My fellow Americans,
I’m concerned about our national debt.
No, I’m not talking about the approximately $35-36 trillion debt the US government owes to various financial stakeholders on account of our not balancing our budget.
Instead, I’m talking about the immeasurable debt we owe to the descendants of African American slaves, whom our country enslaved for the first two hundred years or so of our history.
While we cannot put a price tag on freedom— or the theft thereof— we can try!
From what I understand a figure around $10-12 trillion would do the job.1 Fortunately for us, we are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world; as such, we can afford to pay this price.
While we can never fully repair the damage done by the injustice and depravity of slavery in America, we can try!
Paying slave reparations would be a monumental step to this end; it would be a worthy penance on our road to national atonement and absolution.
Justification
Slavery is a crime against humanity. We have never atoned for it. We have never repaired the lasting, generational harm and suffering it has caused.2
Many Americans are likely familiar with the idea that the United States government owes our country’s slaves and their descendants 40 acres and a mule.3
Many Americans are wondering, when will we pay this debt? How long will we wait for justice to be served to our African American brothers and sisters?
We ought not wait any longer.4
Our country was founded on the principles of freedom and liberty. So dedicated are we to these ideals that every American likely has known the adage, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” since childhood.5
We cannot reconcile our dedication to these values with our history of human subjugation— unless, of course, we atone for this history.6
I’m firmly of the belief that we all know this to be true. Let’s act on our collective wisdom.
Logistics
While most policy conversations concerning reparations seem to tend to culminate in commissions to explore the issue, I propose we bypass this bureaucratic hindrance.7 As with many issues in today’s America, we Democrats need to stop talking about solving problems and start actually solving them.
Looking at the big picture, the money would principally go towards decreasing the staggering racial wealth gap that still exists in this country.8
The recipients of these reparations would be the descendants of African American slaves. The money could look like direct deposits into bank accounts, investments in predominantly black schools, communities, and black-owned businesses, land redistribution, or a combination, or something else.9
Considerations
1. What about XYZ group over here that faced ABC injustice?
Yes, surely, they can be candidates for some form of reparation and restitution. But, before we cleanse our hands of any other sins, we ought to start with our original one.
2. But where will we get the money?
If we can pay for tax cuts for the wealthy under successive GOP administrations, we can pay for reparations, a more worthy cause indeed. If we can pay $400 million for a plane for our president to take home as a party favor when he leaves office, we can pay for reparations. If we can pay for unnecessary military adventurism into Iraq and elsewhere, we can pay for reparations.
3. No one alive today owned slaves back in the day.
Everyone alive today benefits from the prosperity America enjoys due in no small part to our unpaid slave labor!
A reparations agenda has nothing to do with “punishing” Americans.
It’s about fiscal responsibility. If you owe a debt, you ought to pay it.
It’s about upholding our American values of freedom, liberty, and equality.
It’s about justice, and it’s about time.
American Exceptionalism
While many Trump critics compare his administration to the Nazis and reference Hannah Arendt’s work on the banality of evil, we must take a different approach.10 We mustn’t be overcome with despair when some in our society turn a blind eye to suffering and injustice.
Ta-Nehisi Coates explains in Between the World and Me that
“[The] banality of violence can never excuse America because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional… One cannot at once claim to be superhuman and then plead moral error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”
Well, I wholeheartedly agree with Coates. We ought to hold ourselves to an exceptional standard. We ought to believe America is exceptional and then act like it.
We can do exceptional things; therefore, we ought to.
Chief among these things is paying reparations for slavery.
Obligatory Disclaimer: all views expressed here are my own personal views and do not represent the views of my employer nor those of the U.S. government.
Here’s to our American freedom— may we use it to do good in the world!
Thank you for reading!
Noncomprehensive Bibliography
Balfour, Lawrie. "The politics of reparations for Black Americans." Annual Review of Political Science 26, no. 1 (2023): 291-304.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Text Publishing Company.
Reneau, Olivia J. "Justice Delayed: An Analysis of Local Proposals for Black Reparations." RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10, no. 3 (2024): 140-161.
Footnotes
Audio with footnotes:
That number comes from William Darity’s work, which you can hear about on this Code Switch Podcast called “Who’s Black Enough For Reparations” (linked at the end of this footnote) or read about in his book From Here to Equality, though other estimates put the number anywhere from $5.9 trillion to $16 quadrillion. Citation: Olivia J. Reneau, “Justice Delayed,” 2024, p. 141. Podcast episode:
Something I think most Americans today would be shocked to hear is that the only people who have been compensated for slavery are slave-holders who were given money upon its abolition on account of their losing their “property,” a.k.a. the human beings they tortured, enslaved, dehumanized, and exploited for their free labor. Citation: Lawrie Balfour, "The politics of reparations for Black Americans." 2023, 291-304.
Even if we set aside the enormous moral and psychological harm caused, in purely monetary terms, the United States has not even paid for the labor of America’s slaves. We ought to do that as quickly as possible.
I, myself, am a big fan of freedom. There’s no amount of money that I would accept to give up my freedom. I’m sure the same is true for you, my dear reader, and your freedom and life. The same is true for all of the human beings our country enslaved, too.
We must confront this horrific part of our history or it will continue to haunt us. We all know it’s true, deep in our bones. That’s why the overwhelming majority of Americans supported the BLM protests after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. Slavery was a horrible, dehumanizing, unconscionable institution that still negatively impacts its descendants to this day.
See a detailed discussion of American efforts to pursue reparations in Reneau’s “Justice Delayed.”
See this report from Duke on the racial wealth gap, which is largely due to intergenerational wealth transfers due to things like inheritance gifts. See Forbes’ reporting on America’s persistent racial wealth gap here.
Personally, I think a multi-pronged approach is usually called for in matters of public policy.
See her discussion of this concept of the banality of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Citation: Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1994.