Reparations For Slavery Research Articles

Estimating Slavery Reparations: Present Value Comparisons of Historical Multigenerational Reparations Policies

ObjectiveI investigate two problems regarding multigenerational reparations: legal obstacles caused by the passage of time and economic difficulties in obtaining realistic present value estimates.MethodsTo investigate legal precedents, I trace the French spoliation claims, which were paid over a period of 123 years, and Haiti's independence debt, which was paid over 156 years. To investigate present value estimation, I compare existing slavery reparations estimates based on slave prices as expected future income to alternative estimates based on the number of unremunerated work hours multiplied with historical free labor market wages.ResultsI estimate the present value of U.S. slave labor in 2009 dollars to range from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion. Historical precedents suggest that political rather than narrowly legal processes will determine any ultimate claims.ConclusionsNeither problems nor solutions associated with multigenerational reparations are new. New is the estimation method and the resulting upward correction of reparations estimates.

Saving the Republic: State Nostalgia and Slavery Reparations in Media and Political Discourses

Memories of slavery have long been a contentious subject, but no more so than when the question of reparations is raised. This article investigates French media and political responses to reparations within the context of international movements that are pressurising European and US governments to engage more actively with the legacies of their slave pasts. The particular reference here is to the citizen-led activist group, the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires, whose call for a national debate on reparations in 2012 and 2013 was rejected by the French state and misrepresented by the French media. These responses are placed within the context of both the (first) Taubira law (2001), which recognised slavery as a ‘crime against humanity’, and the ‘memory war’ of 2005–2006. Nostalgia is shown to intersect with state and media responses in a number of ways. First and foremost, reparations are seen as anti-republican in nature, being misunderstood as the divisive work of ethnic minorities. Fears of communitarian fracture invoke nostalgia for an imagined wholeness that preceded the state's act of recognition. Secondly, reparations are defined as ‘impossible’ by appealing to their ‘divine’ irreparability. This article challenges the inertia of state nostalgia and the limitations of media representations by reconnecting reparations to a recognition struggle against racial discrimination.

Implicit Closeness to Blacks, Support for Affirmative Action, Slavery Reparations, and Vote Intentions for Barack Obama in the 2008 Elections

Does pro-Black policy support require an individual to be unbiased? I distinguish two types of implicit attitudes based on whether the attitude-target is evaluated as an object (evaluative associations) or as an independent social agent (relational associations). In a series of studies (N = 3,073), a significant anti-Black evaluative association bias emerges. In contrast, relational associations are significantly pro-Black and are unrelated to evaluative associations. Relational associations predict opinions regarding affirmative action, government help for Blacks, slavery reparations, and intentions to vote for Barack Obama. Thus, minority representation based on relational associations may not require absence of anti-minority evaluative bias.

Unearthing the Legitimacy of CARICOM's Reparations Bid

Fourteen Caribbean countries, coalescing under the CARICOM banner, are preparing to bring a class action suit for reparations for native genocide and slavery against the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). CARICOM, an international organization, with a common market at its core, at its 34th regular meeting of the Heads of Government created the CARICOM Reparations Committee, presided over by the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, with Barbados, Haiti, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago providing political oversight. This claim arises from the reparation desires of Member States for the legacies of native genocide and slavery, in which almost an entire population of the regions natives peoples was wiped out by these European settlers and whereby millions of slaves were transported from Africa to work on plantations in the West Indies for the economic benefit of these Europeans. These dark sides of the European colonization of the West Indies may be classified as crimes against humanity, and international law provides from reparations for such atrocities, given the myriad historical examples of such reparations. However, in the 1830s when Britain ended slavery, the enslaved people freed, received nothing from the government in compensation for generations of forced labor, though there was money for slave-owners. These vile crimes continue to have lingering effects in the Caribbean today. CARICOM Heads-of-States are unanimous in their opinion that these two tragedies have contributed significantly to underdevelopment of the region. As such it is hoped that reparations will begin to right the wrongs of the past, namely some measure of economic compensation to supplement the economies of these countries and acknowledgement by these countries of the legacies of slavery. The general view is that reparations are valuable and there needs to be some European recognition of the legacies of slavery.

The Debt of Memory: Reparations, Imagination, and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

essay focuses Toni Morrison's groundbreaking novel Beloved and examines issue of reparations in economic, affective, and historical terms. Beloved, I claim, addresses these debts via fiction by delving into recesses of traumatic memory. Debt is overriding metaphor of our time, a quintessential^ modernizing state and activity that weaves inequalities into fabric and practice of capital. To incur debt is to enter into an interpolative arrangement in which capital confers recognition through repetitive consumption. Morrison's novel redirects our contemporary dependence and understanding of debt from a tangible economic figure or amount to a cumulative colonial deficit spanning space and time of slavery. In this sense, contemporary economic debt functions as a recurring sign in longue duree of racial history, which calls for layered forms of reparations. When Morrison states, at end of novel, This is not a story to pass on ( 1987,274), she asks reader to confront debt assumed by traumas of slavery to enable us to transform this inheritance into a beloved future. To pass this story down is to forge a new repository of memory upon which a severely incurred debt-mnemonic, social, and material-can begin to be defrayed. Therefore fiction, for Morrison, compels reader to reimagine a concealed past as a reparative starting point, which not only summons ghastly foundations of Americas but in so doing, initiates conversations surrounding what was lost, established, and still owed.Indeed, idea of reparations has seen various iterations since end of slavery. Not only did President Lincoln favor some sort of reparations for newly freed slaves but several decades later, in 1915, Cornelius J. Jones brought a lawsuit demanding sixty-eight million dollars in reparative compensation for unpaid slave labor. In 1944 Gunnar Myrdal, Swedish economist and Nobel laureate, in his book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, argued for parcels of former plantations to be made available to ex-slaves through manageable, longterm installment plans. The call for reparations continued in 1960s, when activist James Forman, in his controversial Black Manifesto, boldly proposed five hundred million dollars in damages. Moreover, in 1972, in The Case for Black Reparations, Yale Law School professor Boris Bittker asserted that a history of race-based discrimination from slavery to Jim Crow, spanning over three centuries, caused undue social and economic injury to African Americans and suggested creation of a program to distribute resources to America's descendants of slaves. Finally, in a more recent text, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson makes case for a national economic response that would effectively close the yawning gap between blacks and whites (Robinson 2000, 204).1 However, Robinson's argument marks a shift from a reductive, if necessary and just, economic discussion to a more wide-ranging cultural, historic, and psychic understanding of debt.2As he argues: But only slavery, with its sadistic patience, asphyxiated memory, and smothered cultures, has hulled empty a whole race of people with inter-generational efficiency. Every artifact of victims' past cultures, every custom, every ritual, every god, every language, every trace element of a people's whole heredity identity, wrenched from them and ground into a sharpe choking dust. It is a human rights crime without parallel in modern world. For it produces its victims ad infinitum, long after active statge of crime has ended (Robinson 2000, 216). In absence of economic reparations, Robinson proposes a black renaissance (237-47), a dynamic return to knowledge, memory, and creativity as a formula to halt production of victims generated by aftereffects of slavery and colonialism. Thus, Robinson compels reader to confront varying dimensions of debt as, one hand, virulent conjunction of economic processes-centuries of forced and unpaid labor-and other, imposed erasure of memory and culture. …

Twenty-Five Years Out from Telling Memories : Conversations Between Mary Yelling and Susan Tucker

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For Telling Memories Among Southern Women, Mary Yelling interviewed about one-third of some 200 women who had the time and courage to talk to us about their memories of domestic workers and domestic work. As I said in the book, Mary's part was essential. As an African American woman, she was able to gain trust with current and former domestic workers in our racially divided society much more quickly than I, a white woman, could. We had first met in 1979 on Department of Labor survey research projects carried out in Mobile, Alabama. Mary began with them when she decided to leave work as a math teacher. I began with them also in a gap year, away from being a librarian and archivist, because I wanted to explore more fully than a full-time job would allow the relationships of white employers to their African American domestics. I had begun this work in 1973, interviewing white women and researching domestic workers as portrayed in literature and archival records. In 1980 I asked Mary to join me in this research because we shared an interest in our segregated communities and how segregation was both mitigated and reinforced by domestic workers, their employers, and especially the system that created and continued a servant caste. We also soon learned that we shared much more. Our grandmothers and grandfathers had lived on the same street, for example, and essentially we had grown up in the same neighborhood, albeit one divided by race. Both of us also loved stories, and we thought of the stories that domestic workers and their employers told about one another as critical to understanding so much around us. I have received three to seven calls every year since 1988 from those seeking advice about their own work on domestics or pleased to tell me how they had read Telling Memories and used some of the narratives as a springboard for their research and writing. One of these callers was Kathryn Stockett. Given the frequency of these calls over the years, perhaps it should have occurred to me how significant a topic the story of domestic workers might prove one day to popular audiences. I did not think this, but I was always glad to help, and Mary and I remain grateful that we were able to provide some part of a foundation upon which others could build. On the other hand, because of this continuing interest and because of a sense of fairness to all those women who told us intimate details of their lives, Mary and I have continued to work together in a series of recorded conversations (with each other and with others over the last two decades) on a variety of topics, especially the centrality of place in shaping who one becomes, and legacies within life paths set alongside thoughts on reparations for slavery. The excerpts below come from this documentary project. In Their Own Words ... Mary Yelling: Tell me about your earliest memory of a domestic worker. Susan Tucker: I guess it would be of my grandparents' cook. I can remember seeing her in the kitchen. And there was a little set of steps that I would climb up and jump down into her arms. Also, my grandfather would sit at the table and he would say, Cook, bring the ice cream. I remember how she would stand with her hands on her hips when she talked to him. She was assertive. I didn't know the words for that, but I knew she stood her ground. He wasn't supposed to have dessert. And my other grandmother had a maid named Mattie, and she made really good pralines. So, I guess you would say my memory of them centered around stability and good food. So you, what was your first memory of a domestic worker? MY: My great-grandmother, who was actually my step-great-grandmother but who I called Mama, I can remember moving up to her house. She had pretty dresses that I liked. And she said that when she brought me the first night, I was around three. I could talk, and I protested because she wanted to put pajamas on me. …

“Legal at the Time”?: Companies, Governments and Reparations for Mauritian Slavery

AbstractThis article critiques the “legal at the time” argument used by states and companies which historically practised slavery to defend themselves against claims for restitution, examining the Mauritian case. Although slavery was largely legal there before its abolition by the British, torts were common under slavery and, during the years of historic rupture, 1794–1839, when the local élite defied first French and then English law, generated systemic unlawful activity. Most types of legal action for restitution for slavery face formidable difficulties; pursuing reparations supported by broad legal arguments may therefore be a more viable route. Slavery may be argued to have been an illegitimate endeavour in itself. While sympathetic to that view, this article does not pursue it but rather seeks to demonstrate that the “legal at the time” argument against reparations contains significant lacunae even within its restricted terms. It also shows that French constitutional law offers possibilities in the form of rights that are not time-bound.

UNTHINKING RACIAL REALISM: A FUTURE FOR REPARATIONS?1

AbstractConsidered costly, divisive, and backward-looking, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no place in the politics of the “postracial epoch.” This essay proposes that the dismissal of reparations concedes too much. First, I contend that the conjunction of postracial discourse, on the one hand, and deepening racial inequalities, on the other, demands a counter-language, one that ties the analysis of the present to the historical conditions out of which it was produced. I explore reparations as a political language that (1) situates political claims within the historical framework of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation; (2) links past to present to future in its demand for concrete forms of redress; and (3) has played an important role in African American political life and in contemporary democracies in transition. Second, in contrast to much of the reparations scholarship, I focus on the demands of democracy rather than justice. Doing so both helps to evade some of the technical questions that have prevented full consideration of the political work of reparations and provides a vehicle for redefining both governmental and civic responsibility in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow.

Britain's Black Debt—Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. By Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, University of the West Indies Press, 2013) 292 pp. $70.00 cloth $30.00 paper

<i>Britain's Black Debt—Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide.</i> By Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, University of the West Indies Press, 2013) 292 pp. $70.00 cloth $30.00 paper

The Case for Reparations for Slavery in the Caribbean

‘In history it is the influential who have received reparations’ (147), observes Hilary McD. Beckles in his powerful polemic for reparations to the Caribbean for hundreds of years of slavery impose...

Britain's black debt: reparations for slavery and native genocide

Britain's black debt: reparations for slavery and native genocide

Unblocking a Free Market Perspective in Labor Economics

(2008) Walter Block presents a seemingly comprehensive free market perspective on the economics of the labor market. From this perspective Block discusses the economics of wage determination and the minimum wage’s effects on the labor market; the economic impact of labor unions and unionized regulation as well as the economics of unemployment insurance and academic tenure; and he touches on immigration, redistributive justice, and slavery reparations. There should be no surprise that the free market perspective allows Block to argue that regulation and intervention in the market cause imbalances and disequilibria and are therefore economically inefficient and undesireable. But Block goes one step further and argues that all kinds of regulation or tampering with a free market setting for voluntary interaction of individuals are simply wrong. There is no doubt that Labor Economics from a Free Market Perspective is a very provocative book. On the one hand, it is a treatise on labor economics covering basic economic truths such as the determination of wages and the effects in the labor market of enforced minimum wage laws and unionism. Just like in Block’s 1976 book

The Law of Torts and the Logic of Lynching in Charles Chesnutt'sThe Marrow of Tradition

Tort law, which governs civil wrongs, coalesced during the late nineteenth century as courts became increasingly willing to compensate injured people. Its history, however, has been told without reference to issues of race or compensation for slavery and its aftermath. In the novelThe Marrow of Tradition(1901), Charles Chesnutt stretches tort discourse by using its principle of corrective justice to theorize liability for racial injustice and so discovers what law suppresses—the problem of collateral consequences when responsibility is made a function of race. Not only does corrective justice reach an operational limit when the enormity of the wrong exceeds the ability to pay, but using race to assess liability aligns corrective justice with the logic behind the southern practice of lynching. Recovering Chesnutt's use of tort challenges the dominance of contract law as the framework for readingMarrowand revises our historical understanding of the significance of reparations.

Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions

Should Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions

“We Have Reconquered the Islands”: Figurations in Public Memories of Slavery and Colonialism in Denmark 1948–2012

The fact that Denmark was deeply engaged in the practices of the slave trade and slavery from the seventeenth century to 1848 often goes unnoticed—even in Denmark. For this reason, a number of Danish scholars and artists have characterized Danish ignorance of the colonial past as repression. This article demonstrates that the colonial past has in fact never been repressed, but has instead been subject to figurations, as theorized by Olick (2007). The initial experiences of colonialism have been screened at different points in time rendering the past in versions very far from the actual historical events themselves. Recently, new claims for reparations for slavery and colonialism in the former Danish West Indies have challenged the existing notions of the colonial past in Denmark. These claims have not resulted in an official Danish politics of regret (Olick 2007) as witnessed in other former colonial states. Whereas, a radical break away from the earlier conceptions of the colonial past is demanded, instead new figurations and renarrations have been used to try to incorporate the new challenges to the historical imaginary into the older layers of memory without radically breaking away from it, creating somewhat surprising results that questions the notions of a uniform global memory and understanding of historical injustices.

From Slavery to Genocide

This paper analyzes the failure of the ‘Reparations for Slavery’ movement within the African American community over the past century. It argues that the association of reparations with a “debt” has complicated the ability to win legal arguments for reparations. The author asserts that a stronger legal case can be made by arguing that the Jim Crow era constituted a form of genocide as defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, and that a potential reparations claim made on this basis can overcome the obstacles that have thus far defeated previous reparation law suits.

Invisible norms? Statistics of racial polarization and consensus

Social scientists often arrive at opposite portrayals of American race relations, despite relying on identical data sources. Depending on their ideological predispositions, they either minimize or maximize remaining racial inequalities. The election of President Obama suggests that the reality of American race relations likely falls somewhere in between – but where? This paper applies a simple method of comparing racial gaps across domains on a shared metric. Results suggest that non-violence represents a shared norm rendered invisible by traditional data presentation formats that exaggerate existing ‘crime gaps.’ Other racial gaps are more substantial, e.g., in education, income, and race-related public opinion. However, even in these domains Black–White agreement (group concordance) tends to outweigh disagreement (group discordance). Exceptions are monetary reparations for slavery and presidential approval ratings of Obama. Thus, characterizations of America as ‘post-racial’ seem premature. However, given that racial equality (once achieved) will marked by group concordance and shared norms, equality measures should capture emerging commonalities in addition to remaining gaps.

INHERITING DU BOIS

What would it mean to treat W. E. B. Du Bois as a “living political thinker,” Tommie Shelby asks. The formulation of the question indicates one answer: acknowledging Du Bois's twofold legacy for political theory and philosophy. On the one hand, his body of work as a political theorist is rich and provocative enough that it ought to be, as Robert Gooding-Williams (2009) urges, the subject of serious inquiry in its own right. On the other hand, engaging Du Bois as a political theorist enables contemporary scholars to reflect on the political challenges of our own time, even when Du Bois offers answers we would not own for ourselves. Perhaps most crucially, taking Du Bois's work seriously requires a rigorous engagement with the past and an active refutation of declarations of a “postracial” age that belie yawning racial inequalities, the continuing devaluation of non-White lives, and the unredressed injuries—to American citizens, to the polity itself, and to women and men well beyond U.S. borders—of White supremacy. All of the participants in this symposium would, I think, endorse this view in its broadest strokes. But to inherit Du Bois as a political thinker is also to participate in an ongoing and often contentious conversation about race, democracy, and Du Bois himself. Accordingly, my comments will focus on two clusters of issues. The first is raised by Rogers Smith's and Tommie Shelby's vigorous disagreement with the idea of Black reparations that I explore in the second chapter of Democracy's Reconstruction. The second involves a set of unresolved tensions bequeathed by Du Bois and addressed in Gooding-Williams' extraordinary book and Cristina Beltrán's meditations on the Afro-modern political tradition and Latino politics today.

Memo on Binary Economics to Attorneys for Women and People of Color Re: What Else Can Public Corporations Do for Your Clients?

Memo on Binary Economics to Attorneys for Women and People of Color Re: What Else Can Public Corporations Do for Your Clients?

The Full Price of Freedom: African American's Shared Responsibility to Repair the Harms of Slavery and Segregation

This dissertation explores the issue of reparations for black Americans for slavery and segregation. It addresses a substantial question of warranting ethical analysis unexamined in the existing literature: What responsibility do black communities have for making reparations for slavery and segregation? Without denying the significance of the traditional approach to the issue of reparations that focuses upon wrongdoers responsibility to injured groups, this query suggested a commonly neglected topic in reparations discourse - the appropriate role of injured groups in their own restoration and renewal.In order to address the most signifcant injuries inflicted upon black communities, the analysis focuses exclusively on political, economic, and educational harms. The breadth of the injuries examined necessitated an interdisciplinary approach to the project in order to understand the extent and depth of the harms and the steps required for their repair. Accordingly, as a work of Christian ethics, the dissertation flows from an engagement with law, theology, sociology, and political philosophy as vital resources for ascertaining black communal responsibility for repairing the harms of slavery and segregation.The theologoical insights of womanist scholars provide the foundation for constructing a framework for the remediation of harmed communities. This framework engages a communal perspective to recognize the harms and remedies for black enslavement and discriminiation. In conjunction with that framework, the dissertation expounds on communal self-love as the motivating force and the chief organizing principle supporting blacks' accpetance of shared responsibility for repairing the damages to black communities. The motivation for communal reparations adopted within the dissertation flows from a sense of self-love that embraces both the love of neighbor and the love of God.A communal ethic of responsibility ultimately grows out of the theological analysis as a means of guiding reparative efforts for black communities. The dissertation then explores an institutional framework for reparations as the preferred means of embodying that ethic. As a result of the investigation, the dissertation proposes the development of black political, economic, and educational institutions guided by an ethic of communal responsibility as the ethical expression of black communities' obligation to repair the harms of slavery and segregation.