It is an utter failing in the discussions of race relations in America that so many consider achieving legal equality (if not equality in actual practice or systemic structure) for minorities should be the end of the problem of racism, instead of being the starting point and bare minimum in correcting centuries of crimes against humanity based on the color of one’s skin. While many white Americans (including well meaning liberals) tend to avoid the conversation around repairing that damage, it’s only by leaning into the topic that we can actually work towards a “post-racism” society.
Let’s start with some basics. One of the things I hear frequently when this topic comes up is “how would we even measure how much financial reparations should be?” That’s the easiest question to answer: take the relative growth of the GDP of the US since its foundation in 1776 until the emancipation, and you have the amount of wealth built on unpaid black labor. Divide by the number of black people in America, cut the check, and done (and no, I’m not interested in whether or not there is slavery lineage or not; the impact of slavery and its echoes in our culture affect all black people). Yes, those checks would be large. That’s just the easiest measurable financial impact, and you should wrap your head around it before we go any farther, because we’re not even close to done. Sadly, much of white America is already balking here.
The robbery of the generational wealth of black Americans in plain sight provides some financial context to work from, but it’s one dimensional; it has no capability of measuring the anomalies that might have been possible. How many black DuPonts, Rockefellers, and other legacy wealth families might have been? What would their impact have been on the social standing of black entrepreneurs through out the twentieth century?
Once we move past the simple financial equations, we start to see the far greater cultural impact of centuries of subjugation. This is the fact that white America consistently fails to understand: it is impossible to not have antisocial leanings when the society you have lived in for hundreds of years has been so anti-you. Dead Prez expresses this well in “Hell Yeah”:
Many white people see this video as celebrating crime, instead of understanding the message that many black Americans understand deeply: sometimes, when the system is designed to oppress you, the only way to beat it is to break the rules. And this is just one of countless ways in which the American majority is disconnected from the reality of the minority experience (a major driver of the “Don’t call me privileged” perspective).
This is where the perniciousness of modern American racism is based: a set of lies based on differences in lived experience that are readily explained by structures white Americans never see, much less acknowledge, which allows them to package those lies and believe them sincerely.
As soon as you start to recognize that the impact of slavery is measured not just by what is there, but also by what is not, you begin to see the aspects of racism in the systemic design of America, and how it perpetuates anti-blackness despite there being a framework of legal equality (which itself is poorly formed and enforced). How do you account for generations not offered higher education, and the broader cultural impact of that (including the networks of legacy alumni)? What reparations remove the “tracks” which separate black neighborhoods from white, allowing for easy discrimination against black people solely by locating your business on the other side of them? What affirmative action program brings fathers and sons unjustly imprisoned back to their families? As a country, time and time again, we demonstrate unequivocally that we are not willing to right the countless wrongs of the past. Without doing so, how can we hope to move forward into a more equitable future?
The things that are hung on black culture as negatives by white America (broken families, lack of wealth, cultural culinary mores, lack of higher education and employment, higher rates of incarceration) are the very things our anti-black system causes, by design. Less than 100 years ago, cities were being built to be segregated, and that architecture still shows to this day. Less than 100 years ago, law enforcement prominently featured Klan members who would show up to meetings in their police uniforms. Less than a human lifetime ago, black people were used without consent or knowledge in medical experiments which injured or killed them. Less than 50 years ago, southern trees bore strange fruit.
Which brings me to my final point: the very least we can do as white Americans, and I do mean the very fucking least, is to acknowledge this history instead of trying to hide it. We could reflect on what it would feel like every day to be othered, by something as visually representative as your skin color. We could think about the impact that having our family members be chattel slaves for more than 200 years would have, and how that impact would be felt for generations (many of those black heroes of civil rights you were taught about are still alive. It’s not some ancient history). There are people alive today whose grandparents were slaves. Trying to erase their history as something far in the past due to our own shame is a cruel slap in the face to those still living with those memories.
We should be working on actual reparations in this country, not for some sense of atonement of the collective guilt that drives us to hide from the past, but in the actual sense of repairing what was broken and stolen. But until such time as that happens, we can start by not handwaving away centuries of history which feed the bigotry we still see today, collectively work on dismantling anti-black systems and attitudes, and lay the path to cultural healing from a wound our society caused.
We fucking owe them.