Some thoughts on the difficulties of the reparations-for-slavery concept

Stuart Eizenstat has an informed column on the concept of reparations for slavery.

It's by no means the last word on the subject. And he does resort to a superficial argument of, well, it couldn't pass anyway because some people would be against it and conservatives inevitably win when that happens.

But there are some very practical issues when we talk about monetary reparations. Eizenstat writes:

... reparations in the form of cash payments for descendants of slaves are not the way to right this grievous wrong. I write this having spent decades of my life negotiating more than $17 billion in reparations for Holocaust survivors. What I learned as chief negotiator for both the U.S. government, across several presidential administrations, and for the Jewish Claims Conference, a group representing Holocaust survivors in compensation negotiations with the postwar German government, is that reparations are complicated, contentious and messy, and work best when the crime was recent and the direct victims are still alive. Based on my experience, I believe that trying to repay descendants of slaves could end up causing more problems than reparations would seek to solve and that there are better ways to end racial disparities.

To be clear, I am not saying that the horrors of slavery are greater or less than the horrors of the Holocaust. But the fact that slavery is so much farther in the past makes the logistics of reparations next to impossible. Even though some supporters of slavery reparations point to Holocaust reparations as a model, they are actually quite different. [my emphasis]

The reparations to Jews systematically victimized by the German government under the settlements that he discusses were mostly reparations to direct survivors." "And even this was extremely difficult," he writes.

Imagine how these problems would be compounded in any program of individual reparations for descendants of slaves. Under such a program, a direct link would be necessary to prove which of today’s 37 million African Americans would be eligible for reparations. But poor record-keeping during the slavery era, which predated America’s founding, makes it extremely difficult to trace ancestry back to a specific slave family. With Holocaust-era slave laborers, we applied a sort of “rough justice” by using Red Cross and German concentration camp records to pay a flat sum of $7,500 to each former inmate, regardless of how long they had been held captive (forced laborers received $2,500). It is hard to see how such an approach would work in America, where slave records are flawed and far from complete. That system would also disadvantage those African Americans unable to establish such a linkage because they lacked the economic wherewithal to pursue the difficult genealogical task or because records did not exist.

Other U.S. government reparations programs have stuck to paying direct victims or their immediate family. More than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent who were interned during World War II were each paid $20,000 under a law signed in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan, but nothing was paid to the heirs of those who died before the 1988 law went into effect. The benefits from the settlement of the lawsuit dealing with the awful government experiment at Tuskegee University that withheld treatment for syphilis from hundreds of black patients went only to survivors, their wives and widows, or their children.

I do want to stress that the now all-too-familiar corporate Democratic excuse for this and every other problem they were prefer not to bother about is: It would be great to apply Solution X to Problem Y, but there is no consensus for it yet, it would be expensive, and it would upset some Republican white folks who would never consider voting for a Democrat in 100 years anyway, so we should postpone dealing with that problem for another century or two.

There are always excuses for inaction. But if something is right to do and would make people lives better and improve the country, the fact that it's hard to do doesn't mean that people who care about the issue should just avoid it.

Is it really necessary to add that pretty much no popular movement would ever have accomplished anything if they had taken that attitude? So Eizenstat's arguments along those lines make me more dubious of his more technical argument quoted above.

But he's nevertheless making an important point. If advocates are framing the program as reparations for slavery and point to the examples of reparations where the US and other countries have made reparations primarily to individuals directly affected by the unjust actions, those are points that do have to be addressed.

But another consideration is that financial payments made as part of restitution efforts around the Holocaust have taken a form that weren't strictly compensation to direct victims, a point to which Eizenstat's article alludes.

Here are some other considerations that seem to me to be important ones on this issue, presented here without trying to expand on the ways that arguments arising from them might be applied or countered.

• Slaves were property. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment liquidated that property by freeing slaves without compensation to their owners. I don't know if we can technically call that an "expropriation" of property. But it did wipe out a huge amount of capital previously held by slaveowners.
• Slavery was legal in the slave states. And while it was unpopular internationally and horribly immoral by the standards of the time, it wasn't a violation of international law. In the case of Holocaust reparations, at least a substantial portion of those actions were illegal at the time, even though they were carried out by governments. Though it sounds bloodless to say, establishing a precedent for government reparations to victims of acts that were legal does have complications in how a legal system handles it.
• Reparations that are just may also have destructive consequences. It's widely recognized, for instance, that Allied war reparations against Germany imposed by the Versailles Treaty after the First World War had detrimental effects that a less drastic reparations policy might have mitigated. Similar questions could be raised about Soviet and French war reparations extracted from Germany after the Second World War.
• The legal and political precedents of reparations for slavery would also apply to Native American claims for reparations.
• The historical, political, and moral arguments for reparations for slavery often focus on not just the market price of slaves but on the tremendous contributions of unpaid slave labor to the development of the United States economy. Factoring in the contribution of unpaid labor - or labor that was underpaid for its contributions - into questions of redistributing wealth in the form of reparations could set up some very intriguing precedents. I would note here that the Nixon Administration and American copper companies went bananas over Chile expropriating copper mines at a price that factored in an assumption about the amount of unjust exploitation that the mining companies had extracted from Chilean labor and natural resources over time.