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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Nobody has made this argument better than Ta-Nehisi Coates in _The Case For Reparations_:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...

I think a lot of people's brains throw an exception on the title, as you can see in replies. There is no point where he calls for reparations!

People just won't click through, give it a skim, and see he's only giving an extensive history and suggesting a study to identify and (if needed) correct lingering effects of slavery and ongoing effects of racism. I learned so much about the past and present of racism back when it was published.

I found people's reactions maddening, until I realized (obviously) that this article is a pretty good acid test for who on a thread is arguing in good faith.

There was a debate about reparations in quite another context - the British colonisation of India. Though not connected with the topic being discussed, the question of reparations for historical wrongs is presented in an interesting manner.

https://youtu.be/f7CW7S0zxv4

The idea of reparations after x years seems insane to me. I can understand it if the people affected are still alive, because that would just be seeking damage from unjustly treatment. But when it's a about dead oppressors/oppressed then you are punishing someone for something they didn't do.

And then of course there is always the discussion about how to calculate the fair amount.

While I don't know if reparations are the right solution, I think it's a bit rich to suggest that descendants of slaves aren't "people affected" given the enormous disparity, in almost all metrics, between black and white wellbeing.

While I agree in principle, how far back do we go? 10? 100? 1000 years? Or somewhere in between?

The focus would not be on the damages suffered by those who are dead, but the residual effect on those who are alive. You don’t need to pick an arbitrary time scale, you can just look to the magnitude of the residual effect (which will attenuate over time). Right now, about two generations after the end of legal segregation, blacks make 1/3 less per capita income on average than the national average. So it seems like the residual damage is still very strong.

Agreed. One might hope the 'residual effects' would attenuate over time, but the jury is still out. In large part because our society still has plenty of white supremacist social structure baked in, it's not just residual effects but ongoing harm.

But in calculating reparations, wouldn’t you want to compare the wealth disparity between descendants of slavery and the average per-capita wealth of the African countries from which the slaves originally came? As opposed to average white American wealth? Isn’t the former more indicative of the damage caused by slavery? After all, had there not been slavery, the descendants of slaves would certainly have very different economic outcomes, right? But it’s probably not even so simple since many descendants of slaves also have some European ancestry by way of mixing with white Americans, so maybe we would need to figure out the degree to which mixing occurred and weight the calculation accordingly? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but surely they must be answered before the reparations conversation could be advanced.

We can talk about reparations for colonialism too.

Did you know Haiti was paying back it's "debt" to France for Haitian bodies "expropriated" from French slavery until 1947?

That’s pretty sad, but I don’t see what that has to do with my questions.

Interestingly, for you in particular, pretty much all of the evils of European colonialism throughout the world are in scope.

That's because you downthread hazarded the argument that perhaps (compared, implicitly, to Africans on the African continent) African Americans were better off as a result of slavery.

That's a reprehensible argument, but at least it puts you on the hook for points like these.

African Americans are economically better off as a result of slavery than their African peers. And without slavery, there would be far, far fewer African Americans than there are today. These are facts; no serious person disputes them. It’s not a big jump to suggest that slavery was economically advantageous for the current generation of African Americans.

This is simple reasoning; nothing reprehensible here. However, it would be reprehensible if I used this one positive outcome to justify slavery, which I’m very clearly not doing. Slavery is bad even if it did have a positive outcome.

Of course, none of this “puts me on the hook” for other other unrelated arguments, nor do they make Haitian slavery relevant to the subject of US reparations.

You've missed my point. The comparison you're drawing between African Americans and Africans in Africa (or, very obviously, for that matter in Haiti) is confounded by the fact that European colonialism set the course for all those people. You're comparing the experience of people oppressed by Europeans and Americans with the experience of people oppressed by Americans.

I certainly don’t understand your point. Where did I compare the experience of people oppressed by Europeans with anyone? Is your argument something like “Africans in Africa would be as wealthy as white Americans if not for European colonialism and therefore reparations should be computed accordingly”? This is the only interpretation that I can come up with, but it still doesn’t make the Haiti comment relevant.

There is simply no way to know what Africa, or the rest of the world, would be like in 2018 without hundreds of years of history of European colonialism -- with the settlement of the Americas and mass enslavement of Africans being part of this. To imagine what things would be like in Africa without, is just science fiction alternate history. European colonialism changed the planet. And not for the better for most non-Europeans.

I agree about it being impossible to make reasonable determinations about alternate histories. This is one of the more compelling arguments against reparations.

ridiculous. It is not difficult to make a determination that enslaving millions of Africans for hundreds of years, and the continued history of oppression against their descendents, has caused real harm which requires reparation.

What is ridiculous is you trying to detract from this history by pointing to an Africa that has _also_ been obviously and inarguably harmed by imperialism. It is absolutely indefensible.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. Since you didn't put forth an actual argument, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Have a good day.

This of course ignores that a sizeable portion of inherited white American wealth and associated living standards was built from slavery.

It ignored lots of things. I have no idea how we could even get in the right ballpark even if reparations were morally desirable.

Pay enough to even out the black-white income difference (about $8,000 per person per year).

That doesn’t make sense. Without slavery the current generation of African Americans wouldn’t have incomes equal to white amAmericans. You’re shortchanging other races, not to mention everyone who has to pay for the reparations but never meaningfully benefitted from slavery.

Good thing then that Ta-Nehisi Coates argues by more recent events.

I think Coates' concept of reparations would be for the Jim Crow and later practices that crippled African Americans' ability to build wealth like white people have. Things like housing discrimination, job discrimination, etc. Perhaps also things like the Tulsa Race Riot and other efforts that wiped out black business districts.

Consider the problems Jackie Robinson, first black player in Major League Baseball, had in trying to buy a house in the suburbs of Manhattan (Westchester County, NY and in Connecticut)

http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/jackie-robinson-b...

For these things, the perpetrators and/or their children are likely still alive, as are the beneficiaries.

Contemporary young people should find it easy to understand how this worked and how housing discrimination prevented wealth building. That's because the same thing is now kind of happening intergenerationally via older NIMBY homeowners restricting supply and driving prices to unattainable heights. "Generational redlining" is of course an unintended consequence rather than an intentional policy, but the nature of the effect is illustrative and could serve as a teaching moment.

Good or bad, homeownership is a major way people build wealth in our society. Being excluded from it prevents you from building wealth.

Take the outrage that many younger people feel about generational exclusion from homeownership and then realize that until relatively recently blacks were systematically excluded in much more explicit ways: exclusion from loans, red lining, etc. The effects were the same: no equity, no ability to escape increasing rent, family instability.

The single biggest problem with reparations, is that it would bankrupt several of Europe's leading economies, those that were responsible for hundreds of years of slavery and the forced transport of millions of African slaves to North and South America. As the nation most responsible for African slavery, the UK would be effectively economically destroyed by reparations. Europe would do everything it could manage, to refuse and dodge its overwhelming responsibility for slavery, including refusing to pay the trillions of dollars it would properly owe under reparations.

> The single biggest problem with reparations, is that it would bankrupt several of Europe's leading economies, those that were responsible for hundreds of years of slavery and the forced transport of millions of African slaves to North and South America.

Yes. To add to that: the mere fact that the current European economy cannot exist but for the spoils of centuries of imperialism and exploitation should itself give us pause.

For how reparations may play out, look to WW1. Heavy reparations were demanded from Germany. Its effects produced WW2, a much worse war.

That's largely a myth.

Very heavy reparations were demanded from France after the 1870-1871 war. Guess by who? Germany. France paid in full, quite quickly, despite the reparations being very large and the French economy being smaller than the German one in 1918.

Germany didn't really want to pay and it also fell into disarray due to other reasons, not related to the reparations.

Eh, it may be a myth that that the financial effect of the reparations led to the war, but what about their effects on public opinion? It doesn't seem surprising that heavy reparations might make it easier for populist leaders to win elections.

I know this is a sort of twisted morality, like not punishing a bully because he might beat you up, but as many have discovered, the moral high ground is not a shield.

> a myth

It is controversial, but not a myth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations

I don’t think this is true. I’m of the impression that the wealth difference between the western world and the rest of the world is primarily a biproduct of the industrial revolution. I imagine imperialism contributed, but most places in the world were imperial at the time or even more recently including Asia and the Middle East, and pretty much all places (including the precolonial Americas) practiced colonialism and slavery centuries earlier. Colonialism seems to be much less significant than industrialization, and of course European colonialism also drove industrialization in its colonies.

> I’m of the impression that the wealth difference between the western world and the rest of the world is primarily a biproduct of the industrial revolution

You cannot separate the effects of the Industrial Revolution on Europe from their imperialist practices.

The Industrial Revolution was principally fueled by resource extraction, labor extraction and genocide committed in the colonies.

> and of course European colonialism also drove industrialization in its colonies.

This is literally a standard white supremacist talking point. So I'm not really going to engage with it further, other than to point that out, and to mention that "trickle down" industrialization of the colonies doesn't justify the massive exploitation that European colonialism hinged on.

> The Industrial Revolution was principally fueled by resource extraction, labor extraction and genocide committed in the colonies.

This is patently false, and we know it’s false because the end of slavery and colonialism didn’t slow the pace of industrialization. Certainly some of the initial investment came from wealth created by slavery and colonialism, but it was by no means the principal fuel however much activist revisionist historians might like us to believe otherwise.

> This is literally a standard white supremacist talking point.

Maybe so, but “white supremacy” doesn’t logically follow, so the point remains valid. I’m not content to yield the truth to white supremacists, since their conclusion is incompatible with the truth. Of course this one benefit doesn’t justify colonization; injustices can have some positive outcomes—we can recognize this while acknowledging that the positive outcome doesn’t justify the injustice.

That is not what article is about.

The single biggest problem with repatriations is that slavery in the US did not exist in isolation. It existed in West Africa before and existed afterwards. It existed legally at all times in human history until quite recently.

There's probably a very good case for reparations, but I don't believe it will ever be workable politically. The age of Trump has shown not only a divisiveness but a racism from all quarters. A reparation based policy is inherently racial (obviously) and how do you get that across to the other 50% who if they don't agree might even be outright racists?

This problem of discrimination and a lack of opportunity is not racial, it extends beyond those lines, I feel like if it was approached from a broader perspective like that, it would have much more possibility of working. Politics based on race only end up dividing people and used by those in power. The biggest problem in this country isn't racial (though it is an issue), it is social. There's the haves and the have nots. The haves continually use racial and other issues to divide the have nots, and the have nots remain with nothing.

The response to Kanye's latest stuff has been really enlightening. The following is also from Coates.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im...

Read the article. For this thread, reparations aren't the point. I'm simply saying Ta-Nehisi Coates has done a better job than any other writer explaining how segregation extended far beyond the legal conclusion of government-mandated segregation.

You're not wrong, I'm just surprised when educated people aren't aware of this stuff. Jim Crow was discussed in high school here in the South and there was plenty of opportunity to learn about it in college. The only way people can't know of this is if they haven't actually interacted with minorities that much, which I guess is possible in certain places.

Similarly, this was really great, as it shows the outlash King got when he tried to approach wider social issues as well as the outright hostility against him in places we don't usually consider "racist".

https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/king-in-the-wilderness

Forget Jim Crow! Everyone knows about Jim Crow. Coates traces segregation almost into the 1980s.

There are two separate issues. Ongoing racism, and the lasting impact of past racism, segregation, and slavery. Per capita income for Africa Americans is 1/3 lower than the national average. Even among liberals it’s not a popular idea to say that a big chunk of that gap is not due to ongoing racism but lasting effects of past wrongs. The idea of paying reparations seems radical. But legally it’s not that odd. It would basically be paying money damages for state and federal governments’ past torts and constitutional violations. When slavery was ended, the government should have paid, under common law tort theories, a bunch of money for false imprisonment. When segregation ended, state governments should have been liable for damages for constitutional torts (what would now be 1983 liability).

>Per capita income for Africa Americans is 1/3 lower than the national average

And if you look at household wealth the disparity is even greater--much greater.

Perhaps the most memorable attempt at reparations created a common phrase,"40 acres and a mule", which unfortunately proved to have no resolution behind it:

"The Truth Behind ’40 Acres and a Mule’"

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cro...

from the article:

'And what happened to this astonishingly visionary program, which would have fundamentally altered the course of American race relations? Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a sympathizer with the South, overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and..."returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned it” — to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.'

This understanding of reparations is backwards. Reparations are not a democratic process, there is no need to persuade voters to vote for reparations. Reparations is a legal process. They are executed in courts. Especially in cases of "forced labor" laws both Federal and international have been quite clear that reparations are required. The only "problem" here is that US courts have consistently claimed that the centuries of slavery -- probably the greatest crime in the history of the republic -- are in fact a "political question." (It's worth noting that the question of standing is an aside. Former slaves themselves, nevermind their descendants, were denied restitution and sometimes killed for attempting to seek it.)

> Politics based on race only end up dividing people and used by those in power.

This is very, very easy for people who have never been victims of racism to say. The self-serving backwardness of this logic doesn't just violate basic moral precepts it also ignores the most basic legal precepts. If a group of people are subjected to centuries of abuse they should be awarded redress. It doesn't get more basic than that. To say that now is the time to "look beyond race" and ignore the the many crimes is just abhorrent.

(Ironically the whole situation does highlight that the worst crimes evade justice. If the slaves had been part of a foreign country that was conquered and enslaved then there would be no question about reparations. But because the slaves were themselves "Americans," where slavery was conviently not a crime, they will likely never be awarded justice.)

Reparations can be a legal or a political issue. To get the proper court setup to rule in favor of reparations, you need to appoint the correct justices (if you know a way of appointing Supreme Court justices that doesn't come through election and confirmation by elected officials, speak up). As shown in the Brown v Board of Education discussion here, even if the courts make such a ruling, without broader support, it's essentially powerless. If the SC or any other court today decided that reparations were i order, who holds the purse and who is in charge of executing that? Elected officials who are very beholden to the public.

More here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Hope

Reparations have been argued for throughout the world, with very limited success. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery

In 1999, the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission called for the West to pay $777 trillion to Africa within five years.[23]

Needless to say, that's not going to happen any time soon.

My point is that an action such as reparations is very, very difficult. There are other ways of righting those wrongs, such as through political action which sees proper funding go to inner city schools in minority areas, and better social/economic support for the lower class. This can be a racial argument, but these are issues for all races (even those in the rural majority demographic), which is why that's a broader strategy with a better chance of winning than dying on the hill that is reparations.

This is emotional reasoning to make me look like I'm immoral because I don't support dividing people up. I believe we have more in common than we have different. That's the opposite of racism. It's not that I don't support African Americans fighting for their rights, it is that I believe the most effective way of doing so is by banding together with other people with similar concerns and needs. That's more effective, it's always been more effective. It's the basis of winning coalitions in politics.

I just have a different viewpoint than you, it doesn't mean I'm "self-serving", "backwards" or "violating basic moral precepts". I care about this issue,I consider myself a humanist, I just believe there are more effective strategies than fighting a racial conflict. Casting out others becuase they are more moderate is not a winning strategy. I'm all about reality in politics. You too?

This is by no means universally true regarding conflicts, and in the case of reparations in regards to slavery, it certainly isn't true (see the above Wiki link).

> I believe we have more in common than we have different.

Your feelings and beliefs are irrelevant to the question of reparations. Again, this may be an abstract issue that can be dismissed with platitudes to you but many people -- especially the victims -- do not feel this way. Whose feelings merit greater consideration?

> But reparations for the crimes against them aren't incoming, nor do I believe they should be.

Not sure what this has to do with anything. I guess because some criminals escape justice it's not worth pursuing any justice?

> Get off your high horse.

Your argument boils down to "Get over it." You might dance around with it platitudes about common goals (in fact African Americans are still subject to systemic oppression in many states) but, just to be clear, this is what you are advocating.

Again, it's the sort of argument which is only possible from an extraordinary position of privilege and the goal is not justice but rather to perpetuate that privilege.

> I care about this issue,I consider myself a humanist, I just believe there are more effective strategies than fighting a racial conflict.

I'd suggest that more often than not, thinking in terms of some monolithic "racial conflict" is not an effective way to initiate change. Focus on real people, their lives, and their struggles. Name names. Get concrete. Otherwise you risk glossing over the crucially important details and perpetrating the very injustices you might seek to fight.

[1] Though there are some who suggest slavery wasn't a crime before the 13th amendment. This argument is at least honest though it leads to the conclusion that all state-sanctioned genocides aren't illegal. Then you've got those who suggest the Federal government wasn't the perpetrator of said crimes. This is actually a position I think is quite tenable. But it's all the more reason to let the courts do what they do best. Investigate the evidence, compel discovery, establish clear chains of evidence and harm, rule on the facts, identify the perpetrators and deliver justice.

What's truly extraordinary is not just that the USA never offered redress slaves and their children but that there has never even been any kind of official commission to establish the facts.

Unfortunately, feelings are irrelevant to real world politics and legal issues in many cases. I'm only trying to explain to you why I feel this way. If the feelings of victims were enough, that Wiki page would have at least one example of reparations.

Again, it's the sort of argument which is only possible from an extraordinary position of privilege and the goal is not justice but rather to perpetuate that privilege.

It's not saying "get over it". It's saying let us address this another way. You don't know who I've helped in the last months or year or during my life, so please don't patronize me. You are intentionally or not distorting what I'm saying.

Which is why I study politics for a living and why I cited sources in my post, you know, concrete things. Would you do the same?

If you're just going to castigate and isolate people who have different view than you (but maybe have the same goal as you), what's the point?

If you want to get concrete, let's do it, but you're mainly saying stuff like I'm "devoid of basic moral precepts" which is insulting and absurd. I'd like to discuss this, but not if its just going to turn into that.

> If you're just going to castigate and isolate people who have different view than you (but maybe have the same goal as you), what's the point?

Certainly not my intention. I apologize. I try to separate the ideas from the person. Alas, it's an emotional topic. It's interesting to note that the proposition, "racial crimes require racial justice" is not on its face so controversial. If the victims are all of one race then surely any legitimate response would be similarly focused, right? But as you point out such race-based thinking frightens and divides people. But, I maintain, these feelings of fear and division are not sufficient to deny the cause of justice. I belabor this point precisely because very often in modern democracies -- though it's true of all governments -- the majority will do not do the right thing. In the face of great injustice there will always be calls to accept the political reality. Such calls are calls to accept injustice. The great injustices of slavery and systemic racism were not eliminated by accepting political realities. It's doubtful that any great injustice can be eliminated in such a manner.

No worries. It is an emotional and complicated topic as you said.

We should not accept inequality nor injustice. We've just gotta find the best way (or ways) of combating it, which we may disagree about.

I linked an HBO doc about King in another comment. It's really interesting to see how strongly other civil rights leaders disagreed with his view on nonviolence, so there are probably many valid approaches.

If that kind of action was possible 50 years ago, certainly there's a lot of possibilities today.

The Civil War cost the deaths of 600,000 Americans - 360,000 northern, 258,000 southern. 40,000 of the Union war dead were African Americans. The southern economy was utterly destroyed in the process.

America has already paid a very high and bitter price to end slavery, in the usual currency for freedom - blood.

How much do you know about the Reconstruction period? Where, after a couple decades where Black people could vote and many Southern state legislatures were majority Black, white terrorism (literally, read up on it) returned the Southern Black population to economic dependency, political subjugation, and daily physical insecurity?

Half of America paid that price to keep slavery though, it’s just that they lost. Then that half invested new ways to screw over the same people for another hundred+ years.

320,000 Northern white men died to free the slaves. 258,000 Southern white men died for being slavers.

It's a pretty high price any way you want to look at it.

The Union wasn't just executing southerners for being slavers, they were putting down a treasonous rebellion.

The other way to look at it is that hundreds of thousands of Southern white men demanded a blood price of half a million lives to relinquish a right to chattel slavery that most of them could merely aspire to execute --- that such was the depth the depravity undergirding slavery reached.

As I said, the usual price for freedom is blood.

That's maybe a good song lyric but not especially useful as an argument here.

For the values of 'song' that include 'famous speeches by Mussolini/Schrute'.

I thought that was the wheels of history, not the price of freedom, but point taken!

I believe it was Marcus Aurelius who wrote 'It is not little details that a man making a dumb joke should fear'.

There are plenty of historical examples. For just American wars, we have the American Revolution, the Civil War, WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.

WW1 is a notable exception.

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