Money Talks: The Case for Reparations
Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash
This essay was originally published on Medium.com
My father was a slave. It took Germany fifty-seven years to make reparations for his suffering. It’s time to start reparations for the descendants of American slaves.
Until his liberation by the US Army, my father was a slave laborer at Mauthausen, a category-three Nazi concentration camp. Mauthausen’s policy, according to JewishGen, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, was extermination by work.
This past Saturday, June 19th, we celebrated Juneteenth, marking the day in 1865 when enslaved African-Americans in Texas finally learned they were free. Making Juneteenth a federal holiday is a step in the right direction. Now, we need to develop a reparations program for the legacy of slavery.
America is overdue to follow the leads of Germany and South Africa. To reconcile with their pasts, they faced the truth, head-on, offering a shining example for us to follow. For too long we have pretended to be a nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. It’s time to look at our past honestly so we can move forward.
One hundred years after the fact, the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma is finally gaining widespread attention. Reparations for the few remaining Tulsa survivors and their descendants is an ongoing debate. In February, Virginia Theological Seminary launched cash payments to descendants of the original slaves who built that institution. So far, fifteen people have received monthly grants of $2,100. As genealogists dig through the seminary’s records in search of living descendants, more may be added.
In March 2019, The Wall Street Journal invited discussion on what, if anything, the United States owes its Black citizens. An economics student argued that “reparations for slavery would betray the bedrock American idea of individual responsibility,” that people are never responsible for the sins of their parents, and that paying for reparations now punishes those who had no part in the crime of slavery.
Three years earlier, in 2016, the Measuring Worth Foundation calculated the value of a slave based on “relative earnings, income value, and price paid” in 1850. The range was 12,500 to 205,000 in 2016 dollars. No price was put on the psychological and sociological costs of a system of violence and discrimination which lingers through today. We can look to Germany for another model of how to reconcile with the past.
Six years after the Second World War ended, a consortium of international organizations formed the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Known as the Claims Conference, their goal was to obtain funds for “the relief, rehabilitation, and resettlement of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, indemnification for injuries inflicted upon victims of Nazi persecution, and restitution for properties confiscated by the Nazis.” Deutsche Welle reported in 2019 that since 1952, over $80 billion (€71 billion) has been paid in pensions and social welfare programs to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. The guidelines for qualification continue to be revised and expanded.
My mother and grandmother were among the 85,000 German-Jewish Holocaust survivors who received payments from their former homeland every month until they died. They were also offered free, lifetime mental health counseling to address the trauma of hiding in an attic for over two years. Accepting reparations was controversial; some called the payments “blood money.” My family used their payments to fund my sister’s and my education. Though he didn’t live to see it, three years after his death, my father’s petition to recognize his slave labor at Mauthausen resulted in a one-time distribution of $8,164. With this symbolic acknowledgement, we felt a small sense of vindication.
Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Photo by Giulia Gasperini on Unsplash
Over the past three decades, more than forty countries have established truth commissions, including Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa and South Korea. Facing up to their past allows these countries to begin addressing the mistreatment they perpetrated on religious, ethnic, and racial minorities.
The Germans have coined a single, incredibly long, compound word for coming to terms with their history: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Vergangenheits, means the past. Aufarbeitung means to examine, to work through. Examining, and working through our past, here in the United States, will mean accepting responsibility for events that happened before we were alive, before many of our ancestors landed on these shores.
We can learn from the Germans and take responsibility for the past. It’s time to begin making reparations for the descendants of American slaves.
