I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s piece in the Atlantic regarding Bernie Sanders and reparations. www.theatlantic.com/…
In it he states (and the Atlantic uses as a pull quote)
Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy. It is the indispensable tool against white supremacy.
I am a white white white person. There’s no trace of brown in my background unless you go back to when we were all hiking out of the rift valley. My tribes were the ones who got to the snowy bits and liked it.
I’m still working the family tree, but it seems likely one of my ancestors made it here in the first half of the 17th Century, potentially even on the Mayflower. Other ancestors of mine arrived here in the early 20th Century. One was a captain in the Connecticut militia in the Revolution, one was badly injured in a gas attack in France in WWI. My father fought at Okinawa and served in Guam during WWII.
I understand the crimes committed against the enslaved peoples of the United States. I understand how important it is to provide a level playing field for those who were affected directly and indirectly.
But I also understand that the crimes committed against the slaves may not be as great as those committed against the native people of the Americas. That doesn’t diminish the injuries done against the slaves but it does acknowledge that the population of native Americans may have gone from 112 million in 1492 to less than 6 million by 1620, partly through active genocide, and partly through problems of disease.
Now, I’m a pretty well off technologist and business person in my late 40’s. I’ve been very fortunate in my life though I did pass through a time in my late teens and early twenties where I didn’t have housing or food security and where couch surfing was a matter of avoiding homelessness.
So here’s my question — describe to me how any reparations work in real terms? How would you be determined to be eligible for reparation benefits or payments? How could many people prove they descended from slaves given the mess of Reconstruction and the diaspora or American Blacks from the south after the war? As an expediency, would African Americans in general be eligible? Even if they were descended from later African immigrants? How much of you needs to be descended from slaves to be paid reparations? How do you control for fraud, particularly by those opposed to the whole concept?
And then, what about Native Americans? How do we compensate them if we compensate descendants of slaves? Do we not? How morally is that acceptable? Are those non-participants whose families got here in the 1960’s or after also liable to bear the costs?
Finally how do you convince the electorate to support the idea? Does it matter we will be a majority minority nation in a couple of decades?
I’m skeptical, but I’m open to being convinced. Tell me why it’s a good idea and how it could be made to work in practical terms.