Black History Month should not disappear into history this year without a discussion of reparations. While this has become a popular theme with some African-Americans (and a distinctly unpopular idea with many European-Americans), it remains a divisive issue.
The question is,
do white Americans owe money (as distinct from affirmative action and other reverse-racism behaviors designed to set right the wrongs of slavery and its aftermath)
to black Americans?There is no question that blacks, newly freed at the end of the Civil War, believed that Abraham Lincoln (or the Republican Party,
oh, yes, that Republican Party, or the abolitionists, or someone) had promised them the now-proverbial
Forty Acres and a Mule. (Based, erroneously, on
Sherman's Special Field Orders, No. 15, issued in 1865.)
The phrase lives on still, in reruns of
Gone With The Wind and the name of Spike Lee’s production company, and has become the basis of the perplexing problem,
okay, if we owe reparations, how much reparations do we owe?Reparations have been, in the past, typically owed by the losers to the victors. (The entire Roman empire was based on this premise, as was the aftermath of both the First and Second World Wars. Just ask the Germans; they’re still paying reparations to the Israelis, which is why all the taxis in Jerusalem are Mercedes...)
More recently, however, reparations have become owed by the oppressor to the oppressed. (A good example is the well-deserved case of Japanese-Americans, though even they had to wait more than fifty years for the money.)
No one (except maybe Holocaust-deniers) would argue that blacks were not oppressed in this country, beginning with the importation of the first slave in 1655. Slavery, the pleasant fiction of
Gone With The Wind notwithstanding, was
not a good thing for those enslaved. (No one, except those rare individuals who get some sexual satisfaction from it, has ever volunteered for the job.) Even the end of the First Civil Rights War in 1865 barely diminished their oppression, and some argue that it continues unabated to this day. The Second Civil Rights War, which began in earnest in 1965, made much more rapid progress than the century of Reconstruction and Jim Crow that proceeded it, yet it is still being fought fifty years later, and there remains a deep, cold pool of racism (on both sides of the ‘color line’) in this land that affects us all.
So, reparations. Forty acres and a mule.
Much serious academic study has gone into determining the indeterminable amount that blacks contributed, without pay, to the economy of this country (both
antebellum and after), and how much profit whites made from their labor. (This has even included estimating the profits that Boston insurance companies made on cargoes of humans making the Middle Passage from Africa.)
Being a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy, I wondered just what
Forty Acres and a Mule gets you, these days. If that’s what we owed in June of 1865 (on “Juneteenth”, when the slaves in Texas heard of their liberation), that’s what we owe now, 150 years later. The value of that land and animal in 1865 is meaningless today, of course, but surely we can let the market revalue the same property in 21st Century dollars.
Before we jump to the bottom line, however, let’s look at who is owed and who is owing.
In the census of 1870, there were 4.88 million blacks and 33.59 million whites; the percentage of blacks was 14.5%. In the 2000 census, there were 38 million blacks and 236 million whites, giving a black population of 16%. Close enough. (We will, for ease of calculation, leave out the Native Americans and Hispanics, some of whom even owned slaves prior to the Civil War, present in both 1870 and 2000.)
But who should be included in the ‘black’ column and who might be excluded from the ‘white’ column?
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his recent PBS series
African American Lives, discovered, to his obvious discomforture, that his heritage was fifty percent white. (He even asked “Do I only get half a reparation check?”, little realizing that his white half would also have to contribute to it...) Many African-Americans have the same mixed ancestry, in differing percentages. But do all persons who ‘self-identify’ (the term used by the Census Bureau, since they do no DNA testing to determine the proper category for a resident) as black qualify for reparations? Do black people whose ancestors (or they themselves) came to this country after 1865 qualify? How ‘black’ do you have to be to qualify, and is it, like Henry Louis Gates, proportional?
Are white people whose ancestors (or they themselves) came to this country after 1865 exempt from having to pay reparations, and is that exemption proportional? (Over ten percent of Americans claim Irish ancestry, nearly all of whom came here after the Potato Famine of 1845, and thus had little chance to profit from slavery.) What about white people (myself included) whose ancestors fought, were wounded, and died in the Union Army? Are they exempt, or do they get a deduction for their ancestral efforts? What about white people (myself included) whose ancestors fought, were wounded, and died in the Confederate Army, whether or not they ever owned slaves? (Remember, even those who fought in the Lost Cause for those mythical “States Rights” did so for the right to some day, if they were lucky, own slaves...) Do they get double-billed for the intransigence of their ancestors?
All this is why actually
paying reparations may prove difficult.
But I’m willing to settle up (once that Union
vs Confederate ancestor thing gets worked out) and pay my part of the debt. But the question remains,
how much?
According to a recent Google search, 40 acres of wooded timberland in Choctaw County, Mississippi (remember, the original offer was always rumored to be for “forty acres of Mississippi bottomland”) is for sale for $100,000. The same search produced a mule auction at which the average price for a first-class mule was $5,000.
Forty acres and a mule? $105,000 in 2006 dollars.
Figure two decent mules (easier to plow with), and next year’s taxes (remember
Gone With The Wind?), and we’ll round it off at $110,000.
Now for the hard math: Let’s assume that every black person (men, women, and children) in the 2000 census gets that amount. The total is $4,180,000,000,000. That’s 4.2 trillion dollars, which sounds like a lot of money. Divided by all the white people (men, women, and children) in the 2000 census, that’s $17,711 each. Not so bad on a per-head basis (unless you’ve got a wife and six kids, of course.) Assuming they issue bonds to pay it, I’ll sign up for a payroll deduction for my share right now.
Do reverse-racism regulations and quotas (like affirmative action) go away once the bill is paid? Do Confederate flags get outlawed, or just ignored? Do Jerry Farwell and Jesse Jackson have to go open a church together somewhere and preach on alternate Sundays? All questions for a rant on another day...
Since my ladyfriend is just now going through it with a daughter (and I'm currently working for a purveyor of wedding outfits), I finally understand that women actually believe that, on their wedding day, they truly become some sort of medieval-style princess, with all the rights and privileges thereof. Imagine Princess Buttercup mixed with an equal amount of Elizabeth Taylor (just divorced from Richard Burton) and you begin to get the picture. (As shown by the photo at left.)
