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.

Should Democrats pursue a duck-and-cover strategy on race-related issue in 2019-20?

Paul Starr provides kind of flashback to the Democratic politics of 1991 and the years of the Clinton Presidency in Reparations, Really? American Prospect 04/24/2019. It's a column basically saying the Democrats should never ever have publicly considered the idea of reparations for slavery.

He does talk about issues related to reparations in the context of insisting that the Democrats should discuss only "race-neutral" proposals.

Reparations for slavery is a complicated issue. And, aside from the political marketing worries, I've yet to be convinced that legally and admistratively that the US would be able to design a program that obviously reasonable and fair. Or maybe I should say, "obviously reasonable and fair in the view of Republicans." Because they don't even want black people to be able to vote. They might not want to roll back the 13th Amendment. But they're not so thrilled with the 14th and the 15th.

In fact, the 14th Amendment includes this provision, "neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."

If reparations continue to be a live issue, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some Republicans demand that this portion of the 15th Amendment be changed so that the US Treasury can pay the debts of the Confederate States of America. As long as it benefits mainly the already wealthy, of course.

Because the Republicans have finally morphed into a white nationalist party headed by Donald Trump, the President who regards neo-Nazis as "very fine people". They accuse the whole Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin of being socialists who want to give white people's money to undeserving blacks and Latinos. And they're not likely to stop any time in the future.

But that doesn't mean the Democrats should hide under the bed rather than discuss serious ideas and proposals, including reparations for slavery. What Paul Starr argues that duck-and-cover is the best approach on this issue. And he partly expressses it in vintage 1991 terms:

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon must be smiling from ear to ear and celebrating their good fortune whenever they hear one of the Democratic presidential candidates endorsing a bill to establish a commission to study reparations for descendants of slaves — a proposal that everyone will take as preliminary to support for financial reparations. It's the sort of idea Trump and Bannon can work with, to expand and lock down Republican support among white voters next year.

Not every idea with a moral justification has a political justification in an imperfect world. If Democrats fail to win the 2020 election, Trump will have an opportunity to bring about deeper and more durable change in his second term than in his first. For one thing, he’ll likely be able to add two more conservatives to the Supreme Court, replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and a 7-2 right-wing Court could radically alter legal doctrine in every sphere, including civil rights.

This is pretty much the state in which the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders have been for decades. It's symptomatic of the kind of historical trauma Rick Perlstein discusses in his interview with Isaac Chotiner, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the Future New Yorker 01/10/2019. The "Clintonian" mode of the Democratic Party was to accept the broad Republican framing of issues but presentiong a more compassionate version of them. Or a least a less mean version. Not normally stated publicly but implicit in that approach was that black voters would have no place else to go politically.

But a signficant element of that was to try to show voters that the Democrats were not catering to black voters and were at least somewhat sympathetic to the concerns of whites racist. Bill Clinton presented a prototype version of this kind of performance with his "Sistah Soljah moment." (Rosie Swash, Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment tops year of political controversy Guardian 06/13/2011)

Here's a video of Clinton from Memoryretro at YouTube speaking in 1992 at a meeting of the Rainbow Coalition led by Jesse Jackson showing the actual Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment - JUNE 13, 1992:

I haven't heard the recording in a long time. And I'm struck at how crass and petty it comes across with Clinton attacking a young hip-hip artist that most white people in the US had never heard of at the time. It was a cheap shot. And not one against racist Republican politicians. There was no meaningful group of swing voters in 1992 who actually thought that Bill Clinton and the Democrats advocated randomly murdering white people, which the snippets from the singer's over-the-top words that Clinton criticized suggested. In fact, since most voters would never have associated Clinton with the hip-hop singer they didn't know existed ifl Clinton hadn't attacked her, I wouldn't be surprised if the effect wasn't to associate Clinton and the Democrats with her words in the minds of whites who wouldn't consider voting for Democrats anyway.

Here was Hillary Clinton in 1996, the next Presidential election year, continuing the approach (1996: Hillary Clinton on "superpredators" C-Span; uploaded to YouTube 02/25/2016):

Hillary there was speaking in support of the controversial Clinton Crime Bill, aka, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (Jessica Lussenhop, Clinton crime bill: Why is it so controversial? BBC News Magazine 04/18/2016) In a contemporary account, Tony Poveda described how, compared to previous decades, the bipartisan support for the Crime Bill was largely a result of Democrats adopting Republican positions which the Democrats had criticized for decades (Clinton, Crime, and the Justice Department Social Justice 21:3; Fall 1994):

... what is even more striking [than the bipartisanship] about the crime policy debate of the 1990s is that it has considerably narrowed in terms of the range of policy options on the table for discussion. Liberals of the 1960s often called for an examination of the root causes of crime, the rehabilitation of offenders, and for procedural safeguards in the administration of justice. Conservatives of that period, like today, emphasized punishment and crime control in their crime agenda. These poles (crime prevention versus punishment and due process versus crime control) of the traditional liberal-conservative dialogue have largely disappeared, as measures emphasizing punishment far overshadow any consideration of crime prevention.

Instead, the major policy debate in the 1990s, at least in the congressional arena and in the media, centers on the punishment/crime control end of the continuum. Both conservatives and liberals attempt to outdo each other in their posturing and proposals to be increasingly punitive toward criminals.

While the Democrats may have been more supportive of civil rights generally, there was a huge racial component behind this crime policy. As Jessica Lussenhop writes, the 1994 Crime Bill wasn't the only cause of the mass incarceration of black men that has produced the current situation. However, "At minimum, says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, the bill reinforced the popular thinking that the solution to crime was harsher punishments." (Jerry Brown, who didn't hold public office at the time, was highly critical of the Crime Bill.)

The Sacramento Bee editorial board recalled those days in 2016. The "three strikes" refernce is to a type of mandatory sentencing laws that were becoming an unfortunate fad at the time:

Those “three strikes” Clinton talked about were well on their way to becoming law in California in 1994, when the Legislature and voters were galvanized by the murder of Polly Klaas. Proposition 184 passed overwhelmingly.

“The majority of both houses of the Legislature and the overwhelming majority of the public are in a mind to put people away forever for jaywalking, period,” said then-[California lAsembly] Speaker Willie Brown, one of only nine Assembly members to vote against the measure. “That is the mentality that is going to prevail.”

A lighter version of “three strikes” also became the centerpiece of Clinton’s federal crime bill. It was that 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that pushed the nation over the edge, one of a string of tough-on-crime measures that bloated the prison system and disproportionately decimated poor communities of color.

It’s what people, particularly young people who grew up in the lock-’em-up era, remember most. This is definitely true in New York, where voters head to the polls Tuesday to pick a nominee for president, and in California, where voters will have their say in June. [my emphasis]

The argument to sell Clinton-style "triangulation" to Democratic constituencies was the one Paul Starr uses in the quote above: Democratic Presidents are at least a little better than Republicans. So vote for (so-called) electable centrists even in the primaries because judges. Between 1994 and today, the Republicans have chosen a big majority of the current federal judges. They control the Senate and were crass about just blocking Barack Obama's last Supreme Court nominee on partisan grounds. Given that reality, it's hard to argue that the Democrats' longtime duck-and-cover centrist posture has protected the federal judiciary from become a Federalist Society colony.

Starr cites an article from The American Prospect itself from 1990 by William Julius Wilson (Race-Neutral Policies and the Democratic Coalition Spring 1990) that argued for the distance-yourselves-from-black-people approach of the Democrats. Starr notes that Wilson had by 2011 decided that affirmative action programs were okay, putting him at least as far left as the Nixon Administration in 1972. Starr quotes part of this passage from Wilson's 1990 piece:

Many white Americans have turned, not against blacks, but against a strategy that emphasizes programs perceived to benefit only racial minorities. In the 1990s the party needs to promote new policies to fight inequality that differ from court-ordered busing, affirmative action programs, and antidiscrimination lawsuits of the recent past. By stressing coalition politics and race-neutral programs such as full employment strategies, job skills training, comprehensive health care, reforms in the public schools, child care legislation, and prevention of crime and drug abuse, the Democrats can significantly strengthen their position. As [Party] Chairman [Ron] Brown himself has emphasized, reinforcing Democratic loyalty among minorities and reaching out to reclaim white support are not mutually exclusive.

Such a change of emphasis is overdue. In the 1960s efforts to raise the public's awareness and conscience about the plight of black Americans helped to enact civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. However, by the 1980s the civil rights strategy of dramatizing black disadvantage was backfiring. The "myth of black progress" theme, frequently invoked to reinforce arguments for stronger race-specific programs, played easily into the hands of conservative critics of antibias policies. The strategy reinforced the erroneous impression that federal antidiscrimination efforts had largely failed, and it overlooked the significance of complex racial changes since the mid-1960s. It also aroused concern that Democratic politicians' sensitivity to black complaints had come at the expense of the white majority. [my emphasis]

Yet Wilson also argued in that article, "while income inequality widened generally in America during the 1980s, it widened even more dramatically among black Americans." He recognizes that the "myth of black progress" was in significant part a myth. So how is it a good thing for Democratic politicians and activists to try to ignore the underlying reality? Especially for such an important part of their own political base?

There will always be conservatives warning Democrats to beware of the "white backlash," a term to which the history of slavery and segregation gives a grim double meaning. The problem is, there has been a significant number of whites "backlashing" since the moment Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. The reality in 1990 and today is that Democrats can't successfully counter white backlash by adopting the "backlash" positions themselves. Or by pretending that the problems caused by white racism don't exist.

It would be more meaningful in 2019 to argue that the Democrats should be aggressive in addressing the problems affecting the base because judges. And because a lot more, too. But Starr argues instead that even suggesting that there's anything remotely substantive in the issue of reparations for slavery has practically doomed the Democrats' chances for 2020: "African Americans may or may not ever receive reparations, but the 2020 Democratic candidates who are moving in that direction have already given Trump and Bannon a priceless gift."

In other words, keep on with this version of the Democratic approach to fighting the Republicans. Or, too often, not fighting.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 23: The slave economy of the South and innovative accounting

Sam Seder recently interviewed Caitlin Rosenthal on the topic Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management w/ Caitlin Rosenthal Majority Report 4/15/19 (interview begins around 19:25 in this video):

Caitlin Rosenthal is the author of the book Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (2018), which looks at the accounting methods of the Southern planters, some of which turn out to have been notably innovative. She finds, for instance, that the accounting practice of depreciation was one of their innovations. That is a method of allocating the cost of capital purchases like large machinery to annual income over several years. It can get complicated. But the basic idea is that a capital investment like machinery often has benefits spread over a period of years. And as the machinery is used, it also gets wear and tear that reduces its monetary value from what it was when it was purchased.

Slaveowners depreciated their capital invested in human beings, their slaves. As she explains in Why Management History Needs to Reckon with Slavery Harvard Business Review 11/13/2018:

... one of the key developments in the emergence of modern business is the idea that you should analyze your products to see exactly how much everything costs. And related to this is the analysis of depreciation – so thinking about how a large fixed cost like a railroad train might change in value over time, and how you should account for that.

In one of the most prominent accounting guides for planters, Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” he gives advice on how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people. For him, these are long-lived, complex, capital assets. They are human capital. He doesn’t call them that, but he gives instructions on how to account for their growth and value as they get older, as they learn new skills and how to account for their depreciation as they age or if they’re injured or even if they attempt to escape.

... depreciation is something that I’d gotten used to seeing as a sign of remarkable sophistication. It doesn’t show up in accounting textbooks until the late 19th century and here we are half a century earlier, and we have a Southern planter instructing people how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people. So that means that he was well ahead of his time in a setting that I had gotten used to thinking about as being one that was relatively backwards, one that wasn’t sophisticated. [my emphasis]

She discusses a different aspect of planter business methods in The perils of Big Data: How crunching numbers can lead to moral blunders Washington Post 02/18/2019:

Running a slave plantation involved lots of data carefully entered into paper spreadsheets and reports that were passed along to absentee owners in England. From the comfort of counting rooms, plantation owners could review this data without having to think too hard about the people it represented.

Some planters received standardized reports every month from their sugar plantations in Jamaica and Barbados. These careful records tracked the daily tasks of the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people they enslaved, all with an eye to maximizing profits. The accounts monitored the output of plantations as well as the “increase” and “decrease” of laborers, slaveholders’ chilling economic shorthand for births and deaths.

When you understand the context of these records - high mortality, punishing slave labor, racialized violence - the records are horrifying. But without that context, they erase as much as they reveal. They look like antiquarian versions of Excel spreadsheets. And, absent a moral perspective, the productivity enabled by data-driven analysis could be seen not as a marker of degradation but of progress.

This is also related to the historical issue of how much Southern slavery should be considered an integral part of American capitalism or viewed in some other way, e.g., an aristocratic holdover.

In To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice Boston Review 02/20/2018, Rosenthal talks about how our view of slavery and the kind of economy of which it was a part can have important effects on how we view political systems and human rights:

One place to begin is to describe the abolition of slavery not as a human-rights measure but as a form of market regulation. In the abstract, this shift makes sense: abolition not only stripped slaveholders of their property, it also restricted property rights. It prevented men and women from being sold (or selling themselves) into bondage. Abolition also outlawed certain kinds of transactions and, as a regulation of “bonds,” it restricted the right to contract.

Framing abolition as market regulation inverts conventional ideas about slavery and capitalism, particularly the assumption that free markets are fundamentally connected to other human freedoms. The shared modifier “free” elides vast differences between free markets and other kinds of freedoms: freedom to move, to speak, to assemble, to love. History suggests that these freedoms can both expand together and move in opposition to one another. In the Atlantic world, “free” trade in goods (and bodies) expanded even as millions of Africans lost control over their lives and labor. The relationship between free markets and other freedoms is not inevitable. [my emphasis]

Her analysis there doesn't imply that slavery was not a human rights issue. She's just explaining how the market view is also important. As she notes in the Majority Report interview, the way that slavery was abolished during and after the Civil War was confiscation of property without compensation. This is also relevant to the discussion of reparations for slavery. Because - and here's accounting theory again! - it can also be understood as "giving" individual slaves something of value (their own bodies) rather than paying the planters the money value of the property emancipation took away from them.

I haven't seen this particular angle discussed in the reparations discussion, probably because I'm not familiar with that discussion in any great depth with the issues being discussed in connection with reparations. But I can't imagine it won't be taken up in the policy discussion and polemics. Opponents of reparations could argue that emancipation actually was a substantial form of reparations, while advocates could point to it as an important precedent for the reparations idea.

Reparations for slavery as an abstract issue in the Democratic Presidential race

Ryan Lizza did a classic "horserace" article dealing with the policy of reparations for slavery, The 2020 Democrats' Reparations Debate May Tear the Field Apart Esquire 05/11/2019.

It's classic, because Lizza writes about various ways the issue might affect the Democratic candidates. But he manages to avoid explaining what such a policy would actually look like. The closest he comes is, "the idea that African Americans should be compensated monetarily for the destructive legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow."

A line like that might get a reader not familiar with the concept as far as thinking, well, we could give some kind of monetary compensation to former slaves. But there aren't any former US slave still alive. Unless we count people who were held in some kind of illegal slavery. And that would mean ... etc., etc. And how would we go about calculating the cost of Jim Crow segregation, and how would we define Jim Crow for that purpose, and, and ...

In other words, it is a complicated issue. And Lizza's piece leaves the reader only knowing that it's a significant issue in the Democratic Presidential horserace. But without any understanding of what "it" is.

Reparations for slavery as a 2020 Presidential campaign issue

Reparations for slavery is currently attracting some amount of attention in the context of the 2020 Presidential campaign, as illustrated by this APNews story from Errin Haines Whack, 2020 Democratic hopefuls embrace new meaning of reparations 02/26/2019. Bernie Sanders got a question on it during his CNN town hall event this past Monday.

This is an issue that has been seriously discussed in American politics for at least a couple of decades. The AP story cites some comments by Barack Obama on the issue.

The "new meaning" referred to in the headline is the interpretation of reparations for slavery as being general efforts to oppose discrimination against African-Americans and to provide them more adequate access to public services and expanded opportunities.

The story also suggests that Republicans would like to use the issue in a racially polarizing way. It quotes Whit Ayers, who identifies himself on Twitter as a "Republican pollster at North Star Opinion Research," quoting him as saying, “There is no doubt that issues of race have been and remain critically important in American society. But the idea that you resolve those issues by taking money from white people and giving it to black people will make race relations worse, not better. Republicans would love to have that debate.” (my emphasis)

The AP article mainly illustrates how this issue can be used for throwaway lines in political campaigns.

But the concept is neither trivial nor easy. There is serious scholarly work on the concept, e.g.: Thomas Craemer, International Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade Journal of Black Studies 49:7 (2018; DOI: 10.1177/0021934718779168); Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Anthony Lombardo, Framing Reparations Claims African Studies Review 50:1 (2017; DOI: 10.1353/arw.2005.0107).

Ta-Nehisi Coates also attracted quite a bit of attention to the topic in his article The Case for Reparations The Atlantic June 2014.