Paying Reparations

THE WHOLE ISSUE of paying reparations to living African-Americans for injustices done to mostly dead African-Americans has gained a surprising amount of traction in recent times. It is no longer an outlier, a peripheral issue attracting interest from radicals, but rather, something which is receiving serious consideration among not only the black and progressive communities, but among academicians, political scientists and sociologists in particular, and the greater intellectual community in general. The devil, of course, is in the details. Slavery began in America in 1619, and extended two hundred and forty six years to 1865. That was, has been and continues to be followed by one hundred and fifty nine years of unfair, unequal treatment; segregation, discrimination, and our more subtle current forms of racially unjust inequality, systemic and otherwise. Pen has been put to paper, the calculations have been completed. Starting by reckoning the broken post Civl War promise of forty acres and a mule for each freed former slave, a promise broken by Andrew Johnson after the death of Abraham Lincoln,it has been calculated the the total last value to Arfican-Americans predicated on this broken proimse amounts to roughly fourteen trillion dollars,including the value of the acres of land rescinded, and the value of all the value which would likely have been gotten from this large stretch of land, stretching from South Corlina to Georgia, from lost agricultural crop value. It doesn't even take into consideration the tragic, horrible, incalculable damage done to all slaves between 1619 an 1865. How could that ever be determined with any degree of accuracy and verification? How does one use pen, paper, and computer to figure the amount of emotioal damge done, psychological damage, day after day, to millions of ensalved human beings in all their pervasive, never ending misery throughout their entire lives? One doesn't. Unpaid medical bills, lost time from work, unemployment due to repeated beatings and whippings? Impossible to determine. Most of the harm, indeed a huge perentage of it, was done, inarguably, to the actual enslaved people, not their descendents, certainlly not to those who experienced the pain of twentieth century segregation and discrimination. The living have hardly suffered, in real terms, great though their suffering has been, compared to the nearly incomprehensible sufferrng of those now long dead. The true victims are not among the currently living. To calculate the total value of the reperations necessary to give just redress for past injustices is in fact quite impossible, and would doubtless greatly exceed the fourteen trillion dollar amount named above. Whatever reparations would be paid to America's roughly twenty million living African-Americans they would recive not because they have earned and deserved all of it, but rather, because they would be getting payments which were due their ancestors, long ago, and can never be paid. To whom, among the lving would these reparations be paid? Lebron James has earned close to a billion dollars during his life, and has donated much of it to charity, mostly education. He might turn down his reparations check. Beyonce doesn't need the money either. The NFL and NBA are full of athletes whose accumulated wealth defies any immediate need for reparations money earned by their ancestors. The more closely one examines the actual circumstances involved in doing the accounting, the murkier and more impossibly difficult it becomes. It may well be that the best and indeed only way to actually make appropriate compensation for history, which can never be changed, is to change the present, and thus the future, by elminating forever the one true source of all the injustice ever perpetrated upon any race whatsoever; racism itself.