The reparations question is 158 years late and too narrow
May 13, 2023
If you live in the Kansas City area and pay attention to local news, you probably know that KC Mayor Quinton Lucas recently appointed people to a commission to study the question of reparations for what this KCTV-5 story calls "past harms and discriminatory practices against Kansas City’s Black community."
The question of reparations (it doesn't mean just money) has been around since the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, who numbered about four million then.
One of the catastrophes that happened as the war ended, of course, was the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the fact that Andrew Johnson, a southern sympathizer, became president. So such reparative ideas as William Tecumseh Sherman's notion of giving freed slaves "40 acres and a mule," though it started to be implemented, died on the vine.
Instead, we got the death of Reconstruction and the beginning of decade after decade of Jim Crow laws, legalized racial bigotry, Ku Klux Klan terrorism and other byproducts of the white supremacy written into the nation's founding documents and experience.
As Clint Smith writes in his 2021 book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, "As Republicans (Tammeus insert: Remember these were Lincoln-type Republicans) abandoned the Black community, Reconstruction was dismantled. Black American second-class citizenship was recodified through Jim Crow laws and enforced through the omnipresent threat of violence."
So 158 years later we're still toying around with reparations, an idea that should have happened a century and a half ago. Imagine how much more robust American society and the economy would be today if the residual effects of a racist system hadn't kept millions of Americans from reaching their human and social potential. It was -- and remains -- a self-inflicted wound that costs everyone daily.
Had a fair reparative system been implemented right after the Civil War, we could have begun the broader conversation about reparations for the African nations from whom the slaves were stolen. But that conversation got waylaid and only now in certain quarters is it beginning to gain any traction at all. If reparations for the slaves and their descendants has been 158 years coming (and who knows how many more years before it results in anything tangible?), reparations for such African nations as Gambia and Senegal have been equally delayed, thanks in part to colonialism.
So today I'm going to give you links to a series of articles to help you explore what reparative work in African nations might look like.
First is this story from last summer about various African nations joining together to push for colonial-era reparations.
Next, this 2020 story raises the question of what reparations are owed to Africa, given what the continent lost in people because of slavery and colonial suppression. "Calculating the value of a life," it says, "is complex, but as slavery has taught us, it’s been done before."
Next, this article asks whether the U.S. should pay reparations for its involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. "Calls for reparations to Africans and people of African descent have been accelerating in the twenty-first century," it says. "This article discusses only one aspect of that call, whether the USA should pay reparations to Africa for its participation in the transatlantic slave trade."
This next article from PBS and notes that a U.N. panel says the U.S. really does owe African nations reparations for slavery. The piece, by the way, talks about the old 40 acres and a mule concept.
Next, this NBC News piece notes that calls for reparation have been heard for a long time and asks whether global powers finally will respond.
In this piece, the folks at Pew Research report what we all know, which is that Black and white Americans differ a lot in their views about reparations for slavery. Maybe it's time, finally, to listen to Black Americans on this issue.
This next article, from The Conversation, talks about what the U.S. can learn from Africa as Americans think about reparations. "In the U.S. and globally," it says, "arguments for reparations mostly revolve around financial restitution. But a closer examination of the actual reparations efforts illustrates the limits of programs solely focused on financial restitution."
Finally, this article from the Cato Institute, argues that this issue is so complex that there's no way to figure out the right answers. Apparently we should drop the subject unless we can find a perfect solution to which everyone agrees. Yeah, right.
Again, think how not just Black people but all of us would be far better off today -- economically, educationally, socially and spiritually -- if reparations, even if just 40 acres and a mule, had been the rule right after the Civil War. But, no. White America decided instead to injure former slaves and, in the process, injure white America, too.
And if that's true of America, think how true it also is about our failure to repay Africa, a failure that has led, among other catastrophes, to deep poverty in countries whose citizens were stolen and enslaved.
We might be better people if our national model were "Repent, Repair, Restore, Rejoice."
(A quick P.S. to this post: As this Kansas City Beacon story reports, "A commission created to study William Jewell College’s historical ties to slavery recommends renaming Jewell Hall, its oldest building, to honor the enslaved people who built it." This is just one more effort to respond to this evil at the root of American history, but each such effort is worth considering.)
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A REMINDER THAT YOUR MOM WON'T BE HERE FOREVER
On this Mother's Day weekend, I'm thinking about my own Mom (shown here holding me, next to two of my eventual three sisters), who died not long after Mother's Day in 1996 at age 83. My faith tells me she's safely in God's arms, but that doesn't mean I don't still grieve -- which is precisely the point of this interesting column written by a Hindu. Perhaps the lesson here is to remind ourselves each day that our lives on Earth are limited and that we should spend our time here finding ways to love one another, including moms and dads who, like their children, sometimes you may want to chastise. The days are short, friends.
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P.S.: The news about how Southern Baptist churches are doing in terms of membership numbers these days is mostly bad, but not completely. As this Good Faith Media story reports, between 2021 and 2022 such congregations lost more than 457,000 members. That means that since 2016 they've lost more than 3 million members. But baptisms and in-person worship attendance figures are both up. Ten or 20 years ago the conventional wisdom (which often is wrong) suggested that theologically conservative churches such as those part of the Southern Baptist Convention were growing and would continue to do so, often at the expense of more theologically progressive Mainline Protestant churches. Now both groups are experiencing the diminishment of American Christianity that has been a story for decades. Here's the chart from Lifeway Research:
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