My problem, however is not going to have the slightest effect on what the issue means, and, most importantly, the ultimate effect it will have on reality instead of in academic, intellectual or even legalistic imagining.

ANYONE WHO READS much of what I write here would know that in recent weeks I've been reading the independent Catholic magazine, the National Catholic Reporter a lot lately. You may have noticed I'm especially impressed with the writing and thinking of Michael Sean Winters, even though I disagree with him about as much as I do some of the other writers I admire and respect enough to disagree with.

He has a troubling, disturbing, unsettling, enlightening and still unsettling article up about the questions of reparations for the descendants of those who were enslaved in the United States, an issue I immediately have problems with white men taking the lead on, just as I have a problem with men taking any kind of leading role in discussing the issue of abortion.   My problem, however is not going to have the slightest effect on what the issue means, and, most importantly, the ultimate effect it will have on reality instead of in academic, intellectual or even legalistic imagining.

My problem with the concept isn't one of justice. If it were possible to make those whose families benefited and still prosper from the many steps up enslaving people gave their families pay those whose families are still paying for being enslaved, the justice of that is obvious.* That isn't possible, you can't, for reasons also gone into in the article, limit who pays for that in any specificity. And that leads to problems that are not only external to the cause of economic justice that reparations would be supposed to address, the issue of reparations turns, immediately into a tool of Republican-fascist, generally right-wing and often racist politics and judicial activism. It is a problem that is addressed in this paragraph.

How, then, do you erect a reparations program for slavery of the kind the activists and academics noted above advocate? The short answer is: You don't. The descendants of Russian serfs, who belonged not to a person but to the land, or of Italian messadri, poor sharecroppers, or Mexican campesinos, bear no personal responsibility for chattel slavery in the American South. Expecting those descendants to pay for a reparations program with their tax dollars would not only be unjust, it would be a political disaster.

Why should the descendants of those who didn't benefit from slavery have to pay people for it?  What about those white people whose ancestors not only didn't hold slaves but who fought against it, whose ancestors fought a civil war to abolish slavery?   What about those who had no ancestors here until well after slavery was abolished?    And why just the descendants of those held in de jure slavery?   Why not demand reparations to the descendants of the original inhabitants of North America which those whose ancestors were enslaved would, then, have to pay? Why not require the taxes paid by Black Men be used to pay reparations for the as uncompensated work of and legal dis-empowerment of Women, including White Women?

Those are all questions but the ultimate problem with making reparations an issue that the American Left, American liberals in the traditional meaning of that word, including those who reject all inequality will stand fast on the issue and slogans of "reparation" and go down to defeat by Republican-fascists, white supremacists, racists, billionaire-gangsters and the media they use to sway the gullible, the susceptible and the just plain stupid into putting them into power is not a question, it is a certainty.

The question of reparations is, I'm afraid, an issue that will become popular on the fringiest of the American left, a typical  a cause celebre, which like so many of those of the past will end up being more useful to the fascists than those who care about equality and economic justice. It is certainly one more important than so many of those in the past, manger scenes on public property, mentions of God at public events at public high schools, etc. It is important for the very reason that pushing it, something which is almost certainly never going to happen, will prevent happening, the expansion of equality to cover everyone, the erasing of inequality and discrimination here and now for The People who are alive here and now.

No one who is the victim of injustice in their life was ever benefited by the insistence on doing what was not possible because if it isn't possible to do, it's never going to happen to benefit them. That is, I'm almost certain, what the campaign for the kind of reparations as popularly imagined by the supporters of reparations is, something that is never going to happen. There is not the political will to do it now, there will always be problems that even when the blessed day that America is not a white majority country comes because the question of why Native Americans or Latin Americans or the descendants of European or Asian peasants should pay for the sins of the white Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-etc. slave owners of the past, of the beneficiaries of the de facto slavery that persisted - along with the wage slave system - with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War Amendments to the constitution in place is also an issue. 

 

Will there be some kind of mixture of family-history-DNA testing required to make sure that someone is not, as well, descended from slave-holders before they can receive reparations? That might sound absurd but I guarantee you that someone will raise it as an issue if any kind of reparations law is passed.

 

IF THERE IS ONE THING I WANT TO IMPRESS ON YOU IN THIS IT IS NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE ABILITY OF LAWYERS, LEGAL SCHOLARS, JUDGES AND JUSTICES TO TURN ALL QUESTIONS THAT SEEM ABSURD INTO SOME KIND OF LEGAL ISSUE AND, IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME, SUPREME COURT MADE LAW. 

The way to get justice for those who are alive today is such an important issue that it should only ever be considered in the most practical of terms, starting with what will get you that justice and not get you the kind of backlash that has been the history of Republican-fascist ascendancy in the period after the great Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts have been. It would be useful to know which issues growing out of the great Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-1970 got people some justice and which helped the opponents of justice because both were a feature of the talking and writing of that time. I am absolutely convinced that the advocacy for reparations is one of the things that didn't help, it hasn't happened except, as Winters points out, in a few, very modest, very limited and very targeted examples which will probably stand out as hardly relevant outliers for the majority of those who need justice and, especially, economic justice now and in the near future. 

 

The way to get justice for real people living real lives is by doing what is possible and not doing what is not only impossible but which allows a delusion of justice which will never be had into the tools of the enemies of justice.  AND ALL OF JUSTICE IS INTRINSICALLY AND TOTALLY BOUND UP WITH THE PURSUIT OF EQUALITY IN RESULTS AS THAT CAN BE MADE TO HAPPEN. 

* Though an easier and more just framing of that would be to make the billionaires and millionaires to be leveled, benfitting first the least among us then those just above them, would be a far more just means of addressing inequality.

 

My problem with those white families and individuals whose ancestors kept slaves but whose families fell into everything from poverty to destitution is that they don't have the money to pay reparations.   What they'll do is get scared by those billionaires and their hired media whores into voting for the Republican-fascists by this issue being raised, mostly by affluent academics and media figures and those who hope to ride it to fame and fortune or influence.  

 

I'd rather that we get somewhere we can get than get a ticket to another half-century of Republican-fascism.