Programmatic slavery reparations

 August 3, 2022

I do believe that there are some vitally important issues for which it may appear that there is "no good time" to bring up, and yet it is critically important to bring them up anyway. Slavery reparations in the United States is one of them. One way or another, the United States will have to make amends for the crime of slavery. But it's important to understand that the concrete policy changes that have to happen to deliver reparations in some form for the crime of slavery must contend with the horrors of Reconstruction. After all, when Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, a man whose actions I admire very much, carved a path of destruction through Confederate plantations on his March to the Sea, he ceded to all freed slaves he encountered a famous concession of "Forty Acres and A Mule" through Special Field Order no. 15. But the horrors of Reconstruction ignored and reneged on this promise. In a speech by Nikole Hannah-Jones to the U.N. General Assembly delivered on March 30, 2022 on the topic of reparations, I hear echoes of the hurt from this broken promise.

I will betray my preferences a tiny bit on this topic by saying I personally favor the comment from an episode of The West Wing where the character suggests that reparations be made in terms of government programs like Social Security, Medicare and affirmative action, and so on. However, I disagree that the responsibility to even the playing field through some form of reparations should stop at already-existing programs. Certainly, reparations should be made to descendents of enslaved people for lost or unpaid wages, but just as certainly, reparations should also be made for profiting off the physical bodies of enslaved people, because those are unjust profits. I also do not believe that the unpaid wage issue has been addressed completely through already existing programs. So this is what should be our conception of solving this issue to a greater degree; a humble proposal. Expanding and adding to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and affirmative action (and what about re-upping the Pell grant program?) is definitely a concrete policy action to address the need for reparations. Medicare for All is a form of what could be reparations. But not only that; keeping in mind also that Wall Street has historical responsibility for the slave trade in itself, and, not to mention the recent evidence that they still profit off the manipulation of the job market to the detriment of precarious workers in the labor force (which I wrote about a few days ago), that means some kind of tax on the exorbitant profits Wall Street is currently making at our expense could and should be used to fund more public programs as an additional form of reparations. How about, for example, fixing housing policy, supporting public education that doesn't require "resource officers" or other kinds of police actions in schools, or even continuing adult education programs that for example, might allow parents to keep up with what their kids are learning in school and lets them help their kids with homework? There are a lot of good productive programs that can be implemented with Wall Street's ill-gotten gains. 

I do personally prefer the implementation of public programs over direct money payouts, not because I don't believe people can't handle their money, but rather that there is a predatory system that traces back to Wall Street itself that has always tried to snatch that money back from people that deserve it, regardless of the fact that they deserve it. We have to attack this oppressive system with a better system, on our side, the side of the common people, that addresses the systemic problems created by reneging on our nations promise of "Forty Acres and A Mule" and levels the playing field that has been too long uneven.