This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Reparations! (Middle Passage Press) that examines the many issues in the slavery reparations debate.
Former President Trump called the notion of reparations for slavery "unusual" and "interesting." He quickly added, though, in case anyone mistook this for sympathy for the reparations call that he didn't "see it happening." The speaker was then President Donald Trump. In June 2019 when he spoke out on it, the reparations issue had become such a hot-button buzz topic that Trump felt even he had to say something about it in an interview. He wasn't the only top Republican to weigh in on the issue.
Then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was even blunter. Said McConnell, it wasn't "a good idea." He dredged up the by-then set-in-stone prime reason immediately shouted by reparations opponents. That was that it made no sense to shell out billions in taxpayer dollars for something which is slavery that ended in 1865. Or as McConnell put it, "something that happened 150 years ago."
He didn't stop there. He claimed the Civil War, lots of civil rights laws, and even tossed in the election of President Obama as more than ample proof that the nation had more than paid its debt. For McConnell, this was a mea culpa and atonement enough for slavery.
Trump and McConnell gave a strong hint just what the fate of a reparations study outcome would be if they had their say. A cursory look at the sponsors of Booker's bill confirmed that. Not one GOP senator signed on as a co-sponsor. All fourteen co-sponsors were Democrats. The same with Jackson's bill. Not one GOP House representative signed on to it. It wasn't just Republicans though who were wary of the bill and the issue.
Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden in June 2019, cast a jittery gaze over his back shoulder at potential white conservative Democrats and independents in the crucial swing states. He did not dare risk alienating them and a quick jump onto the reparation's bandwagon might do that. Biden almost out-Trumped Trump and out McConnelled McConnell in throwing ice water on reparations. Biden told the Washington Post, "I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago."
But two years later in February 2021, now safely ensconced in the White House, Biden cautiously changed his tune and said he'd back the Democrats' congressional reparations study proposal. But even here he hedged his bet. He quickly noted that a study was one thing signing an actual bill to pay reparations was an entirely different matter. Biden could still read the poll numbers. A scant fifteen percent of whites favored reparations payment. Overall, less than thirty percent of Americans favored payments. He said no more about it.
There was no guesswork why Biden was silent. The many polls taken on the pros and cons of reparations payments for slavery in the decades since Conyers' introduced his bill in 1989 show one constant. The
overwhelming majority of whites oppose slavery payments.
The standard answers to why there should not be payments for slavery did not form in a vacuum or were driven solely by racial bigotry, or ignorance. Though much of that is there in abundance on the issue. The opposition has been undergirded by a seemingly solid and reasoned intellectual and politically reasoned viewpoint.
This oppositional view has been honed, refined, and sharpened over time by conservative think tanks and analysts. The arguments on the surface appear both factual and persuasive and make perfectly good sense to many. It's certainly true the U.S. government, the Constitution, bolstered by an avalanche of laws for a century encoded segregation, inequality, and gross exploitation of Blacks.
But the case is made that the same government also radically revised the Constitution with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It passed the Civil Rights Act, and Voting Rights Act, as well as successive amendments and revisions that strengthened civil rights since the 1950s.
This was enhanced by legions of court rulings and decisions strengthening civil rights protections, banning job, housing, and lending discrimination, and promoting pay equity, and affirmative action programs. These measures are repeatedly posed as transformative legal and institutional measures designed to redress the decades of Jim Crow racial disparities.
Also, opponents insist that it's a myth that all whites benefited from Black exclusion and racial disparities. Poor whites, immigrants, and other non-whites also have been subject to economic exclusion, social and racial disparities, and impoverishment for decades with no government helping hand to alleviate their plight.
Trump and McConnell did not need to cite the litany of stock arguments against reparations. They simply cited the impracticality of it and the more compelling fallback retort that the decades of government action and redress of racial bias and the disparities have done much to close the economic gap between Blacks and whites.
That in turn has been the engine that has enabled Blacks to smash through the racial barriers to opportunity. Therefore, they have gotten their reparations and then some. The majority of Americans if polls are to be believed, and that includes many Blacks, agree.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the host of the weekly Earl Ofari Hutchinson Show on Blogtalkradio.com on Wednesdays at 9 AM and on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
