Reparations

I'll give a little credit to Ted Koppel of late. On Nightline, successive broadcasts have dealt with the refusal of some elite Israeli Air Force pilots to engage in assassination air-strikes, and, last night, a fairly balanced look at reparations for slavery. Maybe this makes up for last week's punt of the Iraq war in favor of--Michael Jackson.

Reparations are a difficult issue. On the one hand, it's been one hundred and forty years since The Emancipation Proclamation, one hundred and thirty-eight since the Thirteenth Amendment, almost fifty years since Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, and the fortieth anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act is next year.

However--there are serious allegations of practical, if not actual, cases of slavery which occurred well into the twentieth century. Last night, two individuals made just such an allegation on the program. Additionally, reparations for Jewish victims of the Holocaust have been paid out--with the specific reason being coerced labor, i.e., slavery. There is NO doubt that slavery, and the support structure that underlied it, were a source of profit for corporations which function to this day.

But what is the remedy, if anything? In the case of the Holocaust, the program noted that legal action was never successful in bringing about compensation, although lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits kept the issue in the public eye. In the end, various corporations agreed to settle claims out-of-court, based on very specific criteria (for instance, an individual had to PROVE she or he PERSONALLY was enslaved). Lastly, while a large aggregate sum was deposited into a fund for Holocaust survivors, each victim received a very small amount--much less than, say, a successful tort claim would have brought.

Nightline took pains to point out that a successful tort action--for victims/descendants of the Holocaust/Era of Slavery--is highly unlikely to succeed. The point of such action is primarily to publicize the claims of the victims, with the hope that a corporation can be shamed into making, at the very least, a token gesture by way of apology.

So, why is this important? Well, let me begin by adding my own .00002 cents worth: Slavery was/is an abomination--an example of human behavior at its absolute worst. The first principle of humanity, in my view, should imply at least a tacit recognition that opportunity should be available to all. Slavery, by definition, subsumes one human to the will of another--regardless of what sort of "guarantees" exist, be they codified or tacit. The idea that my ancestors owned slaves (and, at least one record I've seen does indicate that a long dead great-great-great-great grandfather of mine owned almost twenty persons) makes me a little sick. Why just a little? OK, yeah, that's when I try to say things like, "but, that was THEN, this is now," or something just as trite, but true nonetheless. But that's a different point.

OK, back to reparations--I think it might be worthwhile to note a couple of things: first, some people believe that emancipation of slaves in the United States was accompanied by legislation authorizing forty acres and a mule to each freed (male) slave--which is actually not true. Legislation PROPOSING this was defeated by Congress, and while General Sherman did grant plots of land to freedmen in Georgia, the property was soon taken away and retitled to the original landholders. So, in fact, while discussed, reparations were never offered to people who had been coerced into labor.

Roughly thirty years following Emancipation, Homer Plessy challenged official racial discrimination and lost. Consider: if official discrimination is ordained as acceptable by SCOTUS, what chance do you think there would be any serious call for genuine compensation for the years of unpaid labor slaves provided? Slim and none might be a little generous.

The fact is, slavery, an intitution which brought thousands of Africans to this country in chains, robbed these people of their very humanity. When families like the Prescotts, the Bushes, the Cabot Lodges, et al--and, to be fair, the Kennedys, the Gores, and others--we're setting the stage which eventually allowed Dubya to pull a legacy admission wild-card out of his ass to matriculate at Yale, people of primarily African-American heritage were forced to live day to day, with NO way to build the kind of foundation, figuratively speaking, that causes the elites to wail and gnash their teeth at the mention of estate taxes...

So, to make a long post short, here's my opinion: there are still some people who might be able to file a legitimate tort claim of coerced labor against those who wronged them, based on allegations like the one noted above. Standard burdens of proof should be required in these cases. If the allegation is against a deceased individual, then the estate can or should be considered liable--and should likewise be entitled to settle.

The broader picture, however, that of the "peculiar institution"--must be addressed by ourselves as a country. Consider: some of the very symbols of our free government, like the Capital, for instance, were built with slave labor. In a sense, we are ALL complicit in this crime.

But cash indemnities are problematic. How does one determine who is eligible? This becomes complicated. In my view, the best remedy would be a national consideration that African Americans should be eligible for considerations based on the fact that they are African American: in other words, something like, I don't know, AFFIRMITIVE ACTION? Hell, yes, this should be STRONGLY considered. It is impossible to determine, with certainty, which individual African Americans have been directly harmed by slavery in the sense of awarding compensatory damages, but certainly ALL African Americans have been affected in some manner--and not in a good way. So, why not, in the interests of rectifying past injustice, offer remedies that offer OPPORTUNITY, as opposed to cash payouts. It's a matter of atonement for the entire country. It also is a realistic way to provide compensation without bankrupting the treasury. Finally--for all those conservatives who blanch to an even whiter shade of pale on this--if we can offer sweetheart, no-bid, government contracts to Halliburton, if we can allow crooks like Ken Lay of Enron fame to write energy policy--and game the horribly deregulated electricity market in California--if we can allow a classic "C" student like George W. Bush to enter Yale, even though my OWN damn SAT score was about 60 points higher than his--well, then I think we can start thinking about spending a relatively small sum to rectify four hundred years of injustice.

Or--we can raise the estate tax to one hundred percent on those who are in the upper one percent, income and estate-wise. What the hell's wrong with that? I thought conservative were AGAINST special privileges--what's a more special, and undeserved, privilege than being born on third base? It's not like you hit a triple....