Reparations, Once Again (original) (raw)
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DOI 10.1007/s12142-007-0055-x Reparations, Once Again
2007
Reparations whether to blacks for slavery, or to Indians for land theft, or to settle any number of other conflicts, has an interesting political background. Analysts on the left, who are usually no friend of private property rights, nevertheless rely on this doctrine to support their case for reparations. Those on the right, in contrast, who supposedly defend the institution of property rights, jettison them when it comes to reparations. It is only libertarians, such as the present authors, who both favor private property rights in general, and, also, apply them to the issue of reparations, who are logically consistent.
The Libertarian Argument for Reparations
Journal of Social Philosophy, 2024
The case for reparations for grievous acts of historical injustice has been getting a lot of attention lately. But I aim to broaden the discussion in two ways. First, I am not only going to talk about reparations as a means of rectifying the injuries inflicted by slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples, the theft of their land, and the ongoing ripple effects of these historic wrongs. I am also going to talk about reparations for a wider variety of historical injustices, including, most importantly, the long-term economic oppression of women, and the historical exploitation of labor. Second, I am not going to base my argument on the principle of equality, as most people currently do, but on the principle of liberty, as it is understood by libertarians on both the right and the left, at least as long as they believe what they say they believe. Not because I think that egalitarian demands for reparations are wrong. Rather, my point is that the principle of liberty, which is often raised as a defense to claims based on the principle of equality, actually leads to exactly the same place. Finally, I will discuss one possible form of reparations that has largely been ignored, but which has a special connection to libertarian principles, and I will show how it can provide some real relief without provoking the opposition that society-wide redistributive remedies usually face.
Philosophy Public Policy Quarterly, 2000
B ecause of its visibility, Randall Robinson's new book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, may rekindle a broad public debate on repara tions. The issue is not new, nor is public debate abo ut it. In 1969, the civil rights lead er James Forman presented the Black Manifesto to American churches, demanding that they pay blacks five hundred million dollars in reparations. The Manifesto a rgued that for three and a half centuries blacks in America had been " exploited and degraded , brutalized, killed and persecuted " by whites. This treatment was part of a persistent institutional pattern of, first, legal slavery and, later, lega l discrimination and forced segregation. Through slavery and discrimination, the Manifesto went on to contend, whites have extracted enormous wealth from bl ack labor with little return to blacks themselves. These facts constitute grounds for reparations on a massive scale. American churches were but the first institutions asked by Forman to discharge this great debt. The Manifes to achieved immediate notoriety and stimulated debate in newspapers and magazines. Within a short period, however, public excitement died away. The issue of reparations has always found favor within the African American community itself, taking root not long after the freeing of the slaves during the Civil War. It flourished around World War I with the Marcus Garvey movement and later fo und voice in Forman's Black Manifesto. It has recently regained vital-• ity, given new life by a recent precedent, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which Congress authorized payment of reparations to Japanese American citizens who had been interned during World War II. In each
A Lockean Argument for Black Reparations
2003
This is a defense of black reparations using the theory of reparations set out in John Locke's The Second Treatise of Government. I develop two main arguments, what I call the "inheritance argument" and the "counterfactual argument," both of which have been thought to fail. In no case do I appeal to the false ideas that present day United States citizens are guilty of slavery or must pay reparation simply because the U.S. Government was once complicit in the crime.
The Debate Over African-American Reparations
Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2010
This paper offers an overview of the debate over reparations for African-Americans in the United States. We state the point in this way because there is little consensus about the " cause of action " for which reparations are sought, whether for slavery or segregation; for that matter, there is little agreement on the type of remedy reparations might effect. This raises the question of political mobilization for and popular views of reparations for African-Americans. It is well known that whites and African-Americans have very different perspectives on this issue. We seek to address the reasons underlying and the significance of this dissensus, stressing peculiarities of American political culture. Less discussed, however, have been the consequences for the reparations debate of recent historical developments in the United States – in particular, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. In addition to assessing the significance of these developments for the debate over reparations, we point to a number of new directions that the notion of reparations appears to be taking. We conclude with some thoughts about the ways in which reparations – understood chiefly in terms of their larger aim of enhancing racial equality-might realistically be achieved. College. We cannot claim to have enjoyed, but neither can we deny having benefited from the comments of an anonymous reviewer of our first draft. We thank Ereshnee Naidu for her excellent research assistance.
The Political Economy of Reparations
Over the last several decades, reparations theorists have continued to justify reparations as an amelioratory policy that fulfills America's democratic potential. Most recently, Roy L. Brooks has developed this optimism in America's democratic reformism into a theory of atonement. Unlike previous models, Brooks holds that reparations is justified solely by its ability to make America a racially reconciled society. This article argues that such hopes in America are illusory. Following the structural-colonial analyses of racism laid out by W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., and contemporary social scientists, I argue that America is not capable of moral transformation concerning racism, because racism is a permanent and necessary feature of our American society. While it is the position of the author that reparations is justified politically, it cannot be justified as a moral charge to an immoral white supremacist society. As such, I call for an anti-ethical deliberation on the issue of reparations-a consideration I hope will continue future debates on the subject.
Reparations for U.S. Slavery and Justice Over Time
International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, 2009
Many philosophers treat the reparations question as another occasion on which the non-identity problem has bite. They worry about the temporal distance between the crimes and wrongs committed and the proposed moments of reckoning with them, taking it to be a serious issue that-to put it starkly-the original victims of slavery are dead, and the original perpetrators are no longer alive either. 2 Whereas, I worry that there are no genuine philosophical problems here and that even refuting them may do little but to perpetuate interest in detours and red herrings. This is a real hazard, but nonetheless reflecting on the persistent cultural anxiety about reparations and the past may help to clarify the point of reparations and to reveal aspects of the intimate connection between our self-conception and group-identification. The fact that the institution of U.S. slavery officially ended long ago might initially be thought to be philosophically relevant for four reasons: First, it might be thought that repair is not possible because the injured are no longer alive. Second, it might be thought that repair is not possible because the perpetrators are not alive: since 'we' did not participate in the crimes ourselves, we cannot sincerely make reparations for that which we did not do. Third, issues of possibility aside, some complain that it is unfair for contemporary agents-who, with respect to slavery, are non-involved innocents-to have to bear burdens for the morally criminal behavior of others who acted in the past. 3 Fourth, the individual identities of the descendants of slaves depends upon slavery; were it not for the institution of slavery and the social conditions it produced,
Legacy of Slavery: A New Approach to Reparations
Building an Architecture of Peacebuilding in the United States, 2020
This article considers responses to U.S. slavery through the lens of transitional justice mechanisms. Government as well as universities are examined as sites of amends-making. Using this as a background, the article argues for a form of reparations not yet considered; free higher education for three generation of descendants of enslaved persons.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Brooks ed., 1999) [hereinafter WHEN SORRY ISN'T ENOUGH] (stating that white wealth has largely came about from stealing labor from blacks and land from native Americans). Consistent with the approach taken by the U.S. Census, I use the terms "black" and "African American" interchangeably. 7 The average white household has, by one estimate, ten times the wealth of the average black household. For greater discussion of this and other inequalities, see infra notes 91-2004] REPARA TIONS SYMPOSIUM: KYLE D. LOGUE 1321 injustice slavery represents, the potential size of a fully "reparative" transfer could be astronomical. Although most slavery reparations proponents decline to suggest specific dollar estimates of the appropriate transfer, some are willing to venture a guess. One researcher, for example, focusing on a stolen-labor measure of harm and using 1790-1860 slave prices as proxies for the value of unpaid slave labor, calculated a sum of between 448billionand448 billion and 448billionand995 billion,8 which in 2003 dollars would be approximately between 2trillionand2 trillion and 2trillionand4 trillion.9 By comparison, the entire U.S. government budget in 2004 is projected to be just over $2 trillion. More recently, taking a different approach to assessing the social harm associated with slavery, sociologist Dalton Conley suggested that if all of the present wealth gap between African Americans and whites were attributed to the institution of slavery and related injustices, a one time transfer of 13 percent of existing white wealth would be necessary to eliminate the black-white wealth disparity entirely.10 Alternatively, Conley suggested that a better approach might be to determine what fraction of existing household wealth is attributable to inheritance from prior generations, and to use that number to determine the extent to which current levels of black household wealth Jag behind those of whites because of slavery. Following that approach, Conley arrived at a more modest one-time tax of 3.7 percent of white household wealth to be distributed among African Americans.1 1 Only the most radical reparations supporters would regard such a massive wealth transfer as desirable, and few people-perhaps none-would regard it as politically plausible. Putting aside the discussion as to amount, the idea itself of a transfer of resources from whites to blacks is intriguing. What would such a transfer even look like? Perhaps the most obvious and most controversial possibility would be a program of direct cash transfers to African American taxpayers funded by federal tax revenues or, as suggested above, by some special tax on whites. Indeed such a system is what many slavery reparations proponents seem to have in mind. That type of racially 111 and accompanying text. 8 Robert S. Browne, The Economic Case for Reparations to Bla ck America, 62 AM. ECON. REV. 39, 42 (1972) (discussing work conducted by Jim Marketti, a University of Wisconsin graduate student, to determine "unpaid black equity"). 9 Dalton Conley, Calculating Slavery Reparations: Theory, Numbers , and Implications, in POLITICS AND THE PAST: ON REPAIRING HISTORICAL INJUSTICES 117, 119 (John Torpey ed., 2003) (observing that Marketti's estimates matched the sum demanded by a prominent black separatist movement, the Republic of New Africa)). 10 I d. at 122 (stating that a 13 percent transfer would be sufficient due to the African American population being approximately 17 percent the size of the white population). 11 Id. at 122-23. To arrive at this 3.7 percent figure, Conley assumed that there were six (22-year) generations from the time of slavery to the present. Additionally, Conley relied on the assumption, developed by prominent economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Lawrence Summers, that 80 percent of household wealth is attributable to inheritance. Id.