Why I Think Reparations for Racism Are Just

 I meant to write this post weeks (a month or more?) ago. Time got away from me, writing my stories and putting my journals online. Sorry. This is important stuff.

Impetus caem today with Think reparations are impossible? The story of Japanese Americans proves otherwise:

Many veterans of the Japanese American movement for redress are getting back into the fight for reparations. Once again, they say, it’s the right thing to do. And it’s a matter of reciprocity: the Japanese American movement was heavily inspired by the civil rights movement, and Black members of Congress were key allies in persuading the government to back it. These activists are bringing a rare message to the movement: one of hope.

“The Japanese American experience can be pointed to, can be used, to show that reparations are possible,” Ochi said. “It’s happened here – it’s possible and it’s necessary.”

I meant California faces backlash as it weighs historic reparations for Black residents as the basis for this post:

“Reparations for Slavery? California’s Bad Idea Catches On,” commentator Jason L Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, as New York approved a commission to study the idea. In the Washington Post, conservative columnist George F Will said the state’s debate around reparations adds to a “plague of solemn silliness”.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, according to 2021 polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2022 polling from the Pew Research Center. Both found that more than 80% Black respondents support some kind of compensation for the descendants of slaves, while a similar majority of white respondents opposed.

Pew found that roughly two-thirds of Hispanics and Asian Americans opposed, as well.

But in California, there’s greater support. Both the state’s Reparations Task Force – which released its 1,100-page final report and recommendations to the public on 29 June – and a University of California, Los Angeles study found that roughly two-thirds of Californians are in favor of some form of reparations, though residents are divided on what they should be.

When delving into the reasons why people resist, Tatishe Nteta, who directed the UMass poll, expected feasibility or the challenges of implementing large programs to top the list, but this wasn’t the case.

“When we ask people why they oppose, it’s not about the cost. It’s not about logistics. It’s not about the impossibility to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery,” said Nteta, provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It is consistently this notion that the descendants of slaves do not deserve these types of reparations.”

In California, notions of deservedness may be tied to a commonly referenced facet of the state’s identity – that it joined the union as a free state in 1850.

Long ago, while driving and listening to NPR, I heard a discussion about slavery reparations. I do not recall who was speaking, but this little fact stuck in my head: the economic benefits from slavery were national. I remained certain the Civil War paid the debt of slavery. 

However, the Civil War did not put paid to racism. There is also the matter of the Jim Crow Era. Whatever the Civil War did to slavery, Jim Crow deprived African-Americans their rights to a safe life and to economic opportunities for the sin of not being white. Conscious, intentional acts by local, state, and federal governments denied to African-Americans an equality in economic opportunities from mortgages to pay. The nation benefited from this discrimination.

The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy review: necessary chronicle of US racist history is a good starting place on this point:

Enunciated in 15th-century papal decrees, adopted in 1823 as part of US common law through the supreme court case Johnson v M’Intosh, the discovery doctrine offered theological and legal justification for conquest and its aftermath. Jones extensively quotes Robert Miller, a law professor at Arizona State University and a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe.

“In essence, the doctrine provided that newly arrived Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property rights over the inhabitants without knowledge or consent of the indigenous peoples,” Miller wrote, in 2012.

Jones adds: “Despite its near-total absence from white educational curricula … Native American scholars have been highlighting the impact of the doctrine of discovery for at least half a century.”

He meticulously details events that further scar US history. It is a first-rate chronicle of horror. Jones lays out the lynchings of three Black circus workers in Minnesota, in 1920, and of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. He recounts the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the destruction of “Black Wall Street” and the deaths of 300 African Americans.

He also delves in detail into the US government-sanctioned execution of 38 Dakota males in Mankato, Minnesota, in December 1862. It remains the single largest event of its kind in US history. Abraham Lincoln played a central role.

On the page, Jones lays out his pathway to a “shared future”. He advocates “reparations” for the descendants of enslaved Black people and argues for “restitution” to Native Americans.

The nation betrayed its creed, played the hypocrite. That, in and of itself, makes reparations just. We have Trump talking about making America great, again. We have no claim to an honorable greatness, a true greatness unless and until we live up to our creed that all people are created equally with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit fo happiness.

sch 9/4