Hurting and Healing

Hurting and Healing

          When I lived on Staten Island, I lived a mere several hundred yards from the place where Eric Garner was choke-hold wrestled to the ground and killed by police over a charge of selling untaxed cigarettes.  Both of my sons lived even closer to that same spot.  Tonight, I saw on the Democratic debate the discussion about reparations to African-American’s who descended from slaves.  It seems 73% of African-Americans favor those reparations.  In the general population that drops to 40% with 55% against it and 5% undecided.  I asked my uber-liberal wife what she thought of the issue (mostly because I had never spent any time thinking about it).  She punted on the issue and said she would have to study the issue before commenting.  That had been my exact reaction, so I’m surprised that the undecideds only number 5%.  I think it might be an important issue for me to highlight and debate myself about.

          Reparations have a precedent.  Both Native American victims and Japanese-American Internment victims were given reparations for the deemed unjust suffering that was inflicted on them or their direct ancestors.  The post-WWII time seemed to be a point in time when the general population felt most willing to make amends for prior injustices.  In the instance of the Native Americans and the resultant post-WWII Indian Claims Commission, for which every Native American received about a disappointing $1,000, a total $1.3 billion was paid, but not without much controversy on both sides. 

The Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act of 1948 offered direct and trackable compensation for real and personal property lost.  $37 million was paid to 26,000 claimants ($1,400 per person on average). But this was for specific property losses, not for the less objective lost freedom or rights violations.  In 1988, Congress extended an apology and agreed to pay $20,000 to each Japanese-American survivor of the internment, or $1.6 billion.

          Holocaust survivors also received benefits from West Germany in 1952 at a rate of $3,000 per survivor, or a total of $1.5 billion that was paid to the state of Israel to build the infrastructure of a Jewish homeland.  In that case, records of specific property losses (though likely far greater than the reparations) were hard to obtain given the devastation, war and concerted Nazi cover-up efforts.  It does not seem that this settlement even began to put a dent into the pain and suffering based on the vast extermination program inflicted.

          World history is rife with great injustices inflicted on classes and races of people by self-serving groups who claim superiority and dominance.  I think it is fair to say this has been the pattern of human evolution and the instances of oppression are too many to cite.  Slavery alone is as old as homo sapiens and every human population has had widespread or narrow cases of slavery, in every era of humankind.  At certain moments of grace, like following WWII, the mood of the conquering populations has been so chastened that they have tried to make reparation for the injustices (probably based on the organized protests of the put-upon survivors).  Unfortunately, memories grow short and human natural tendencies once again prevail or emerge from new quadrants, and the next round of injustices begins anew.

          The mere mention of reparations brings about a set of anticipated debates about correcting history.  Those who benefited and those harmed are hard to discern with the passage of any meaningful period of time.  This is not all like that movie Woman in Gold with Helen Mirren, where she can identify her family’s ownership of a portrait of her aunt that is owned by the Austrian Government.  There you have a direct asset link and a clear owner and pseudo-owner situation.  How much history is to be counted or ignored in this pursuit?  What of the notion that current descendants are neither perpetrators nor direct victims?

          The concept of giving broad reparations to African-American descendants of slavery means that most of the 37 million African-Americans (12% of the U.S. population) deserve a settlement for the harm inflicted on them for over 150 years of disadvantage.  How does one put a price on that?  At a mere $1,000 per person settlement, that totals $37 billion, at $20,000 that’s starting to close in on $1 trillion.  Some economists have estimated that the appropriate “full-restitution and compensation” number is likely twice that.  It is trite to say that’s a lot of money.  It’s even more trite to say that it would be very hard to find the political will to right that magnitude of wrong.  Conquering warriors rarely appease the vanquished under the basic rules of natural selection.  Wars are fought over much less and then there would be a compounding of the injustices with which to contend.

          I find myself suggesting things that I know will be unpopular and likely leave everyone unhappy.  The settlors will always feel that they are being unduly put upon for making these reparations at all.  Beneficiaries are unlikely to feel that any settlement is enough in amount or form to square the prior injustices.  In any case, I sensed that what would help would be a fund plus some policies that would address the most important improvements to the lives of African-Americans and still help the overall economy.  That seems to me to focus on two things; housing and education.  If a government fund dedicated to African-Americans (get a registry of slave descendants going right now for posterity) could be established by the government (funding could be over time with the full faith and credit of the U.S. sufficing for now) to fund public housing and grant student loan relief and future educational grants for African-Americans.  Lifting up African-Americans to make them better citizens and more important contributors to the ongoing economy and state is a way that benefits all Americans ultimately.  I think setting a big number to that fund of something like $500 billion would at least get the benefit of pouring some oil on troubled waters, though we should expect push-back from those who want money in the palm of their hands.  That is both unlikely and not necessarily achievable or likely the best for the country long-run.

          We cannot remove old scars.  The hurt will never be erased, but we can help to heal those old scars.  And the reason we should consider doing this is not just for righteousness or to make amends (although both are valid), but rather out of enlightened self-interest.  We need a more solid union to make progress and sometimes reparations can be money well spent in allowing us all to move on and work at creating growth and peace for our grandchildren.