This will sound nuts, but last night I received a call from Al Sharpton. He was explaining that after fleeing Germany shortly before the Nazis my Jewish ancestors acquired a giant tobacco plantation in South Carolina and at one point held over 2,000 slaves.
Then I woke up from the dream. I still feel immense guilt.
Will We Ever Hear the End of Slavery Reparations?
Biden thinks the issue needs further study, but few issues in history have received more attention.
By Jason L. Riley, WSJ
Dec. 3, 2024 5:27 pm ET
During the colonial era, a white man on the run could take refuge in sub-Saharan Africa, where fear of contracting yellow fever, malaria and other maladies kept most outsiders from traveling inland. It was in this spirit, perhaps, that President Biden ventured to Angola shortly after the unpopular pardon of his son Hunter over the weekend.
Many black Americans trace their ancestry to Angola, a former Portuguese colony, and Mr. Biden spoke of the countries’ “shared history, an evil of human bondage,” during his remarks Tuesday at a slavery museum in the capital city of Luanda. “We remember the stolen men and women and children who were brought to our shores in chains and subjected to unimaginable cruelty.”
More than 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America between the 16th and 19th centuries, while only about “6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America,” according to historian Steven Mintz. Although the trans-Atlantic slave trade receives far more attention today, the trans-Saharan slave trade—which involved Arabs transporting captives from black Africa across the Sahara Desert and the Persian Gulf to the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East—involved a larger number of African slaves and lasted for a much longer period.
“It is striking,” Harvard scholar Orlando Patterson wrote, “that the total volume of African slaves acquired by Muslim masters is greater than the total acquired by Europeans in the Americas.” Nor, Mr. Patterson stressed, was slavery unique to Africa, Europe and the Islamic world or to a particular stretch of time. “There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery,” he wrote. “It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region of the earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably, there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.”
Earlier this year, Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa suggested that his country should pay slavery reparations, but Angola President João Lourenço shot down the idea, insisting that it is “impossible” to make up for what happened in the past. “It only creates conflicts,” he told reporters. Mr. Biden, by contrast, has insisted that the issue needs further study, though one would be hard pressed to name an issue that has received more attention than slavery’s impact on black Americans.
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Mr. Biden’s would-be successor, Kamala Harris, endorsed slavery reparations, but her defeat last month doesn’t mean the issue is going away. Efforts to compensate descendants of slaves continue at the state and local level. California and New York have set up reparations task forces. In 2021, Evanston, Ill., became the first municipality in the U.S. to make reparations, in the form of housing grants, available to black residents. Last month the Southern California city of Palm Springs approved a multimillion-dollar reparations compensation package for black and Latino residents.
California was never a slave state, and its black population didn’t reach 2% until the 1940s. Today, California is a majority-minority state, where Latinos (40%) and Asians (15%) far outnumber blacks (5%). Why should Asians and Latinos, whose ancestors were never slave owners and who themselves have been subject to discrimination, be forced to compensate black people today who were never slaves?
Moreover, those blacks who did migrate to the Golden State in the middle decades of the 20th century did relatively well on average. “Blacks have long been better off materially in L.A. than in the rest of the country,” urbanist Fred Siegel wrote. “As early as the 1930s, Watts had the highest rate of black home ownership in the country. And blacks benefited from the World War II boom when Japanese internment and Mexican deportations created demand for low-wage African American labor.” A 1964 National Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the best big city in the nation for black employment, housing and income.
Earlier this week, California Assemblyman Isaac Bryan said he would introduce legislation to require the University of California and California State University to give admissions preferences to the descendants of slaves. “For decades universities gave preferential admission treatment to donors, and their family members, while others tied to legacies of harm were ignored and at times outright excluded,” said Mr. Bryan, who represents parts of Los Angeles. “We have a moral responsibility to do all we can to right those wrongs.”
But the real moral obligation is to stop discriminating by race altogether, not change who’s on the receiving end, which is all his legislation would do. Mr. Bryan and others seeking reparations need to decide whether they want justice, or payback.
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