Among the contentious issues surrounding the fight for civil rights is reparations. This would be some manner of monetary compensation for centuries of slavery, followed by a hundred years of Jim Crow and other forms of institutionalized racism. There are some out there who advocate very strongly for reparations, believing that they are the only way to make up for the generations of trauma caused by slavery. They cannot, but they can begin to make things right. Just as there are those who advocate strongly for reparations, there are those who deny this course of action. Some view reparations as a wholly new, radical issue heralded in along with other insidious and un-American ideals such as Critical Race Theory and anti-racism. Others criticize how feasible these reparations could even be; can America really afford to write out a check to every African-American currently living in the United States? Who is going to pay for that?
However, even this debate is a cloistered one. In the early 19th-century, Congress instituted a “Gag Rule” prohibiting the discussion of slavery in the House of Representatives. Today, there is a similar Gag Rule surrounding reparations. During every session of Congress for twenty-five years, Congressman John Conyers Jr. presented HR 40, now known as The Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. This bill would authorize a congressional study of reparations, essentially giving the issue of slavery and it’s lingering after-effects for African Americans a hearing in the central legislative body of this nation. It has never made it out of the House, and was only in 2021 voted out of the Judiciary Committee. Regrettably, Conyers died in 2019. He never lived to see it come to pass. Three years later, it still has not.
The first argument that reparations are a new and radical idea are already based on a false premise. To compensate people formerly held in bondage has a long history, and “at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often affected” (Coates). Even after the Civil War during the period of Reconstruction, activists, even some Confederate veterans, advocated for reparations as a stimulus to help repair the Southern economy. It never happened. In 1870, the Union pulled Federal troops out of the South, ushering in a century of mob-violence and Jim Crow that would create a kind of “second slavery” (Coates). Reparations have been lingering in the back of the American conciousness from the very beginning, paired with the ever present forces that the deeply-endemic system of chattel slavery has established here.
To the latter point of how feasible reparations are, it is difficult to say. What should these reparations look like? One of the more recent advocates for reparations, Boris Bittker, described that “a rough price tag of reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income” (Coates). This then ushers in the inevitable follow-up question, who should that amount of reparations be payed to? When West Germany payed reparations for the Holocaust in 1952, they paid the sum directly to the State of Israel. In the case of reparations for slavery, this would be our country paying itself; there is no outside body to send the check to.
I want to close by saying that I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that we should be putting our support behind the passage of HR 40. This is a way of me side-stepping the question of whether or not I support reparations (you might notice that this is a theme with my writings), but I think that the best step to start with is to put this issue to rest by giving it the hearing it deserves in Congress. From there, we can reckon with ourselves and our greatest evil, our greatest sin. From there, we may begin to make true reparations. For reparations are more than just a monetary pay-out, it must also be a kind of atonement.