Reparations

 The Boston Globe ran a headline the other day that should make anyone in this country queasy. Surveying the financial wherewithal of current members of Congress, the paper found that lawmakers whose ancestors had been slaveholders had a disproportionately higher net worth than those whose did not. 

The finding provides anecdotal but nonetheless unsettling evidence that slavery—more than a century and a half after its end—is still conferring unjust advantages on the people whose ancestors practiced it. The notion undercuts in the most troubling way our default belief in meritocracy.

We like to imagine, after all—in a capitalist society—that differences in people's outcomes stem from differences in effort, "innovation," etc. Yet here we find that a family's participation in slavery can still mark their fortune more than a hundred and fifty years after the fact. Thus—so much for that notion!

A passage from W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn came back to mind in this regard. The "novel" (really more of an unclassifiable prose work, full of Sebald's unique sense of tragic humanism) devotes an extended section to the Belgian Congo and other horrors of Western colonialism. Sebald observes: 

"The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation [...] still bearing interest, increasing many times over and still burgeoning anew." (Hulse trans.) Great art museums have been endowed with this money, in an effort to "legitimize" it. 

In other words, Sebald portrays some of the great monuments of European civilization as a sort of elaborate money-laundering scheme. The enormous wealth that was extracted through the uncompensated labor of people in the Congo and the Indies was put through the wash by endowing the Tate. 

It has always seemed to me, in such a world, that the moral argument for reparations is pretty much inarguable. This is not because of some metaphysical collective guilt on the part of white people, which I do not believe in; but simply because we are plainly still benefiting economically from slavery. 

This point applies, by the way, to all of us—regardless of whether our particular ancestors practiced slavery. I recently attended a family reunion in which we took a deep dive into our genetic past and—thankfully—found no Confederates or slaveholders. But I can't pat myself on the back too much. 

Even if my family did not benefit directly from slavery, after all, they surely benefited from federal programs that disproportionately excluded Black people. Since the government invested massively in our collective wealth generation, within living memory, it is only fair that it now invest equally in others'. 

No one is "responsible" for the actions of their ancestors, to be sure. Descendants of slaveholders are not "guilty" ipso facto. "Though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities," as Thomas Hardy once wrote, "it is scorned by average human nature." 

But people can acquire a certain measure of responsibility if they become aware of the crimes of their ancestors, and choose to continue to benefit from those crimes, without protesting against them. Nathaniel Hawthorne explores this theme in The House of the Seven Gables, as I've discussed before.  

Hawthorne's novel—which can be read without too much of a stretch as a metaphor for the dispossession of Native peoples that was still proceeding apace on this continent, at the time he wrote it—tells the story of a family that inherits its home and social position from a crime that happened generations earlier. 

To make the point that seems obvious to us today (though it is one that Hawthorne may not have had consciously in mind at the time), all European-descended Americans today are in something of their same position: our wealth has come in part through the legacy of slavery and dispossession. 

The moral case for reparations therefore appears airtight—even as it is almost certainly a political nonstarter in the country today. But we also shouldn't let it delude us into thinking that the moral problems of economic life can be settled so simply, either. 

The only thing I don't like about the approach the Globe report takes, that is to say, is that it can lend itself a little too patly to dividing people today into sheep and goats. As noted above, people with slaveholders in their family history are no worse than anyone else. 

Concentrating on one form of injustice in the past can risk leading to a certain "idolatry" of a particular social system, as Reinhold Niebuhr once put it. After all, once the wealth that was accumulated through slavery is removed, that doesn't mean that the rest of what's left over is morally "pure." 

Much of the rest probably came through colonial dispossession or the nineteenth century factory wage system. And while those are not exactly the same thing as slavery, they are hardly a good thing either. And so, there is an element of injustice and will-to-power in every social system, no matter where we turn. 

And so, our starting point with reparations cannot be guilt and shame—which always has the counterpart of implicitly exempting some other group—the "accusers"—as innocent. We instead have to struggle forward without one-sided blame or absolution—knowing that justice is a perpetual work in progress. 

We won't arrive, therefore, at some point at which the society's wealth is all justifiable, and has been purged of its original sin. By labeling some of us as "guilty," we won't achieve innocence ourselves. But then—this, in turn, is no excuse either not to at least try to move in the right direction. 

The fact that reparations will always be an imperfect and partial solution is also, that is to say, no reason not to pursue them. This, too, is a consequence of the flawed and fallen world we inhabit. It is our destiny not to achieve moral perfection—but that is no reason not to struggle each day against the most rank forms of injustice.