She described its value this way:

The philosophical and tactical brilliance of reparations lies in its synthesis of moral principles and political economy. If the crimes and depredations inflicted on African nations and African descendants over centuries have relied on strategies of dehumanization in the service of power, profit, and conquest, then the efforts to identify, halt, and redress them must insist on explicit acknowledgment and repudiation of such strategies, alongside comprehensive material efforts to indemnify them. Rather than a retreat into narrow nationalism, as many have cast(igated) it, reparations represents the culmination of a long African American human rights struggle. [my emphasis]

In general, the farther back in time one looks, the determination of what just indemnification would be becomes more challenging.

Biondi also refers to some of the more general incarnations of the reparative/restorative framework:

In his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr. argued that the United States owed social and economic compensation to black America for the wrongs of slavery and segregation and vowed to make this the next goal of the black freedom struggle. The A. Philip Randolph Institute lobbied Congress for what it called a Freedom Budget, and the National Urban League advocated a “Marshall Plan for Black America,” remedies that embodied the spirit of reparations by insisting on the government’s obligation to financially repair the group harm caused by institutionalized racism. The 1969 “Black Manifesto” by James Forman, a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, demanded reparations in the form of a southern land bank, publishing houses, television networks, universities, and skills training centers. Forman envisioned reparations as an opportunity to reverse the consequences of racial capitalism and promote thoroughgoing social and economic development in black America.

And Biondi calls attention to the value of the reparations demand in driving home a deeper understanding of the actual effects of slavery and white racism in the US:

A second major reason for the rise of the reparations movement is the growing African American conviction that until the United States confronts the full scope of harms inflicted on enslaved Africans and their descendants, genuine healing and racial justice will remain impossible.

She makes the point that the demand for reparations is a way to frame civil-rights demands in a way that avoids stressing victimhood: “Reparations changes [sic] the discursive image of African Americans from victims to creditors and revises the dominant narrative of American social, political, and economic history in order to emphasize the debt owed to African Americans.” (my emphasis)

However, Daryl Michael Scott more recently described the reparations focus in The 1619 Project as marking a return to a victimhood narrative:

The 1619 Project marks the end of a silent, unacknowledged phase—a historiographical shift from a moratorium on depicting African Americans as victims. The new sensibility is visible in the move away from referring to Blacks in bondage and the owners of human chattel as slaves and slaveholders, respectively. The “enslaved” and “enslaver” better convey an ongoing power dynamic that highlights the victims and victimizers. In Afrocentric circles, the centrality of Black victimhood never died, but other communities of scholars have made the crucial difference in giving this emphasis a wider hearing. Afro-pessimism and epigenetics are influencing scholars for whom victimhood is central. In an age of interdisciplinary work and Black Studies Departments, the locus of historiography is no longer inside history departments. Moreover, since the rise of reparations as a policy issue, leading activists and scholars such as Randal Robinson and the late Charles Ogletree have emphasized a history of victimhood to justify reparations. The new historicism, including this work, has a policy purpose for the past under study.⁹ [my emphasis]

1. Elnaiem, Mohammed (2020): JSTOR Daily 02/27/2020. <https://daily.jstor.org/the-case-for-reparations-is-nothing-new/> (Accessed: 2023-25-04).

2. Lockhart, P.R. (2019): The 2020 Democratic primary debate over reparations, explained. Vox 07/19/2019. <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/11/18246741/reparations-democrats-2020-inequality-warren-harris-castro> (Accessed: 2023-25-04).

3. Coates, Ta-Nehisi (2014): The Case for Reparations. The Atlantic June 2014. <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/> (Accessed: 2023-25-04).

4. Oakes, James (2021): What the 1619 Project Got Wrong. Catalyst 5:3, 6-47. Discussed here in the April 18 post.

5. Aleida Assmann: "Repairing the Past: Divided Narratives and National Solidarity". Amerikahaus YouTube channel 07/09/2021. (Accessed: 2023-25-04).

6. Remarks by the President on Teaching American History and Civic Education 09/17/2002. The White House archival website. <https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020917-7.html> (Accessed: 2023-25-04).

7. Shriver, Donald (2007): Repairing the Past: Polarities of Restorative Justice. CrossCurrents 57:2, 209-217. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/24461365> (Accessed: 2023-25-04).

8. Biondi, Martha (2003): The Rise of the Reparations Movement. Radical History Review 87:2003, 5–18.

9. Scott, Darly Michael (2022): African American Exceptionalism in the Service of American Exceptionalism. American Historical Review Dec 2022, 1815-1819.