Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have apparently indicated that they support the concept of reparation payments to African-Americans, although there are serious questions about whether the measures they contemplate are actually “reparations” in any meaningful sense. Warren is also open to the idea of reparations for Native Americans. Whether she would qualify for the payments herself is unclear.
Creating and implementing a reparation program would be devilishly hard. The question for today is, who pays? If you think that issue is simple, and the answer is white Americans, consider the following:
- WHAT IS THE STANDARD FOR WHITENESS, AND HOW WOULD IT BE ASCERTAINED AND ENFORCED? I suppose you could go back to the definitions used in the Deep South prior to desegregation, but if that makes you uncomfortable, it should. In addition, there is no obvious way of tracking the history and the DNA of over 300 million people to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether they are “white” or not.
- WHAT ABOUT THE EUROPEANS? Americans were not, by any means, the sole beneficiaries of slavery. From the descendants of cotton mill owners and workers in Lancashire to the heirs of ship owners and slavers throughout Europe, countless people made money off of slavery who could not be made liable for reparations.
- WHAT IS THE TRIGGER DATE, AND WHAT IS THE CRIME? If the issue is limited to active participation in slavery, liability should logically be limited to the heirs of slave owners. If the issue is expanded to include de jure segregation, only Southerners should be liable, if you can somehow determine who a “Southerner” is. If the problem includes de facto segregation, all white Americans are guilty in some way; that system would be much easier to enforce. As we will see in a later post, however, computing the amount of reparations becomes vastly more difficult if it includes de facto segregation.
- ARE THERE ANY OFFSETS? It seems obnoxious to charge the descendants of people who fought and died to end slavery with reparations. Native Americans also have an excellent claim to be exempt; in fact, you can easily make a case that African-Americans should be paying reparations to them.
And this is one of the easier issues. I’ll tackle the identity of the beneficiaries tomorrow.