The case for reparations?
By Kathryn
That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life. Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story (New York Times).
Our program included a visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, and it has provided much food for thought. While much of the museum was eye-opening (we never studied apartheid, or much of African history at all, in school – the basics I learned from the Disney Channel Original Movie, The Color of Friendship), I was surprised by the lack of present-day updates within the exhibits. The narrative the museum presents ends with the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996.
This restorative justice commission was assembled “to bear witness to, record, and in some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations, as well as offering reparation and rehabilitation to the victims” (Wikipedia). It is largely seen as successful, and the Apartheid Museum finishes with an opportunity to view some of the heartbreaking public hearings. And that’s it.
As I discussed in my last blog post, racism is very much alive and well in South Africa today. The systems that apartheid developed don’t magically disappear once the laws are changed. “Using the national poverty line of $43 per month (in current prices), 47 percent of South Africans remain poor. In 1994, this figure was 45.6 percent.” (New York Times) When the previously quoted article was written in 2013, South Africa’s unemployment was at 25.4%. The most recent 2017 statistic has risen to 27.5% (CIA World Factbook).
Additionally, from 2008–2014, long-term unemployment was “highest among Black Africans with as many as 61.0% – 71.0% of that group looking for work for one year or longer. The unemployment rate among the white population group – ranging between 4.1% in 2008 and 7.3% in 2014 – is the lowest of all the population groups by a large margin, the data found.” (BusinessTech)
For this reason, I was surprised there wasn’t a present-day exhibit within the Apartheid Museum, an exhibit explaining the issues that still exist and what is being done to create solutions. Ending a visitor’s journey with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes South African apartheid feel done and behind us, when in actuality, it’s not.
I brought this thought to the attention of one of my classmates, and he responded with the thought that had been most on his mind – that while South Africa assembled the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Germany conducted the Nuremberg Trials, and Argentina held the National Commission on the Disappeared, the United States has done nothing to attempt to acknowledge or make good on the centuries of slavery and legal segregation of the country’s Black citizens (not to mention the American Indian populations the original colonizers decimated and following US government officials continued to destroy.)
These thoughts have remained with me since leaving South Africa, and so I’ve done some additional reading and research. The rampant racist views today, as well as the current inequities that are a direct result of past racist policies, make it clear to me that just as South Africa is not past apartheid, the United States is not past slavery and segregation. And we need to do more.
My research brought me to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” For some reason, one of the anecdotes that struck me the most at the Apartheid Museum was a man’s story about the government kicking his family out of their home, an urban brownstone they had owned for centuries. After the family was relocated, the government razed the building. The man explained that they had been poor, but they at least had a home and a foundation on which to build their lives – now they were poorer and they had nothing. The United States government took at least 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars from over 400 victims, dating back to the period before the Civil War. And these numbers were found after a survey of only 1,000 individuals within 13 southern states (Los Angeles Times). Much of Coates’ essay discusses the US discriminatory housing policies and the ways in which they ensure the American Black population still struggles to reach economic success today.
“Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy,” Coates says.
While the Apartheid Museum acknowledges that apartheid didn’t truly end once the discriminatory laws were removed, it does suggest that it did end with the Commission (without mention, of course, of the fact that agreed-upon reparations are still to be paid out). The US history books – at least in the way I was taught, at one of the most well-reputed public school systems in the Greater Boston Area – suggested that once President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, legalized (and thus all) segregation ended. I never learned about the ways in which the government and our society legally forced Black families further into poverty. Or how the legacy of slavery and segregation lives on.
“Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods,” Coates explains.
And in the United States, still we have not officially acknowledged these actions in any way. Our government has offered no apologies or reparations. No one has stood trial or admitted wrongdoing. We are pretending we’re moving forward and we’re in a better place – but there is little proof that either of these facts are true in any meaningful way.
“Political apartheid may have ended, but economic apartheid lives on,” Foreign Affairs stated when discussing the failure of the South African government to fulfill its promises of land redistribution (Foreign Affairs). The same holds true in the United States – legal segregation may have ended, but economic segregation lives on. I previously held my doubts about the effectiveness of reparations in an attempt to rectify a country’s wrongdoing – how can you put a price on people’s lives? How can a generation that wasn’t involved in the creation of the system attempt to quantify and offer apologies for the crimes of ancestors? I still believe you cannot put a price on people’s lives. There is no real rectifying for the terrible, terrible crimes of the past. But in order to attempt to stop the ongoing crimes of the present, we need to do something – we need a public reckoning, and reparations are a beginning. David Brooks, a well-known columnist for the New York Times, published a piece that expressed similar thoughts the day after my return to the United States.
Brooks eloquently put my thoughts into words, saying, “We’re a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation — the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices. The need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives, in which all feel known. That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life. Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story” (New York Times).
I hope we can rise to this challenge.