World and I Magazine - Reparations for Slavery?

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C U R R E N T I S S U E S
FEBRUARY 2000

An Apology and Reparations for Slavery?

By Jay Parker

At this point in history, the problem facing black Americans has nothing to do with the legacy of slavery and, as a result, cannot be ameliorated by "reparations."

n year 2000 campaign interviews and during debates in Iowa and New Hampshire, both Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley again flirted with the notion of calling for a "national dialogue on race." It sounded a bit like a broken record. The suggestion, for many of us, elicits groans. We cannot help recalling that in mid-June 1997, President Clinton launched what he said would be a "great and unprecedented conversation about race" that would "transform the problem of prejudice into the promise of unity." The would-be "conversation" became such a slanted forum for black grievances that many of its early advocates found the dialogues to be considerably less that memorable. However, in the fall of 1997 and the beginning of '98, three successive issues of the Lincoln Review Letter addressed the subject. Portions of that series, with some updating, are presented here as a refresher course on the subject.

The debate over an apology for slavery, needless to say, does not involve anyone who argues that slavery was, in any way, a worthy or defensible institution.

        At the same time in 1997, it should be recalled, several members of Congress wanted the United States to issue an official apology for slavery. A number of black organizations and leaders called for the federal government to pay "reparations" to the descendants of slaves. Apologizing, it seemed then and seems still, was and is very much in vogue--and not only in America. The then new British prime minister, Tony Blair, apologized for the treatment of the Irish during the potato famine in the nineteenth century. Pope John Paul II apologized for the Roman Catholic Church's treatment of "heretics" and others during the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation. Australia continues to apologize for its treatment of the aborigines.
        Here at home, President Clinton has already apologized to Hawaiians for the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani a century ago, as well as to the victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments in World War II. Apologies and reparations were paid 20 years ago to the still-living Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in detention camps after Pearl Harbor. It is quite different, however, when it comes to apologizing to black slaves, long dead, for deeds committed by white slave masters, also long dead.
        The debate over an apology for slavery, needless to say, does not involve anyone who argues that slavery was, in any way, a worthy or defensible institution. There has long been a consensus in the Western world that slavery is an abomination. It was an abomination to many slave owners, but sad to say, economically it was deemed too important to relinquish. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter to A.C. Hodges in 1864.

* The legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation. Following the Civil War, most freed blacks remained on the farms.

        Those who advocate a formal apology believe that such a step would have an ameliorating effect upon race relations, but many others sharply disagree.
        Professor Thomas Sowell calls an apology for slavery "mindless mush." He writes: "First of all, slavery is not something like stepping on someone's toe accidentally, where you can say excuse me." If the people who actually enslaved their fellow human beings were alive today, hanging would be too good for them. If an apology would make no sense coming from those who were personally guilty, what sense does it make for someone else to apologize ... today? A national apology," writes Sowell, "also betrays a gross ignorance of history. Slavery existed all over the planet, among people of every color, religion and nationality. Why then a national apology for a worldwide evil? Is a national apology for murder next?"
        Underlying many race-based programs in recent years has been the notion that all living white Americans are somehow beneficiaries of centuries of discrimination against blacks. Conversely, we are led to believe, all contemporary blacks are its continuing victims. In this formulation, white Americans whose ancestors arrived on these shores after the Civil War and Emancipation remain beneficiaries of slavery, and black Americans born more than a century after slavery's end are still being victimized by it. Columnist Mona Charen asks, "What about immigrants, like Koreans or Vietnamese, who only just arrived? They did not participate in discrimination against blacks, nor did their ancestors."
        Then Charen adds: "So many blacks in Africa have suffered starvation and massacres in the 130 years since slavery was abolished that at least one black writer has expressed his gratitude that his ancestors were taken as slaves to America. History is not simple."

Underlying many race-based programs in recent years has been the notion that all living white Americans are somehow beneficiaries of centuries of discrimination against blacks. Conversely, we are led to believe, all contemporary blacks are its continuing victims.

        What many black activists want, of course, is not an official apology for slavery but the payment of massive reparations to today's black community. In the 1950s and '60s, the reparations movement was manifested as the Republic of New Africa and led by the likes of Audley "Queen Mother" Moore and the former fugitive Robert Wil1iams. In 1969, James Forman, director of international affairs with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, interrupted a service at New York City's Riverside Church to deliver his "Black Manifesto" demanding $500 million in reparations from white synagogues and churches. At the 1995 National African-American Leadership Summit--billed as a follow-up to the massive District of Columbia rally sponsored by Rev. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam--the call for reparations drew a quick consensus. Even such so-called moderates as Hugh Price, president of the National Urban League, and offbeat Harvard Professor Cornel West, who shared the stage with radical ministers Farrakhan and Ben Chavis, expressed no disagreement. In 1994 a summit was held in Detroit by the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. The group called for, among other things, the creation of an independent state exclusively for blacks and $23,000--as well as access to land, money, technology, and tax deductions--for any black citizen descended from slaves. Among those attending were Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, and Nation of Islam leaders, and demands varied from speaker to speaker.
        Many black voices have risen in opposition to the very idea of reparations for slavery. Walter Williams, chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, describes the call for reparations "just another scam" and argues that at this point in history, "slave owners cannot be punished and slaves cannot he rewarded. Black people in our country have gone further than any other race of people. You cannot portray blacks as victims. It's an insult to their progress and success. Most of [today's] problems have nothing to do with race; they're social and economic."
        The call for reparations, states Michael Meyer, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, "is an embarrassment of muddled thinking--but then, foolishness and pie-in-the-sky sounding off are par for those who believe the world owes them. ... However one defines it, 'reparations' is just another word for the old hustle." But columnist Charles Krauthammer proposed "a historic compromise, a monetary reparation to blacks for centuries of oppression in return for the total abolition of all programs of racial preference; a one-time cash payment in return for a new era of irrevocable color blindness." Is he serious? How much cash is enough to "settle the score"--$l5 per black? Sounds uncomfortably like the old slave auction, but look who's holding the gavel this time.
        The fact is that the problem facing black Americans has nothing to do with a legacy of slavery and, as a result, can hardly be ameliorated by "reparations." The problem is that many black leaders and groups have a vested interest in proclaiming that things are bad and getting worse. Yet, while black leaders persist in this direction, the facts vitiate their claims.

* Black Americans have achieved unprecedented progress. Persistent problems have more to do with the disintegration of the family structure than the continuing legacy of slavery.

        The main story with regard to black Americans since the 1960s is "black progress," argues Abigail Thernstrom, coauthor with her husband of the widely praised study in book form Americans in Black and White. "No group in American history ever improved its position so dramatically in so short a time," notes Thernstrom. In the 1950s, barely 1 in 10 blacks were in white-collar occupations. By the 1990s 4 in 10 held such positions, compared with 1 in 5 whites. In 1990, the median income of black married couples was a little under $40,000, which was 84 percent of the income of white married couples. In 1967 the comparable figure was 60 percent.
        The real problems, which do exist, relate in large measure to the black underclass in the nation's inner cities who suffer not from "white racism" or the "legacy of slavery" but from an internal breakdown of the family structure. In the 1960s, the overall family structure of black Americans began to crumble.
         In 1950, some 78 percent of black households featured a married couple, comparing loosely with 88 percent of white households. The proportion of black children born in female-headed households was 23 percent in 1960 and 62 percent by the end of the 1980s. In 1988, some 56 percent of single-parent black households with children were living in poverty, compared with 12.5 percent of two-parent families with children.
        No serious problem facing society will ever be resolved unless it is diagnosed properly. Our inner-city problems will not be solved by "apologies" and "reparations." Liberal Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. of Harvard tells his fellow black scholars that they must learn to speak about black poverty in a way that "doesn't falsify the reality of black achievement." Washington Post columnist William Raspberry says that the civil rights movement was a largely successful battle against the "external enemies of black progress." It is now time, he insists, "for a full-scale movement against the internal enemies of our progress."
        The Civil Rights Act of 1964, we often forget, specifically states that discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and age is to come to an end. In the year 2000, much of it has. Let's continue to move forward to a society in which individuals are judged on their personal merits, not their race or color. Let's not perpetuate division by harkening back to a society in which Americans of different races were at war.

Jay Parker is president of the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, a nonpartisan public policy organization in Washington, D.C. He is editor of the Lincoln Review and president of the Abraham Lincoln Foundation for Public Policy Research. Parker has also served as a consultant to several federal departments and agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, and Health and Human Services.