Reparations For Slavery
"Two wrongs don't make a right." There is a reason this saying has been repeated enough to become a cliche. Though the phrase has lost much of its power through overuse, it remains stubbornly true and applicable - especially on the subject of reparations for slavery. Very few people are undecided on this issue; most are either strongly for it or strongly against it. The former maintain that to reparate slave descendants for the mistreatment of their ancestors, an old wrong can be made right. It seems reasonable. What about those who oppose it?
Children instinctively understand that they have been treated unfairly if they are punished for someone else's wrongdoing. That is what makes the plea for reparations so disturbing; Americans are being "punished" for something they did not do. Why, then, should people be punished for crimes their distant ancestors may or may not have committed, and why should people benefit from suffering their distant ancestors may or may not have endured? The child of a serial killer is not expected to make restitution for his father's crimes, nor is his grandchild. Why should it be any different with slave owners and their descendants?
Even supposing, for the sake of argument, that it were reasonable to punish or reward people based on the actions of their ancestors, the resulting logistical nightmare would almost certainly render such actions impossible. It is incredibly difficult to track down actual slave or slave owner descendents. Some have suggested distributing reparations based solely on race, but this, too, has gaping flaws; it is naïve to paint all living Negroes and Caucasians as direct relatives of slaves and slave owners. Only a fraction of Americans, even in the South, ever owned slaves, and of those, 385,000 were free Negroes.1 Reparations would also tax the descendants of immigrants who came to the United States long after slavery was abolished.
Even ignoring all of that, such a drastic move could never fix the damage that was done. Attempting to tack a dollar amount onto past sufferings would be a grossly enormous undertaking, and it is almost insulting to insinuate that money could ever make up for the tragic mistakes of many early Americans. Supporters of reparations argue that while it could not undo the social harm to slaves and their descendants, it could help them in their financial plight. Does this plight, however, even exist?
As former slave Booker T. Washington wrote in his book "Up From Slavery",
I have long since ceased to cherish any spirit of bitterness against the Southern white people on account of the enslavement of my race...when we rid ourselves of prejudice and look facts in the face, we must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe. ...This I say, not to justify slavery ... but to call attention to a fact.
American blacks, on average, enjoy twenty to fifty incomes per capita than blacks living in any of the African nations from which Negro slaves were originally kidnapped.2 If America owes blacks a financial debt, blacks owe one to America as well. None of this is to say that the actions of American slave owners were not horrible and inhumane, for the certainly were. However, taxing the present Americans trillions of dollars would not restitute those actions. If anything, it would have the opposite effect, promoting division and drawing lines between races. If monetary reparations will not make up for the injuries, and such actions could create the sort of discrimination that Americans seek to avoid, why should this course of action even be considered?
To take money from people who did not commit the wrong in an attempt to "repay" the debt of slavery to people who were never slaves will promote hostility, not healing. The wrongdoings of the past, while they cannot be denied or ignored, will not be fixed by wronging the Americans of today. Two wrongs do not make a right, and to impose such a tax on the American public would be an unquestionable wrong.
