The Chris Moeller Archives

The issue of reparations in kleptocratic America

The United States owes African-Americans an insane amount of money. This really shouldn't be debated. The history of the nation is white people making money off the forced labor of black people, denying them access to wealth, keeping them de facto segregated in housing and opportunity, with the constant threat of violence by police to enforce the stricture.

It's this lack of access to wealth that trips us up time and again. We've been sold a story of ever-improving race relations, but there is great evidence that the pace has been glacial. According to the General Social Survey, a poll that has existed since the 1970s, 28% of white Americans in 2014 say they support a law that allows homeowners to refuse to sell their homes to blacks, even though such a law is illegal. A third of whites in 1972 agreed with the statement "white people have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhood if they want to, and blacks should respect that."

When slavery was outlawed, 13% of the total American population was freed, and even then, nothing was given to these people that had made the rest of us rich. New York City, the North's largest city, was built on slavery. For every dollar cotton made in the South, 40 cents ended up in the nation's business center on the Hudson River. When the Civil War broke out, the market value of slaves exceeded that of banks, railroads, and factories combined.

After the war, the prison industrial system took over for slavery. Vagrancy laws allowed police in the South to sweep up freed black men and rent them in convict leasing programs. In Nashville, Tennessee, between 1865 and 1869, the black prison population rose from 33% to 64%. Potential black business owners were charged $100 for business licenses when white owners were charged nothing.

When Social Security was enacted, it excluded domestic and agricultural workers-- mostly African-Americans. In 1935, that mean 27% of whites were ineligible, 65% of blacks. During this height of the Great Depression-- and Jim Crow, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation was created by the federal government and kept one million white Americans in their homes. Blacks were ineligible. The Federal Housing Authority, housing covenants, and redlining maps came next. Banks drew lines on maps to create neighborhoods where banks would not invest, and the federal government subsidized it. You didn't complain about it for fear of violence against your family. In 2001, an AP investigation determined that more than 24,000 acres of black-owned land was stolen simply through local chicanery and terrorism, and for generations, blacks had been legally kept from taxpayer-funded schools. Today, we still have "separate but equal" schools thanks to a system in which individual districts are funded by the local tax base. "White flight" has not been incidental. It's been a matter of social engineering.

For every dollar of assets white households have today, black households have 10 cents. In 1990, African-Americans owned 1% of our national wealth. In 1865, that number was 0.5%. The income gap between white and black has gone unchanged since 1970. Economists estimate that 80% of wealth in America is accumulated by intergenerational transfer. Martin Luther King, Jr. estimated that the U.S. government's failed promise of "40 acres and a mule" at the end of the Civil War was $20 a week since the late 1700's for 4 million slaves-- $800 billion. In today's dollars, that's $6.4 trillion.

Americans that are against reparations for slaves today are likely ignorant of the fact that reparations were made at the time of slavery's abolition-- to slave owners. The issue should be very much alive today for descendants of the victims that still live with the economic effects. If Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of U.S. Independence still matters, so does the fact of his slave ownership. If George Washington's presidency still matters, so does his blood-stained history as a slave owner. The issue remains unresolved. In a recent op-ed in the Atlantic, Ta-Nahisi Coates gave us the words of the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, "A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us, and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them."

posted by CM @ 7:14 PM