It’s long past time for the United States to create a program of reparations for Black Americans, not just for slavery but the second, third, and fourth iterations of systemic racism in the United States–the segregation in North and South after the Civil War, the terrorism against Black people perpetuated by the lynchings and chain gangs of Jim Crow, the attack on Black communities through urban renewal and red-lining, and the mass incarceration carried out as a result of the war on drugs.
Each of these policies were created by the white supremacy and systemic racism that was created in the 17th century by rich white people who sought to use create and heighten racial division to undermine opposition to them. Each of these policies have had not only an immediate and devastating impact on the Black people in one generation but have had been repeated in different ways in generation after generation. And each of these policies have had effects that have echoed down through the generations, leading Black individuals, families and communities to have fewer economic resources and opportunities than white people year after year, decade after decade, for the entire history of our country.
White people often say that they are not responsible for the sins of slavery and shouldn’t be asked to pay for reparations in the 21st century. That is true. But saying that forgets first, that the effects of slavery were long lasting. Had enslaved Black people had the same opportunities that white people did in the early 19th century, their economic well being would have been far greater. They would have become, like white Americans family farmers who accumulated wealth. They would all have had a primary education as this country started giving white people in the 1830s. Some would have gotten even more education and moved into the middle class, just like some white people did.
Because they did not, after the end of slavery Black people were not able to take advantage of the economic opportunities the last 19th century provided. And that worked to benefit white people who did not have to compete against talented Black people.
And second, slavery did not end white supremacy. In the aftermath of reconstruction, the rise of the Klan and other terrorist organizations used lynching and the destruction of Black live and property to keep Black people from taking part in politics and much of economic life. That limited their ability to use the political process to lift themselves–and poor white people as well–up. The result was that labor and tax laws in the South systematically harmed poor people, both Black and white, and benefitted rich white people. And wherever Black people began to make progress by relying themselves and creating more or less self-sufficient thriving economic communities, whether in Tulsa or Wilmington of many other communities, white mobs too often were resentful and destroyed those communities and killed many people within them, setting back economic progress for Black people.
While the post-slavery oppression of Black people was worst in the South, it was a feature of our entire country. Hard color lines in occupations was found throughout the North long into the 20th century–and in fact continues today. Residential segregation was found throughout the North long into the 20th century–and continues today. Black communities had fewer public services, from trash collection to easy access to government offices long into the 20th century, and that continues today as well. Discrimination against Black people was a fact of every day life and that, too, undermined Black economic progress and not for just one generation at at time.
And if those policies were not bad enough, prosperous Northern Black communities created by World War II industries were systematically undermined both by redlining, which prevented Black people from securing mortgages, and by the flight of white owned businesses and people from cities to the suburbs where Black people were not welcomed. These things, and the barriers they created for Black economic life, did not just happen. Redlining was created by the federal government’s mortgage guarantee programs. Vibrant Black communities were undermined by Urban renewal programs and highway construction. While flight was aided and abetted by Interstate Highways and massive federal support for the creation schools and water and sewer systems in suburban communities. And Black people were kept out of suburban communities by racial covenants that prevented housing from being sold to Black people well into the1950s and by zoning policies that prevented the creation of affordable housing in the suburbs. These policies may not have been as immediately violent as the attack on vibrant and prosperous black communities like Tulsa and Wilmington, but their effects on vibrant Black working class and middle class communities in Northern cities were as devastating and ultimately did terrible violence to the opportunities and lives of Black Americans.
And then In the 1950s and 1960s the FBI working with state and local police officials spied on and to divide Black civil rights organizations and the Black Panthers. And when that did not work they imprisoned them on often trumped up chargers or murdered them while they slept. And then in the last thirty years of the 20th century Nixon’s war against drug and similar state and local efforts was mostly directed not against white drug users–the vast majority of drug users– but Black ones. And the result was the mass incarceration of Black men, which again, had devastating effects on Black communities and economic life.
I’ve only touched the surface of this country’s white supremacist war against Black people. But I want to add one more important point–from the beginning to the end of that war, the Black family was a target of white people. Slavery divided Black families. The continuation of slavery by other means through he unjust conviction of Black people who were then used as unpaid laborers in chain gangs did so as well. And so did mass incarceration. White sociologists in the 1960 wrote frequently about how many Black families were headed by women. But it took a Black sociologist William Julius Wilson to point out that systemic racism that severely diminished economic opportunities for Black men and mass incarceration were the reason.
This history justifies not just the most abject apology on the part of white Americans to Black ones but the adoption of a policy of reparations. How that policy should work is an open question. I’m of the opinion that substantial funds–tenes of billions of dollars should be devoted primarily to investing in Black communities, breaking down racial segregation and building up opportunities for Black people through investment in education and job creation not primarily in sending individuals checks. But ultimately I don’t think that’s a decision that white people like myself should make. Rather we should create Black run institutions funded by reparations to decide how these funds should be spent.
I understand that most white people aren’t aware of the history I sketched above and don’t understand the moral case for reparations. I’m only aware of it through a bit of a fluke. I was trained as a political philosopher in the 1970s. One of the other students of my dissertation advisor, Michael Walzer, a man named Robert Amdur wrote an article making the moral case for reparations in the journal Political Theory in the late 1970s. I read it and found the argument compelling. And from there I discovered that a Black state representative named Dave Richardson had been introducing legislation in Harrisburg to study reparations. When I moved to Mt. Airy in 1998 I learned that our Councilwoman, Donna Reed Miller, who later became a friend, had worked for Richardson and I started studying the issue again and reading more widely in the history of white supremacy in our country. And then I realized that the case for reparations was not just compelling but overwhelming.
It’s time for more white people to raise our voices in support of not just ending our history of white supremacy and systemic racism–which sadly continues to this day–but in making the only apology for it that would really count, a generous policy of reparations for the wrongs our ancestors did, that we benefit from, and that continues to this day.