The View From the Ramparts: Reparations
Can cash payments achieve the goal of racial justice?
It’s comforting to think that 300 years of racial strife could be erased, or at least neutralized moving forward, with a one-time action, a sort of magic wand.
That’s both the premise and promise of reparations - to cleanse the stain of slavery by making cash payments to the descendants of slaves.
No one can reasonably argue that black Americans haven’t been the victims of gross historic injustices.
Accepting that the vast majority of this nation wants to see its black citizens have the same opportunities and access as its white citizens, the question then is not one of morality but of effectiveness.
Can reparations reasonably be expected to level the playing field?
With the city of San Francisco and the state of California both seriously considering the authorization of cash payouts intended to bring the financial health of black households to an equal footing with that of whites, all sorts of formulas for determining the economic burden imposed upon African Americans by slavery and the lingering discrimination are being bandied about.
San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee has proposed a $5 million per individual lump-sum payment. The California Reparations Task Force has proposed $360,000 per person.
Neither proposal has yet been approved by the elected officials who created these advisory committees — but neither have we seen any kind of meaningful discussion about the likely effectiveness of reparations.
And yet, there are some serious questions that need sober debate — not more divisive name-calling.
To wit:
Will reparations actually increase the average wealth of black families over the long haul?
Who should receive reparations? Most proposals would limit them to descendants of slaves — but surely black immigrants who arrived after the Civil War still faced discrimination and prejudice, which impacted their economic prospects.
Can we afford these kinds of payouts when all levels of governments are under increased economic pressures due to inflation and a possible pending recession?
If reparations move forward but are ineffective at erasing the economic disparities between white and black families, does that risk undermining other efforts to increase opportunity for black Americans?
Addressing the first question, it is difficult to find any evidence that much thought has been given to the effects of handing large sums of money over to families who have struggled with poverty. While families in the middle and upper classes may well find reparations to be a blessing, families with no experience at managing large sums of money may not be prepared to protect their intended nest egg from scammers and opportunists.
We have decades of data on how sudden wealth affects lower-income — and even some middle-class — families. The history of lottery winners, professional athletes, and pop music and Hollywood stars is not encouraging: Few of these folks have turned their bonanzas into lifelong financial security.
Lottery winners are more likely than average folks to declare bankruptcy within five years of winning. Let’s be honest: the rich have less incentive to play the lottery, so the winners’ lists skew toward working-class families of all ethnicities — who lack the kind of financial acumen that would allow them to protect their winnings.
The odds are even worse for professional athletes — with almost 4 out of 5 being broke within three years of ending their sports career.
And while there aren’t hard statistics on pop stars the way there are lottery winners or pro athletes (or even a hard and fast definition of what constitutes a “pop star”), plenty have spent all their earnings and ended up broke.
Simply handing an inexperienced family a large payout without providing any kind of financial training seems more cruel than kind — promising a dream that for all too many will evaporate in a few short years leaving them back where they started.
As to the second question (of eligibility), that cuts to issues of perceived fairness — a subjective issue if ever one existed. Dreisen Heath, a staff member at Human Rights Watch who has been pushing for years for slavery reparations, makes the reasonable argument that “Racial violence does not discriminate by lineage — it comes for all Black people.”
And so she is opposed to limiting eligibility to descendants of American slaves.
At the same time, should immigrants from Africa who arrived in the past 50 years, say, who chose to move to the United States knowing full well our failure to live up to our ideals, be eligible for reparations? That is an equally reasonable argument.
The third question is the most practical: Can we afford these payouts?
Dreisen and her allies make the argument that if reparations are just, then we simply have to find a way to afford them.
I get that.
At the same time, if San Francisco is going to take on anywhere from $50 billion to $175 billion (depending on eligibility) in new debt, on an annual budget of $14 billion, certainly the city is going to have to make deep, painful cuts across its budget for decades to come.
The same holds true for California’s proposal.
While only black families would receive reparations, that money wouldn’t come only from white citizens: We all pay taxes, so black families would likely see future tax increases to help pay for the reparations they received.
Everyone will be paying more in taxes and receiving less in public services.
And we know how that turns out: Poor neighborhoods always get short shrift when government spending is cut.
All of this leads us back to the final question above: What if the reparations don’t work as intended? What if various levels of government take on massive debt to try to square historical wrongs, and 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now we see the same economic disparities between average black household wealth and average white household wealth?
What if we find out after the fact that, just as with lottery winners, pro athletes and rock stars, most recipients of reparations find themselves swindled out of what is intended as their birthright?
That’s a question worth asking before any decisions are made, before any checks are cut.
When supporters of reparations argue that black Americans are harmed financially by “institutional racism,” they’re (mostly) not talking about formal laws that discriminate against blacks. (They do argue that some drug and motor vehicle laws are intentionally written in a way to entrap blacks at higher rates than whites.) Fortunately, almost all of the legal framework of Jim Crow has been swept away into the dustbin of history.
As presently used, “institutional racism” generally means cultural and business practices that are predicated on racial prejudice: Redlining in loans or insurance rates based on an applicant’s ZIP code. The kind of lingering prejudice that leads to homes on the same block being appraised for significantly less money when the owners are black.
But perhaps the single largest, and most influential form of institutional racism in this country today is the one that is least talked about: The funding and operation of our public schools.
While California talks about spending billions of dollars on reparations, it continues to fund schools on a sliding rate based on the local property tax rates! School districts get a set amount from the state for every day a student is in class — but that student-per-day rate varies from district to district based on the property values in that area.
Thus, a school district in, say, San Francisco gets far more per student from the state than a district in, say, San Diego’s working-class National City suburb. How this doesn’t violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment is utterly beyond me.
One of the biggest schisms in the Democratic Party today is over the question of standardized testing: Teachers unions are adamantly opposed to them. Black parents, looking at the lingering achievement gap between their children and other students, are just as adamant in insisting these tests continue so they can measure the education their children are receiving.
Or not receiving.
The school lockdowns that most states adopted during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated the learning gap between black and Latino students on one hand, and white and Asian students on the other.
If these underlying inequities aren’t addressed — primarily the refusal of most big-city school school districts to provide a meaningful, much less comparable, education to students in low-income neighborhoods — then the problems reparations are supposed to address will continue to haunt future generations.
Education remains the single greatest determination of an individual’s prospects in life.
If reparations end up taking resources away from public education, then it’s difficult to see how they can possibly achieve the goals their supporters lay out for them.
Like most folks, I’m sympathetic to kids born in rough neighborhoods — and acknowledge that it is an issue that affects black families more than white.
But we live in a world of finite resources, which compels us to make judgement calls on how to best allocate those resources to achieve the greatest good.
Right now, the only thing I’m convinced of is that whatever the benefits of and arguments in favor of reparations are, we’ve not yet had the kind of serious, painful discussions about them we need to have before putting so much of our communal wealth into a plan that may well backfire and further harm the people it is supposed to help.
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I would suggest the writing of Freddie DeBoer on the fruitlessness of trying to educate away inequality. In his "The Cult of Smart" and on his substack, he makes this case often. And he's a socialist who studies education so it's not the "bootstraps" argument you get from right wingers.
Also it's shocking to learn that California's state funding system works that way. I thought that State and Federal education funding tended to try and offset, not amplify, the differences between local property taxes.
On reparations, other practical concerns are what to do with mixed-race people and also how to fight the civil war that ensues.