crossfire
Will Hutton
Slavery is America’s incubus. It made racist hypocrites of the founding fathers who drafted a Constitution and Bill of Rights that proclaimed individual liberties for all as long as they were white, knowing exactly what they were doing. It disfigured American society for 250 years while it was practised, and for another 100 years after it was banned because North and South alike turned a blind eye to the idea of “separate development” in the old Confederacy the suffocating discrimination of the Jim Crow laws that denied southern blacks civil and social rights.
Its legacy hangs over every American inner city and every exchange between black and white. With the Democrats now agreeing they will champion up to $440-billion of reparations, slavery and its fall-out promises to become the hottest, most contentious issue in American politics.
The 1960s civil rights movement brought the curtain down on the world of Jim Crow, and 30 years of affirmative action has tried to redress the position. Bill Clinton apologised, but still the issue has lost none of its sting.
The Democrats’ last-minute conversion a fortnight ago was acutely judged. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations America (N’Cobra) has been lobbying for an investigation into slavery and then legislation for reparations for years and has launched a suit against the government. But the United Nations Conference on Racism was the catalyst.
The Bush administration’s position is easy to portray as racist, but there is also hard cash at issue. Any US government signature on an international declaration even remotely agreeing to reparations in principle will damage its defence to N’Cobra’s suit in court maybe make it impossible. But the politics are deadly; the Democrats can confirm their black support, and the Republicans emerge as the racists.
The sums at stake are enormous. If every American black got $50 000, the gross bill would be around $435-billion (R3 624-billion). In the context of a 10-year tax cut of $1,4-trillion, this is affordable just but it would be the largest reparations payment in history.
But reparations on this scale are not without precedent. Half a dozen Indian tribes have won reparations from the government over the past 20 years; and the tobacco industry has had to accept a $206-billion liability after a protracted lawsuit.
Jewish organisations, after their success in winning compensation from German industry for slave labour during the Holocaust, are now suing American companies that traded with the Hitler government. In this compensation culture, with individual smokers winning $2-billion damages from US courts, N’Cobra’s claim looks almost mild. And such is the gathering moral and political force behind the movement especially now with Democrat support and such the proven willingness of American courts to accept the principle, it seems difficult to imagine that N’Cobra is not going ultimately to win.
Your first instinct, probably like mine, is to side with the reparations movement. There is even a conservative argument in favour, that the quid pro quo for a generous reparations deal would be the end of white guilt and black reproach. America could start dismantling the whole apparatus of affirmative action in a Grand Compromise.
It is a seductive argument but wrong. The response to the fall-out from slavery cannot be a one-off payment as a result of one group in society holding the rest to ransom.
The correct response is surely to make sure that the entire society sustains over time what the political philosopher John Rawls calls an infrastructure of justice and invests in the educational, political and social structures that give every member of society, black and white alike, an equal chance to participate.
The paradox of reparations payments is that they will validate the Balkanisation of America into minority groups whose membership becomes at least as significant arguably more significant than membership of the whole. To be black is to be more important than to be an American citizen.
The black reply is instantaneous: we were denied citizens’ rights for centuries, and racist abuse continues daily. Moreover the knowledge that your ancestors were slaves is a kind of psychological torture. White efforts in the Civil War or in the civil rights movement count for nothing. We are owed; our debt should be discharged in cash.
The injustice is obvious, but allowing America to collapse into the politics of competing minority groups scrambling for advantage at the expense of each other lays the foundations of further injustice in future for everyone. The fuck-you society succours and is succoured by the same culture that legitimises reparations.
A society can only hold together if it stands by universal egalitarian values and a universal infrastructure of justice and it is within those we design our response to racism. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.