No one currently living is responsible for righting the wrongs committed by long dead slave owners.
Over 150 years ago, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on Dec. 6, 1865, ending slavery in the United States. The first enslaved African arrived on American soil more than 400 years ago in 1619. The last living survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, Matilda McCrear, who arrived in Alabama in 1860, died in Jan. 1940. [31] [32] [45]
As of Apr. 2020, millennials are the largest living adult age group in the United States. Born in 1981 or later, the 72.1 million American millennials would have to go back at least five or six generations to find a slave or slave owner in their lineage, if there were any at all. [33]
Should people so far removed from slavery be held accountable for the damage?
U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) states, “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea…. We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African American president.”[34]
McConnell continues, “I think we’re always a work in progress in this country but no one currently alive was responsible for that and I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it.” [34]
Steven Greenhut, Western Region Director for R Street Institute, also notes, “White Americans whose families arrived after the segregation era will wonder why they must pay for the sins of other people’s ancestors. Instead of solving problems, everyone will fight over money. It will end up only being about the money. This is not how to help a nation reckon with its past.” [35]
Scott Reader, a reporter, summarizes, “The fact of the matter is I don’t believe in collective guilt. I don’t believe all Muslims can be blamed for the 9-11 terrorist attacks, that all gun owners are to blame for violence in our cities or that all Americans are responsible for the injustice of slavery.”
The idea of reparations is demeaning to African Americans and would further divide the country along race lines.
Reparations require the country to put a literal price on the generational traumas of slavery. How much is one slave’s suffering worth to the country? What is the compensation for several generations of enslaved ancestors? Determining those numbers could insult descendants and other Americans alike.
Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, stated in 2019 testimony before Congress: “If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today; we would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors; and we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction — from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.”[37]
Hughes continues, “[P]aying reparations to all descendants of slaves is a mistake … [because] the people who were owed for slavery are no longer here, and we’re not entitled to collect on their debts. Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims. So the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent.” [37]
Former NFL player Burgess Owens expands on the idea of victimhood: “At the core of the reparation movement is a divisive and demeaning view of both races. It grants to the white race a wicked superiority, treating them as an oppressive people too powerful for black Americans to overcome. It brands blacks as hapless victims devoid of the ability, which every other culture possesses, to assimilate and progress. Neither label is earned…. It is their divisive message that marks the black race as forever broken, as a people whose healing comes only through the guilt, pity, profits and benevolence of the white race.” [38]
Meanwhile, if reparations were paid, the country’s problems with racial inequality would not be solved and may actually be exacerbated.
Columnist Ron Chimelis explains, “Angry white Americans will say, ‘Stop whining about racism in modern America. Stand for the flag of the country that just sent you a check. We paid you, that’s it and we’re done.’ But we wouldn’t be done, because racism certainly does still exist in America. It’s more subtle than slavery, and it won’t be solved only through legislation because you can’t entirely legislate basic human respect.”
Reparations would be too expensive and difficult to implement.
While the potential cost of reparations is abstract without a definite plan, one estimate figured by William A. Darity Jr., an economist at Duke University, and Kirsten Mullen, a folklorist, based on Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” order put the 2019 cost at $80,000 per African American descended from enslaved people, or approximately $2.6 trillion taxpayer dollars if estimating for about 30 million descendants of enslaved people. That estimate is about 55% of the $4.7 trillion US budget for 2019. [40]
Financial writer Brett Arends, took another approach to calculations, using the values assigned to generations of enslaved people in 1800, 1830, and 1860 and adding interest, resulting in a $16 trillion price tag for reparations. At the time of this 2019 calculation, the entire US national debt was $22 trillion. [41]
Beyond the financial difficulty of implementing reparations, there is the question of who would receive payments. Oprah Winfrey can trace her lineage to 19th-century slaves, but she’s worth an estimated $2.6 billion. Does her net worth negate a reparations payment? [40] [42]
Then there is the trouble of determining who is a descendant of enslaved people. Barack Obama, though African American, does not have Black American ancestry because his father was Kenyan and his American mother was white. [40]
Many biracial people or more recent Black immigrants, though not descendants of American enslaved people, may have suffered the societal leavings of slavery but may not be included in reparations payments.
Further, Ancestry.com notes the unique difficulties of tracing African American ancestry in the South to prove slave ancestors, including “family members’ name and nickname changes, the passage of enslaved people from one family member to another without a deed of sale, and the dispersion of family members who were sold away from the rest of their families.” [43]
The article continued, “When slaves arrived on American shores, they often were given the surname of their first owner, if they had a surname at all. Others did not take the slave owner’s name until after Emancipation. As former slaves grew accustomed to their freedom in the years after the Civil War, many rejected their former owners’ names and created new surnames for themselves.” Simply proving one is a definitive ancestor of slavery may be difficult. [43]
Finally, as Joe Biden asked of reparations in 2020, “[W]ill it include Native Americans as well”? According to one estimate, reparations to indigenous Americans would cost another $35 trillion. [41] [44]
Simply determining who is eligible for reparations could come with a hefty price tag.
