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MTJ LabReparations Opening Packet (J. Miller)

Reparations Topic Area Work – Pre Institute

The United States federal government ought to pay reparations to African Americans.

Background...........................................................................................................................................................................3Definitions.............................................................................................................................................................................5

Federal Government.........................................................................................................................................................5Definitions.....................................................................................................................................................................5

Ought................................................................................................................................................................................6Definitions.....................................................................................................................................................................6

Reparations.......................................................................................................................................................................7Definitions.....................................................................................................................................................................7

African Americans.............................................................................................................................................................7Term of Art....................................................................................................................................................................7Definitions.....................................................................................................................................................................8

Pro Evidence........................................................................................................................................................................10Reparations Solvency......................................................................................................................................................10

Symbolism Solves........................................................................................................................................................10Financial/Monetary/Material Solve............................................................................................................................10Financial Solves – Symbolism Warrants......................................................................................................................11Can’t Be Economic Reparations...................................................................................................................................11Large Efforts Key..........................................................................................................................................................12AT: Economically Not Feasible.....................................................................................................................................13AT: Apologies, Aff Axn, Truth Fail – Monetary Key......................................................................................................14AT: Affirmative Action Fails.........................................................................................................................................15

Federal Government Key.................................................................................................................................................16Obligation....................................................................................................................................................................16Accountability.............................................................................................................................................................17Revenue Stream..........................................................................................................................................................17UN Genocide Convention............................................................................................................................................17Spillover Effect.............................................................................................................................................................19

Potential Impacts............................................................................................................................................................19Self Sufficiency.............................................................................................................................................................19Future Policy Failure....................................................................................................................................................21Justice..........................................................................................................................................................................22Harms Value of Life.....................................................................................................................................................23Democratic Politics......................................................................................................................................................25Harms Democracy.......................................................................................................................................................26Leads to Activism.........................................................................................................................................................26

Con......................................................................................................................................................................................28Responsibility Debate......................................................................................................................................................28

Slaveowners/Direct Perpetrators................................................................................................................................28Federal Government...................................................................................................................................................29States Government.....................................................................................................................................................33

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AT: Popular Opinion Polls............................................................................................................................................34Harms of Reparations......................................................................................................................................................34

Continues Problems....................................................................................................................................................34Causes Trauma............................................................................................................................................................35

Reparations Fail...............................................................................................................................................................36Costs Too Much...........................................................................................................................................................36One Group Fails...........................................................................................................................................................36Preclude Future Repair................................................................................................................................................37Poor Focus Fails...........................................................................................................................................................37Monetary Fails.............................................................................................................................................................38AT: Educational Reparations.......................................................................................................................................40

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Background1865-2003 Historical Timeline of ReparationsRodney D. Coates, [Professor of Sociology@ Miami University, OH], 2004, “If a Tree Falls in the Wilderness: Reparations, Academic Silences, and Social Justice” Social Forces 83(2); p. 855 // JM

1865: Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman declares that a strip of land along the Southeast coast be set aside for freed slaves; families can receive up to 40 acres. The federal government also establishes the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance. But, within the year, President Andrew Johnson undermines Sherman and weakens the bureau.

1890: William R. Vaughan, a white man from Alabama, persuades members of Congress to introduce the first of nine bills mandating federal pensions for former slaves, but none of the bills passes.

1890s: African Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop Henry M. Turner campaigns to secure reparations for black Americans. He estimated blacks were owed $40 billion dollars for 200 years of unpaid labor.

1897: The Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association is founded. Under the leadership of Callie House, it eventually enlists hundreds of thousands of members, but the government later indicts House for mail fraud. After serving time in prison, she helps file a lawsuit demanding African Americans receive $69 million acquired through cotton taxes.

1962: New York activist Queen Mother Audley Moore submits a petition to the United Nations asking the U.S. government to pay slavery reparations.

1968: Radicals in Detroit form the Republic of New Africa, demanding five Southern states and $400 billion.

1969: Civil rights activist James Forman marches into a service at the mostly white Riverside Church in New York City and begins reading his “Black Manifesto.” Forman charges white churches and synagogues with complicity in slavery and racial oppression and asks them to pay restitution.

1971: The U.S. government agrees to grant $1 billion and 44 million acres to Native American tribes in Alaska.

1988: Congress allocates $20,000 for each Japanese American survivor of internment camps. Meanwhile, activists form the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.

1989: A reparations bill introduced in Massachusetts by state Senator William Owens languishes. And U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., a Detroit Democrat, calls for a federal study of slavery, racial discrimination, and “appropriate remedies.” The bill does not leave the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers reintroduces it every subsequent year, with similar results.

1995: A federal appeals court in California dismisses Cato v. United States, which asked for $100 million in slavery reparations. Judges can find no law allowing the government to be sued for slavery, declaring it an issue for Congress.

1997: U.S. Representative Tony Hall, a white Ohio Democrat, introduces a resolution asking Congress to formally apologize for slavery. Despite provoking intense debate, it is buried in committee.

1999: Acknowledging a pattern of discrimination, the U.S. Department of Agriculture agrees to pay restitution to thousands of black farmers.

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2000: Randall Robinson’s The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, an argument for reparations, is published, becoming a bestseller and dramatically raising the movement’s profile.

2001: Writer and activist David Horowitz places an advertisement in college newspapers around the country, arguing that blacks have benefited from being brought to America. And, after intense lobbying, the final document of the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, declares that slavery was a crime against humanity.

2002: Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a New York advocate, files a class-action lawsuit against several major corporations for profiting from slavery and violating human rights laws. By the end of the year, the case is consolidated with eight others and moved to federal court in Chicago. Over the summer, activist Conrad Worrill co-organizes a rally in Washington, D.C., that draws thousands of reparations supporters. And in October, the Chicago City Council passes the Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance, requiring firms that want contracts with the city to investigate and reveal ties to slavery.

2003: Virginia residents Robert L. Foster and his daughter Crystal are sentenced to prison after filing an income tax return claiming she was owed $500,000 for reparations.

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DefinitionsFederal Government

Definitions Federal government is central governmentWEBSTER'S 76 NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY UNABRIDGED, p. 833.

Federal government. Of or relating to the central government of a nation, having the character of a federation as distinguished from the governments of the constituent unites (as states or provinces).

Federal government is the national government that expresses powerBlack’s Law Dictionary, 8th Edition, June 1, 2004, pg.716.

Federal government. 1. A national government that exercises some degree of control over smaller political units that have surrendered some degree of power in exchange for the right to participate in national politics matters – Also termed (in federal states) central government. 2. the U.S. government – Also termed national government. [Cases: United States -1 C.J.S. United States - - 2-3]

Federal refers to the national government. It’s distinct from state law.Dictionary of Government and Politics ’98 (Ed. P.H. Collin, p. 116)

federal [‘federal] adjective (a) referring to a system of government in which a group of states are linked together in a federation; a federal constitution = constitution (such as that in Germany) which provides for a series of semi-autonomous states joined together in a national federation (b) referring especially to the federal government of the United States; federal court or federal laws = court or laws of the USA, as opposed to state courts or state laws.

USFG is the federal government of the USA, based in DCDictionary of Government and Politics ’98 (Ed. P.H. Collin, p. 292)

United States of America (USA) [ju:’naitid ‘steits av e’merike] noun independent country, a federation of states (originally thirteen, now fifty in North America; the United States Code = book containing all the permanent laws of the USA, arranged in sections according to subject and revised from time to time COMMENT: the federal government (based in Washington D.C.) is formed of a legislature (the Congress) with two chambers (the Senate and House of Representatives), an executive (the President) and a judiciary (the Supreme Court). Each of the fifty states making up the USA has its own legislature and executive (the Governor) as well as its own legal system and constitution

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Ought Definitions

Ought implies a moral obligationMoti Mizrahi, City University of New York, “‘Ought’ Does Not Imply ‘Can’”, Philosophical Frontiers ISSN 1758-1532 Vol. 4, Issue 1 (2009) pp. 19-35 // JM

Before discussing counterexamples to OIC, some terminological notes are in order. In this paper, ‘ought’ is used to express a duty or moral obligation. For example, the sentence “Parents ought to be revered” means that one has a duty to revere one’s parents. Indeed, this is the sense of ‘ought’ on which the literature has focused. That is, ‘ought to’ and ‘is obligated to’ are used interchangeably.5 As for ‘can’, construing ‘can’ in terms of what is logically possible for an agent to do seems too strong. So a reasonable understanding of ‘can’ seems to be in terms of what an agent is capable of doing within the limits of her physical and mental abilities in the circumstances. Having the physical and mental abilities requisite for performing a certain action, however, need not guarantee success. As in the case of ‘ought’, this is the sense of ‘can’ on which the literature has focused.6 In this paper, ‘can’ and ‘ought’ are used in the same senses. However, there may be some plausible alternative meanings of ‘ought’ and ‘can’ that are available to those who wish to defend a weaker version of OIC. These alternatives will be discussed in the penultimate section of this paper.

Ought implies can – (Mizrahi quoting Sidgwick)Moti Mizrahi, City University of New York, “‘Ought’ Does Not Imply ‘Can’”, Philosophical Frontiers ISSN 1758-1532 Vol. 4, Issue 1 (2009) pp. 19-35 // JM

With these senses of ‘ought’ and ‘can’ in hand, the analysis will now focus on the relation of implication. Some have argued that the relation of implication in OIC

should be taken as logical implication. For example, Henry Sidgwick seems to endorse OIC in this sense.7 As he writes: ...in the narrowest ethical sense what we judge ‘ought to be’ done, is always thought capable of being brought about by the volition of any individual to whom the judgment applies. I cannot conceive that I ‘ought’ to do anything which at the same time I judge that I cannot do.8 If conceivability is a guide to logical possibility, then Sidgwick seems to suggest that ‘ought’ logically implies ‘can’. In other words, it’s inconceivable that an agent ought to perform a certain action if that agent cannot perform that particular action. If this is correct, then the supposed implication seems to be the following: (OIC) If A ought to do X, then A can do X.

Prefer our definition—Wedgwood draws a distinction between the practical and political “ought”Wedgwood 6 (Ralph Wedgewood, Professor of Ethics at Oxford University, 2006 “The meaning of ‘ought’,” 2006. www-bcf.usc.edu/~wedgwood/meaningofought.htm)/lj

I have already cited the distinction between the practical ‘ought’ and what Sidgwick called the “political ‘ought’”. The most striking difference between these two

kinds of ‘ought’, as I have suggested, seems to be this: the practical ‘ought’ is clearly indexed to a particular agent and time, and it is a constraint on what “ought” to be the case, in this sense, that it should be realizable by what the agent thinks or does at that time; the political ‘ought’, on the other hand, is not indexed to any particular agent and time in this way. I might say, ‘The British constitution ought to be radically reformed’, without having any particular agent x in mind (either individual or collective) such that I mean to say that x ought to bring it about that the British constitution is radically reformed. In that case, as I argued earlier, my statement does not contain any implicit reference to any particular agent. My acceptance of this statement hardly commits me to planning on the radical reform of the British constitution; at most it commits me to favouring the goal

of such radical reform. ‘Ought’ exhibits other sorts of contextual variation as well. For example, on some occasions, therefore ‘ought’ seems to be relative to a particular goal or purpose.

“Ought” implies an ideal or ethical obligationSidgwick 1907 (Henry Sidgwick was one of the most influential ethical philosophers of the Victorian era, and his work continues to exert a powerful influence on Anglo-American ethical and political theory. 1907, Book I, ch. 3, n. 10, p. 34. http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/sidgwick/me/me.b01.c03.s03.html // LJ)

In performing this process it is important to note and distinguish two different implications with which the word ``ought'' is used; in the narrowest ethical sense what we judge `ought to be' done, is always thought capable of being brought about by the volition of any

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individual to whom the judgment applies. I cannot conceive that I òught' to do anything which at the same time I judge that I cannot do. In a wider sense , however,--- which cannot conveniently be discarded ---I sometimes judge that I òught' to know what a wiser man would know, or feel as a better man would feel, in my place, though I may know that I could not directly produce in myself such knowledge or feeling by any effort of will. In this case the word merely implies an ideal or pattern which I òught'---in the stricter sense---to seek to imitate as far as possible. And this wider sense seems to be that in which the word is normally used in the precepts of Art generally, and in political judgments: when I judge that the laws and constitution of my country òught to be' other than they are, I do not of course imply that my own or any other individual's single volition can directly bring about the change. In either case, however, I imply that what ought to be is a possible object of knowledge: i.e. that what I judge ought to be must, unless I am in error, be similarly judged by all rational beings who judge truly of the matter.

Reparations Definitions

Types of reparationsEric Posner & Adrian Vermeule, "Reparations for Slavery and Other Historical Injustices," 103 Columbia Law Review 689 (2003). // JM

The word "reparations" does not pick out a natural kind; there are no clear conceptual boundaries that demarcate reparations from ordinary legal remedies, on the one hand, and other large-scale governmental transfer programs, on the other. Paradigmatic examples of reparations ordinarily discussed in the relevant literatures

in law, politics, and moral theory, such as proposals for slavery reparations, do tend to share certain major features: They typically refer to schemes that (1) provide payment (in cash or in kind) to a large group of claimants, (2) on the basis of wrongs that were substantively permissible under the prevailing law when committed, (3) in which current law bars a compulsory remedy for the past wrong (by virtue of sovereign immunity, statutes of limitations, or similar rules), and (4) in which the payment is justified on backward-looking grounds of corrective justice, rather than forward-looking grounds such as the deterrence of future wrongdoing. However, a wide range of policies, programs, and decisions have been described as reparations, and the various cases are connected only by a series of family resemblances. Any of the typical features we have listed can be quibbled with; we might, without linguistic impropriety, use the word "reparations" to describe a scheme that dispenses with any of them. A payment to a small group rather than a large one, for example, might without absurdity be described as "reparations" if justified as remediation of wrongs committed under a previous legal regime.

African Americans Term of Art

African Americans is a unique term of art that must be used in the debate of reparationsCraemer, Thomas. "Framing Reparations." Policy Studies Journal 37.2 (2009): 275-298. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 July 2015. // JM

Governmental agencies are usually not considered as potential recipients of reparations, except when the definition of slavery is expanded to include atrocities committed under colonialism (e.g., Wareham, 2003; Worrill, 2003). This argument would make African governments potentially eligible to be compensated (Wareham, 2003, p. 230). However, it may also reverse the direction of reparations. Abolitionist demands of colonial powers were rejected by notorious African slave traders such as the notorious king Gezo of Dahomey (today's Benin). He resisted signing a treaty with the British for the abolition of slavery stating: "The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Can I, by signing … a treaty, change the sentiment of a whole people?" (cited in Thomas, 1997, p. 695). According to Derrick (1975), "anti-slavery action … was linked inextricably with colonial aggression and conquest" (Derrick, 1975, p. 13, emphasis added). This consideration leads Jon M. Van Dyke (2003, p. 74) to move African governments from the side of potential recipients of slavery reparations to the side of potential providers.

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“African Americans” are U.S. citizens with Sub-Saharan African ancestry—legal definitionUS Legal (independently operated legal destination “for consumers, small business, attorneys, corporations, and anyone interested in the law, or in need of legal information, products or services.” “African Americans Law & Legal Definition” http://definitions.uslegal.com/a/african-americans/ accessed 6/2/15)/lj

African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. In the United States, the terms are generally used for Americans with at least partial Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Most African Americans are the direct descendants of captive Africans who survived the slavery era within the boundaries of the present United States. There were many events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by African Americans. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the African-American community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. African Americans make up the single largest racial minority in the United States and form the second largest racial group after whites in the

United States. They are also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans, and formerly as American Negroes.

Definitions “African Americans” must have origins in black racial groups of Africa—2010 Census definitionRastogi et.al 2011 (Sonya Rastogi, Tallese D. Johnson, Elizabeth M. Hoeffel, and Malcolm P. Drewery, Jr. Sonya Rastogi joined the U.S. Census Bureau in 2007 as a statistician in the Population Division. She began her career with the Immigration Statistics Staff, where she contributed to important methodological changes in estimating net international migration. Recently, Rastogi worked in the Racial Statistics Branch, where she led projects such as testing and evaluating alternative race and Hispanic origin questions and reviewing and analyzing 2010 Census statistics on race. Rastogi was recently appointed to a senior research position in the Census Bureau's Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications, where she is leading the research on race, ethnicity, and immigration using administrative and Census data. “The Black Population: 2010: 2010 Census Briefs” https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-06.pdf)/lj

DEFINITION OF BLACK OR AFRICAN AMERICAN USED IN THE 2010 CENSUS According to OMB, “Black or African American” refers to a person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. The Black racial category includes people who marked the “Black, African Am., or Negro”

checkbox. It also includes respondents who reported entries such as African American; Sub-Saharan African entries, such as Kenyan and Nigerian; and Afro-Caribbean entries, such as Haitian and Jamaican.*Sub-Saharan African entries are classified as Black or African American with the exception of Sudanese and Cape Verdean because of their complex, historical heritage. North African entries are classified as White, as OMB defines White as a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

“African American” evolved as an movement—refers to the unique cultural experiences of Black AmericansWilkerson 89 (ISABEL WILKERSON, Special to the New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. “'African-American' Favored By Many of America's Blacks” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/31/us/african-american-favored-by-many-of-america-s-blacks.html. 5/4/15)/lj

A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this country. The term ,

used for years in intellectual circles, is gaining currency among many other blacks, who say its use is a sign that they are accepting their difficult past and resolving a long ambivalence toward Africa. The term has already shown up in the newest grade-school textbooks, been adopted by several black-run radio stations and newspapers around the country and appeared in the titles of popular books and in the conversations of many blacks as they warm to the idea and speak of visiting Africa one day. For many, the issue is already settled, not only in their minds but in their hearts. ''Whenever I go to Africa,'' said Roger Wilkins, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, ''I feel like a person with a legitimate place to stand on this earth. This is the name for all the feelings I've had all these years.'' Mr. Wilkins's feelings are not shared by all. Skeptics, many of them older blacks who have lived through previous name changes, are resisting the move. Some say they do not identify with Africa and resent prominent blacks telling them what to be called. Others fear that the debate over a new name draws attention away from problems like unemployment and drug abuse. Leaders of the movement to change the language say it was concern about those problems and growing involvement in the fight to end racial separation in South Africa that led to the search for a clearer group identity. They say they want to shift the definition of the group from the racial description black to a cultural and ethnic identity that ties the group to its continent of origin and fosters dignity and self-

esteem. ''This is deeper than just name recognition,'' said Mr. Jackson who, along with others, called for the change at a news conference in late December. ''Black tells you about skin color and what side of town you live on. African-American

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evokes discussion of the world.'' Few people who favor the new term expect to see it replace ''black'' entirely, although they would like it to be the principal reference eventually. For now, there does not seem to be the distaste toward ''black'' that many felt toward ''Negro'' or ''colored'' two decades ago. Instead,

there is a feeling that ''African-American'' can sometimes convey a significance that ''black'' cannot. The debate among blacks comes at a time when other minority groups are also struggling toward redefinition. In recent months, Jews here and in Israel have been torn over the question ''who is a Jew?'' Hispanic Americans have grappled with the use of Latino and Hispanic. And Asian-Americans, seeking recognition of their many nationalities, have successfully lobbied the Census Bureau to delineate Asian groups in the 1990 census, even listing Samoans and Guamanians. The push for a change from ''black'' to ''African-American'' came too late to become a category in the 1990 census, said Nampeo McKenney, director of the agency's special populations division. The form will say ''Black or Negro'' in the section on race. But in light of growing pressure, the agency is adding special instructions telling those filling out the forms that ''Black or Negro includes African-Americans.'' The term African-American cannot be used officially until the agency tests it in a process that takes several years, she said. Turning Point Is Seen Still, the push by Mr. Jackson is seen by black historians as an important step. ''This is a significant psychological and cultural turning point,'' said Dr. Walter Allen, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who is black. ''This makes explicit what was implicit. First we had to convince everyone to come into the fold as black. Now we are clarifying what that means.'' Dr. Ramona Edelin, president of the National Urban Coalition, said: ''There were bitter battles when we went from 'Negro' to 'black.' We don't want that this time.'' Dr. Edelin said that when she brought up the idea for adopting the term African-American at a meeting of 75 black groups convened by Mr. Jackson late last month, there was ''overwhelming consensus'' favoring the change. The meeting attracted scores of people from fraternities, sororities and civic and social groups. Several school districts, including Atlanta and Chicago, have adopted the term in their curriculums and encourage teachers to use it. ''We just feel it's a more accurate term,'' said Dr. Alice Jurica, director of social studies for the Chicago public schools. Two of the largest black-oriented radio stations in New York City, WWRL and WLIB, have been using the term. Now more listeners who call in refer to themselves as African-Americans, although once they get going they often slip back to using black, said David Lampel, WLIB program director. ''Often they will use black and African-American in the same phone call,'' he said. Changes in the Press

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Pro Evidence

Reparations Solvency Symbolism Solves

Financial reparations cannot compensate for slavery, but the symbolism is an important step.Angelique M. Davis, [Asst. Professor; Political Science, Global African Studies Program @ Seattle University]; 2014, “Apologies, Reparations, and the Continuing Legacy of the Slave Trade in the United States.” Journal of Black Studies 45(4) // JM

Finally, by minimizing the continuing legacy of the European Slave Trade and slavery in the United States and thwarting concrete remedial measures including reparations claims, the resolutions serve to absolve White Americans, state governments, and the federal government for their role in these horrors and allow them to continue to benefit from systemic racial inequality in the United States. Some argue that although financial reparations could never compensate for the genocide perpetrated by the enslavement of African Americans, it would be symbolically significant (Cooper, 2012).

The question of whether these apologies will lead to tangible benefits for African Americans or serve as a form of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) that ultimately benefits the majority remains. There does not appear, however, to be much political will to address this issue as public reaction to these apology resolutions reveals that vigorous debate remains surrounding whether or not present-day racial inequalities are linked to slavery and if government bodies and individuals today have any responsibility for it.

Financial/Monetary/Material Solve

Monetary reparations are key to economic freedomRobert Westley 2001, Associate Professor at Tulane University Law School, "Many Billions Gone:Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations?". http://www.raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid988933302,39826,.shtml // JM

Compensation to Blacks for the injustices suffered by them must first and foremost be monetary . It must be sufficient to indicate that the United States truly wishes to make Blacks whole for the losses they have endured. Sufficient, in other words, to reflect not only the extent of unjust Black

suffering, but also the need for Black economic independence from societal discrimination. No less than with the freedmen, freedom for Black people today means economic freedom and security. A basis for that freedom and security can be assured through group reparations in the form of monetary compensation, along with free provision of goods and services to Black communities across the nation. The guiding principle of reparations must be self-determination in every sphere of life in which Blacks are currently dependent.

Material reparations are key to ending government discrimination through race-based programsHarvard Law Review, 2002, "Bridging the Color Line: The Power of African-American Reparations to Redirect America'sFuture", Vol.115, No. 6, pp. 1689-1712, April, @JSTOR) // JM

African-American reparations claims do not appeal to the same traditional values as the Japanese-American claims, but it is still pos-sible to eliminate zero sum notions that reparations take from "us" and give to "them" by emphasizing the cathartic and economic benefits to the polity. Reparations, as proposed here, should

restore some of the lost chapters of our history and explain, and ultimately remedy, the wealth and power divides of today. The public investigation into the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow should create an unabridged version of American history, one that would

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provide the country with closure regarding the shameful history of slavery and Jim Crow. This emotional closure, combined with economic and educational programs, could eventually bring the end of race-preference programs and the start of a dialogue about race focused on the future. Reparations that focus on investment in education and training for blacks should result in better skilled workers who are less reliant on welfare , enabling the economy to maximize its previously underutilized human capital.' Affirmative action in employment will ensure that blacks have an opportunity to develop and utilize these skills.105 Providing resources to predominantly black neighborhoods106 to rebuild the educational infrastructure beginning at the elementary level107 might eventually allow all American students to start from the same poin t, rather than rely on affirmative action programs to make up the difference at the college level. Prosperous black-owned businesses, fueled by government subsidies and support,108 could invigorate the economy of both the local neighborhoods they inhabit and the nation.109 Grants to black community-based organizations for

investment in community development projects - parks, cultural symbols, and security, for ex-ample - should reduce crime and increase pride in inner city neighborhoods; this investment could carry over into increased efforts to keep communities safe and clean.10 The government should also provide incentives for asset accumulation to address wealth inequal-ity.1ll Wide distribution of a commission's findings would aid in educating the public regarding the link between past wrongs and present injustices. Admittedly, these investments will be costly in the short term, but over

time, the beneficial effects should be enjoyed throughout the country. The hope is that a reparations plan such as the one proposed here can empower blacks to overcome the lingering impediments of slavery and Jim Crow to achieve equality. South Africa is considering a plan

with similar components to repair its post-apartheid polity. The proposal for reparations before the South African government includes individual reparations grants (payments to qualified individuals), symbolic reparations (constructions of monuments and memorials), com-munity rehabilitation (creation of community-based services and activities, including health care, education, and housing), and institutional reforms (measures to ensure that human rights abuses do not occur again).112 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created to provide a forum for victims and perpetrators to tell personal narratives regarding violations that occurred during apartheid in hopes of disseminating truth and building a

unified country.13 Unofficial reparations have also been offered to empower groups disadvantaged under apartheid . South Africa's black empowerment policies include affirmative action in educationll4 and preference for black businesses in government work allocation - corrective measures the country has deemed necessary in its move from "discrimination to true equality."116I n light of South Africa's history, the government finds a narrow focus on individual rights too limiting and thus recognizes that racial differentiation( as opposed to discrimination)is necessary to give substantive meaning to

mandates for racial equality.117 The African-American reparations package proposed in this Note will likely gain acceptance only if America emulates South Africa's determination to eradicate the lingering effects of government-sanctioned discrimination through programs intended to uplift those groups disadvantaged by that discrimination.

Financial Solves – Symbolism Warrants Symbolic though it may be, financial reparations are critical to any attempt at racial reconciliation.Allan D. Cooper, [Otterbein University] “From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse.” Journal of Black Studies 43(2); p. 121, 2012, JM

In short, financial compensation for victims of genocide, although lacking in any true compensatory value, is a symbolically significant exchange that promotes authenticity to an apology offered by a state to victims of genocide. Compensation represents some acknowledgement that the apology is sincere and that the wrongdoer is prepared to surrender something of value to meet the victimized party halfway as both now proceed into a future that will be developed in partnership with each other. Ideally, reparations should always be tied to an apology; when the head of France’s national railway company offered a formal apology on January 25, 2011, for its role in shipping thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps some 60 years earlier, a lawyer for the more than 600 Holocaust victims and survivors who had filed a class-action lawsuit against the company immediately responded, “Now they should take the next step and pay reparations to the victims” (de la Baume, 2011, p. A6). It is important that an apology be initiated by the wrongdoer and not be part of a demand by a community of victims. “Any apology offered as a result of pressure may (would) not have the attributes that are central to some construction of the apology: that it be freely given and be

sincere” (Cunningham, 2004, p. 565). In the end, even limited restitution seems to be more reparative than an effort to apologize; aboriginal communities in Australia were relatively unbothered by prime minister John Howard’s refusal to apologize for past genocidal policies as long as the government fulfilled its commitment to provide various forms of restitution.

Can’t Be Economic Reparations

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Any form of reparations must be devoid of economic calculation - America’s political and economic system is founded on an intentional exclusion of African AmericansDekera Greene, Clemson University “Ain't no Peace until we get a Piece: Exploring the Justiciability and Potential Mechanisms of Reparations for American Blacks Through United States law, Specific Modes of International Law, and the Covenant for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination ("Cerd")”, The Modern American - Nbr. V-1, April 2009 // JM

Since America's political and economic traditions are based on a system of private property and capitalism , borne of thinkers

like John Locke, democratic participation is premised on property ownership.29 Property is a natural right derived through labor , with ownership contingent upon "useful" development and value of the land .30 This natural right31 precedes governmental sovereignty, based on a social contract in which the people consent to being governed. As such, the government is subject to the will and volition of the people32-presupposing the people's right to revolution .33 This ultimately connects fundamental rights (including the right to revolt or hold government accountable),34 democratic participation (governmental access and engagement),35

and value (societal contribution and intrinsic worthiness),36 to ownership of private property. The benefactors of this oppressive structure designed it for their own success (and continued success for their progeny) by directly exploiting37 and dispossessing enslaved Africans of private property ownership and depriving them of control over their own labor . The government sanctioned this system, and White society perpetuated it 3839. It deprived enslaved Africans of property ownership (inhered value in this

society)40 and subjected them to the expropriation of their work.41 The direct result of this systemic marginalization influenced the place Black people stand in today -deprivation of access to democracy, citizenship, and participation in governmental functions,42 and the intrinsic value 43 manifested in subjective conceptions of cognizable societal contributions and "earned" wealth. Extending the elimination of American Blacks' democratic participation for almost four centuries,44 these economic, political, white supremacist, and governmental systems fundamentally led to the incapacitation of Black self-determination in this country . The harm done is three-fold: (1) American Blacks were denied value45 and worth, which in a zero-sum framework of capitalism protects whiteness and privilege46 as a core value (this dictated Black inability to engage in the development and execution of the democratic and political processes that have sustained this society and government); (2) they were deprived of the capacity to acquire capital and resources to sustain a living for themselves and their descendants,47 and (3) they were deprived of this right so long that there have not been sufficient gains to overwhelm the ills designed to marginalize them.

Large Efforts Key Only large reparations are sufficient – single reparation efforts aren’t enoughRoy Lavon Brooks 1999, New York University Press, “When sorry isn't enough: the controversy over apologies and reparations for human injustice.”, pg 417-418 // JM

In the first place, the claim of innocence is often factually incorrect because many whites still discriminate against African Americans in a variety of blatant, subtle, and covert ways. And even if a particular white person has not or does not engage in overt discrimination, most such individuals are the beneficiaries of what their (and others') ancestors did in creating a system of racial oppression that, as we have demonstrated, persists today. Unjust enrichment is another name for contemporary white privileges. Patricia J. Williams has underscored this major principle of law and ethics: "I read a

rule somewhere that said if a thief steals so that his children may live in luxury and the law returns his ill-gotten gain to its rightful owner, the children cannot complain that they have been deprived of what they did not own". Martin Katz has argued

forcefully that the harm of past discrimination cannot be "allowed to persist unremedied because its 'cause' cannot be specifically identified." If this ist done, "whites will be allowed to retain an advantage which they did not earn and blacks will continue to lag behind as a result of acts which although they may not be amenable to documentation no one denies were performed in contempt of individuality." Just because many of the specific acts of racial discrimination and exploitation cannot be specifically

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identified does not exculpate the beneficiaries of racist practice. For many generations now, white children have inherited ill-gotten gains from the anti black actions of whites before them. Recognition of this inheritance of privilege is key to understanding arguments for reparations, and key to bringing about reconciliation

between blacks and whites. Wealth transmission is a critical factor in the reproduction of racial oppression. Given the nature of whites' disproportionate share of America's wealth and the historical conditions under which it was acquired--often at the expense of African Americans--it is of little significance that legal discrimination and segregation exist today. The argument that "Jim Crow is a thing of the past" misses the point, because the huge racial disparities in wealth today are a direct outgrowth of economic and social privileges one group secured unfairly, if not brutally, at the expense of another group. Although civil rights laws that attempt to maintain equal opportunity in jobs, education, housing, and voting are

necessary and vital to eradicating racial oppression, they alone cannot remedy the continuing inequalities linked to Jim Crow.

Redressing the inequality generated by racial oppression will require a major redistribution of white wealth . The ill-gotten privileges and unearned wealth inherited by present day generations of white Americans must be dismantled and redistributed to those who have inherited the burdens of long term racial oppression, both past and present . Economic,

political, and perhaps other forms of reparations for African Americans are essential if the United States is to begin to approach the equality long ago enunciated in the Declaration of Independence 's opening premise : "all men are created equal and are

endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." Large scale reparations might be part of the next American Revolution.

AT: Economically Not Feasible We must make sacrifices – material reparations are worthless unless we are forced to take a hit – this is the only way for those in poverty to succeedDavid Hall, 2004, Law @ Northeastern, "The spirit of reparations", http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/lawreviews/meta-elements/journals/bctwj/24_1/02_FMS.htm/ // JM

In a society where the economic power and well-being of a group determines so much of its social , physical, and educational

well-being, there must be economic solutions and remedies. This will never happen through an individualized civil rights approach to justice. We can

not level these playing fields with marginal remedies that do not go to the heart of the problem. Certainly money alone will not cure these social injuries, but without a major infusion of economic resources into the social wounds that this society created through laws and

customs, we will not only remain a separate nation, but we will never fulfill the true calling of this nation. Many African-American children are attending public educational institutions that are in need of enormous resources and new ideas about

learning and achievement.24 [*PG9]Progress will not occur through the normal incremental budgeting process at the local or state level. Any viable reparations claims must address these educational, economic, and social issues through whatever judgment is rendered or legislation enacted. Therefore, funds and resources must be targeted toward African Americans who have failed to succeed economically. The most compelling claim for reparations, centuries after the initial violation occurred, is made by those who are still locked out of

this country’s dream despite years of legislative initiatives. Reparation is for children in urban areas who will not be able to leap over poverty, crime, and hopelessness in a single bound. It is for families who, despite their efforts, have been unable to break the chain of generational poverty and limited dreams. Yet the real reason for reparation extends beyond financial compensation and redress. Embodied in the reparations movement and decision is an opportunity for this country to release itself from the psychological bonds of social and individual guilt and unresolved shame. Reparations can also serve to free Black people from the spiritual bondage that this society still subtly imposes. When this nation chose in 1865 and again in 1867 not to provide reparations to newly freed Africans, it not only postponed an appropriate legal remedy, it also placed a psycho-spiritual chain around the heart and soul of this nation. Despite the efforts of the Civil Rights movement, this chain has never been broken. This nation is still trapped in spiritual chains of indifference, guilt, and shame. Each generation has learned to live with these spiritual chains, to cover them up, to rationalize them away, or to deny that they even exist. To cover up the shame and guilt, some developed theories of inferiority to justify slavery and

segregation.25 Others use the present dysfunctions that exist in some Black communities to rationalize away any responsibility for this country’s treat[*PG10]ment

of Black people in the past.26 So many White Americans bathe daily in these rivers of denial that water the soil of this land . Yet

the spiritual heart of this nation is still mired in the sins of the slave trade, slavery, and years of subjugation, lynching, and murder. Buried deep in the crevices of this nation’s consciousness is the stark and brutal truth of this human tragedy . I am not suggesting that a large amount of money can free us from this pattern. The money is as much symbolic as it is substantive. It is an act that must come from the heart of this nation and not just from its coffers. This society is trapped spiritually in a race conundrum – there appears to be no escape from it. Discussions about race and racism are still among the most

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uncomfortable and emotionally charged conversations to have in this country. Even among individuals who share similar political perspectives, there often remains an underlying tension and tentativeness. Many Blacks and Whites who worship and praise the same

god choose to do so in separate churches, temples, and mosques. There is a wall, a spiritual and psychological wall, that still separates us. Something drastic must happen to alter our understanding of the past and deepen our commitment to a common future . I believe that reparations could serve this purpose. From a spiritual perspective, in order to reconcile people or groups that have been torn apart, something must be sacrificed. Professor Bell, in his seminal text, Race, Racism and American Law, eloquently made the point that Black people in this society have been the “involuntary sacrifice”

to keep various groups of Whites united in this society, and to bring about a sense of equilibrium between competing political perspectives.27 The time has come for Black people and their rights to cease to be the sacrificial lambs to bring about reconciliation in this country . This quest for reparations, therefore, is as much a spiritual quest for reconciliation as it is a substantive demand for resources. For the sacrifice is meaningless if society gives up something that is of little value. Words alone will not break these spiritual chains. Even legisla tion, if it does not dramatically alter existing positions and serve as a sign of repentance , will not serve as the spiritual sacrifice that is so desperately needed. In various religious traditions the seriousness and sacredness of sacrifice is deeply understood and enacted. God tested Abraham to see if he would sacrifice his son in order to be more connected to God.28 The Torah is filled with commands and instructions about sacrifices, especially when people have violated or failed to comply with

sacred law.29 Christians believe that Jesus was the sacrificial lamb to bring humanity back in line with divine order . 30 What will America sacrifice to bring about the long overdue reconciliation between those who suffered because of this crime against humanity and those who benefited from it? The conundrum is that in America, it is difficult to sacrifice financial resources when we don’t value those who will be the recipients of those resources. Many will oppose reparations for African Americans because they cannot see the underlying wrong , or the value in redressing those who claim they were wronged. Reparation

dollars may still, therefore, prevent this society from being released from the invisible badges and incidents of slavery.31 Let us hope that this will not be the response of the courts or Congress to these latest appeals to break our spiritual chains. For these mental and spiritual chains that we all still carry around with us must be released in this generation. We must, in this generation, release into the universe a true spirit of justice and respect. We must release into the universe ideals

of forgiveness and repentance. Let us release into the world a balm to heal the wounds of a nation broken long ago. Reparations [*PG12]contains within it that spirit. It has the potential to be that balm in Gilead 32 to heal the sin-sick soul of this nation. There are numerous legal hurdles that stand

in the way of any reparations claim. Many of these hurdles, like causation, statute of limitations, and class limitations, will be thoroughly discussed

in the companion articles to this symposium issue; therefore I will not venture to address them here.33 In addition, there are major concerns about how one would

administer and distribute resources if these claims are deemed meritorious. Yet it is important that we not allow these issues and hurdles to blind us to the substantive and spiritual merit of reparations claims. Yet some may ask, why now? The answer is, why not now? Dr. Martin Luther King once asked the question at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March, “How long?” How long would it be before Black people

would receive the right to vote and be truly free? He answered his own question by saying, “not long.”34 Thirty-four years after his death it is still too long. Though his optimism proved right in regards to changes in the voting rights laws, it did not prove right in regards to changes in underlying conditions. We have all paid a high

price for this delay. The spiritual challenge facing this nation is whether we will continue to pass this burden on to future generations, or whether we will once and for all make racial justice and healing a national priority . As some of the symposium articles eloquently indicate, we are facing one of those rare moments in the life of a society where we can choose to reverse centuries of injustice, or we can allow these legal and procedural hurdles to blind us to our social, moral, and spiritual responsibility. May the following articles, and our sobering reflection on the past, serve as a catalyst for us to remove our blinders and vividly see the limitations and unlimited potential of this nation.

AT: Apologies, Aff Axn, Truth Fail – Monetary Key Financial involvement in reparations efforts is critical: apologies, affirmative action, and truth and reconciliation all fail.Allan D. Cooper, [Otterbein University] “From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse.” Journal of Black Studies 43(2); p. 120 // JM

A related question concerns the possibility that reparative justice can be satisfied with an apology, an affirmative action policy, or a truth-and-reconciliation process

rather than real or symbolic financial compensation. A number of recent studies identify serious shortcomings with such efforts to remedy genocidal practices through some manner of discourse that allows the perpetrator to “lose face” but not suffer material loss. Gibney and Roxstrom (2001) argue it is difficult to determine whether apologies are an expression of the personal remorse of the official issuing the statement or whether it represents official state policy (p. 911). Tavuchis (1991) maintains that the ritual of apology involves saying one is sorry and, equally as

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important, feeling sorry (p. 31). Scheff (2000) insists that an effective apology requires that the party making the apology manifest some embarrassment and that one

way to confirm such embarrassment is to provide restitution to the victims (pp. 135, 142). Each of these scholars concludes that all too often, apologies are perceived to lack genuine sincerity; since an apology is a promise to change behavior, the actions taken by a state after it has issued an apology becomes vitally important (Gibney & Roxstrom, 2001, p. 935).

AT: Affirmative Action Fails

Affirmative action policies are not sufficient.Allan D. Cooper, [Otterbein University] “From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse.” Journal of Black Studies 43(2); p. 120 // JM

For those who suggest that the U.S. government has already remedied past genocidal policies through its promotion of affirmative action programs, a counterargument can be made that in the absence of an apology or outright compensation, such programs perpetuate the trauma inflicted on the actual victims of the genocide . As Pettigrove (2004) points out, “being unapologetic can indicate that the wrongdoer does not see her actions as objectionable, or that she does not see the one she has wronged as deserving of

better treatment” (p. 199). The offer of affirmative action to the descendants of the victims does little to provide reparative justice to the actual victims of the genocide, and this neglect is especially exacerbated when the victims of the genocide are still living with the memories and legacies of their trauma.

Reparations can come in many forms – but any of them can help African AmericansHarvard Law Review, 2002, "Bridging the Color Line: The Power of African-American Reparations to Redirect America'sFuture", Vol.115, No. 6, pp. 1689-1712, April, @JSTOR) // JM

African-American reparations claims do not appeal to the same traditional values as the Japanese-American claims, but it is still pos-sible to eliminate zero sum notions that reparations take from "us" and give to "them" by emphasizing the cathartic and economic benefits to the polity. Reparations, as proposed here, should

restore some of the lost chapters of our history and explain, and ultimately remedy, the wealth and power divides of today. The public investigation into the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow should create an unabridged version of American history, one that would provide the country with closure regarding the shameful history of slavery and Jim Crow. This emotional closure, combined with economic and educational programs, could eventually bring the end of race-preference programs and the start of a dialogue about race focused on the future. Reparations that focus on investment in education and training for blacks should result in better skilled workers who are less reliant on welfare , enabling the economy to maximize its previously underutilized human capital.' Affirmative action in employment will ensure that blacks have an opportunity to develop and utilize these skills.105 Providing resources to predominantly black neighborhoods106 to rebuild the educational infrastructure beginning at the elementary level107 might eventually allow all American students to start from the same poin t, rather than rely on affirmative action programs to make up the difference at the college level. Prosperous black-owned businesses, fueled by government subsidies and support,108 could invigorate the economy of both the local neighborhoods they inhabit and the nation.109 Grants to black community-based organizations for

investment in community development projects - parks, cultural symbols, and security, for ex-ample - should reduce crime and increase pride in inner city neighborhoods; this investment could carry over into increased efforts to keep communities safe and clean.10 The government should also provide incentives for asset accumulation to address wealth inequal-ity.1ll Wide distribution of a commission's findings would aid in educating the public regarding the link between past wrongs and present injustices. Admittedly, these investments will be costly in the short term, but over

time, the beneficial effects should be enjoyed throughout the country. The hope is that a reparations plan such as the one proposed here can empower blacks to overcome the lingering impediments of slavery and Jim Crow to achieve equality. South Africa is considering a plan

with similar components to repair its post-apartheid polity. The proposal for reparations before the South African government includes individual reparations grants (payments to qualified individuals), symbolic reparations (constructions of monuments and memorials), com-munity rehabilitation (creation of community-based services and activities, including health care,

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education, and housing), and institutional reforms (measures to ensure that human rights abuses do not occur again).112 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created to provide a forum for victims and perpetrators to tell personal narratives regarding violations that occurred

during apartheid in hopes of disseminating truth and building a unified country.13 Unofficial reparations have also been offered to empower groups disadvantaged under apartheid. South Africa's black empowerment policies include affirmative action in educationll4 and preference for black businesses in government work allocation - corrective measures the country has deemed necessary in its move from "discrimination to true equality."116I n light of South Africa's history, the government finds a narrow focus on individual rights too limiting and thus recognizes that racial differentiation( as opposed to

discrimination)is necessary to give substantive meaning to mandates for racial equality.117 The African-American reparations package proposed in this Note will likely gain acceptance only if America emulates South Africa's determination to eradicate the lingering effects of government-sanctioned discrimination through programs intended to uplift those groups disadvantaged by that discrimination.

Federal Government Key Obligation

The federal government is accountable for the demise of African Americans – it has the moral imperativeDavid Lyons, Law @ BC, 2004 "Reparations and equal opportunity", http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/lawreviews/meta-elements/journals/bctwj/24_1/09_FMS.htm// JM

When the colonies were first established, the British common law, which the colonists brought with them, lacked any law of slavery.11 The [*PG181]legal framework

for chattel slavery was constructed by colonial legislation.12 After Bacon’s Rebellion, slavery was given a racist character.13 The colonial elite, which understandably felt threatened by the uprising of black and white servants acting together, decided that their security and privilege required them to divide and weaken the multi-

racial servant class. Slavery was then restricted to people of color, and became a condition into which white servants were assured they could not fall.14 A century

later, slavery was incorporated into the new federal system by constitutional provisions. Slave states were given extra representation and therefore extra influence in the federal government, and all states acquired a constitutional obligation to return escaped slaves.15 Until the Civil

War, public policy supported the slave system. After slavery was abolished, the federal government took important legislative 16 and constitutional 17 steps to aid the former slaves and guarantee them equal rights. But the federal government soon gave up those onerous tasks, broke its solemn constitutional promises, and knowingly allowed a new system of racial subjugation to be brutally established.18 In

fact, federal policies promoted racial segregation. Consider housing. In the 1930s, federal agencies embraced the practice of “red-lining,” which disqualifies applicants in African-American and “transitional” neighborhoods from home purchase and home improvement [*PG182] loans. That policy was subsequently followed by private lenders. The practice severely restricted home acquisition and repair in African-American neighborhoods. This, in turn, substantially limited wealth accumulation for African Americans, which largely accounts for the substantial wealth gap

between African-American and European-American families. Federal agencies also supported the segregation policies of local public housing agencies, and other federal policies promoted the development of permanent black urban ghettoes and lily-white suburbs.19 During the 1950s and 1960s, under extraordinary foreign and domestic pressures, the federal government denounced race discrimination and took important steps to ameliorate poverty and guarantee equal rights. However, once again, it soon gave up those onerous tasks. It allowed the entrenched

disadvantages of African Americans to remain unchallenged by law or public policy. Federal fair housing legislation, for example, at first lacked significant enforcement provisions.20 When enforcement authority was later added, enforcement was not part of federal policy.21 In sum, federal policy supported slavery before the Civil War. After the Civil War, the federal government pledged to support racial equality, but after a brief time

period it violated or failed to enforce relevant federal law. After Jim Crow was denounced, the federal government failed to rectify the inequitable legacy of its own prior policies. The federal government has thus been complicit in the systematic, grievous wrongs done to African Americans. Slavery and Jim Crow were in large part public, not private wrongs. And their legacy is a matter of public concern

because its persistence reflects current policy. The federal government is the single most important currently existing party that can truly be held accountable. In view of that history and the entrenched nature, the wide scope, and the great

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magnitude of the persisting inequities, the federal government is a fitting target of moral demands for corrective justice.

Accountability USFG is responsible and is accountable for slaveryDavid Lyons, 2003, Corrective Justice, Equal Opportunity, and the Legacy of Slavery and Jim Crow(July 30, 2003). Boston Univ. School of Law Working Paper No. 03-15. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=430280 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.430280 // JM

In this section I will argue that the federal government is significantly accountable for its support of slavery, its acceptance of Jim Crow, and its failure to address their legacy adequately. That facts may be summarized as follows. (1) The protection for slavery that were provided by the Constitution went beyond what was required for a constitutional settlement . The result was a central

government that not only tolerated but supported chattel slavery. (2) When the U.S. formally abolished slavery, the federal government failed to secure reparations for the former slaves, it abandoned Reconstruction, and it rejected reforms that were needed to end

the racial caste system. Instead the federal government permitted the systematic violation of blacks’ constitutional rights, the reestablishment of a racial hierarchy under Jim Crow, and its enforcement by murder, fraud, and other illicit means . (3)

When the U.S. formally abolished Jim Crow, it declined to implement fully many of the reforms it officially endorsed, such as fair housing legislation. It failed to dismantle the racial caste system it had helped to sustain, despite urgent advice from an official body that reforms were essential to prevent the development of “two societies, one white, one black – separate and unequal”

Revenue Stream The United States collected revenue from cotton fieldsMarie Roberts, member of the Carnegie Council (The Voice for Ethics in International Policy), “THE QUESTION OF REPARATIONS TO AFRICAN AMERICANS” 2000.

Mr. Robinson also believes that the US government has the responsibility to make amends because it was complicit in slavery. He notes that in the 1800s the government collected a tremendous amount of money in taxes on cotton, and he

states: Cotton was the principal export crop of the United States. It earned more in foreign revenue than all other exports put together. The revenues to the treasury were major. However, as he says in his book about the people who grew

and harvested the cotton: Black people worked long, hard, killing days, years, centuries--and they were never paid. The value of their labor went into others' pockets-plantation owners, northern entrepreneurs, state treasuries, the US government....There is a debt here. I know of no statute of limitations either legally or morally that would extinguish it.

UN Genocide Convention The Jim Crow Era represents a clear breach of the UN Genocide Convention.Allan D. Cooper, 2012, [Otterbein University] “From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse.” Journal of Black Studies 43(2); p. 114, // JM

Still the question remains: Did U.S. government actions after 1948 affect the African American community in a manner justifying a claim of genocide? The question itself requires that we ignore slavery altogether and focus instead on the application of the Jim Crow era of American apartheid. There is already a large literature detailing the atrocities and humiliations of the Jim Crow era in the United States (e.g., Woodward, 2001; Packard, 2003; Wormser, 2003). President Bill Clinton apologized for one of the policies

targeted at the African American community that occurred during this time, the Tuskegee experiments that forced nearly 400 African

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American men to be subjected to syphilis without medical treatment. These experiments began in the 1930s and continued until 1972; one third of the victims died from the program organized by the U.S. Public Health Service (Cooper,

2008, p. 191). Causing serious bodily harm to members of a group constitutes a criterion for genocide identified in the UN Genocide Convention. The bottom line is that from the 1948 Genocide Convention to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, African Americans were subjected to governmental policies that denied them basic civil rights and permitted discrimination in all facets of social and economic life. As a result, the community suffered disproportionate harm in terms of employment opportunities, median income compared to Whites, families living in poverty, incarceration rates, and corporal punishment in public schools as well as disparate access to public facilities ranging from restaurants to lodging to entertainment venues. Hate crimes against African Americans were epidemic; in 2005, the U.S. Senate went so far as to issue an official

apology for failing to criminalize lynching during the Jim Crow era, acknowledging that [at] least 4,742 African Americans had been lynched by domestic terrorists (Stolberg, 2005). These lynchings continued through 1968 (Brophy, 2006, p. 29).

Reparations for the genocide committed under Jim Crow should not be based on economic claims, and located instead on moral grounds.Allan D. Cooper, 2012, [Otterbein University] “From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse.” Journal of Black Studies 43(2); p. 116-117, // JM

But independent of the legal argument, reparations for genocide poses a much more powerful ethical argument. Up until

now, the fundamental justification for reparations has been economic: African Americans are owed a debt. Reducing slavery to a cost-benefit analysis connotes that the inherent indignity of being a slave is merely a matter of unfair compensation for labor performed. If this was all it was, then the entire working class of America could demand reparations for their lack of fair pay . But slavery was about much more than economic hardship; slavery related to an assault on the humanity and dignity of African Americans. Robert S. Browne (1972) offers this

insight: It is doubtful if one can meaningfully discuss the reparations concept solely within an economic context, in isolation from the associated moral and political considerations which are inseparable from a reparations demand . Conceivably, one might successfully demonstrate the Pareto optimality of a capital transfer of a specified size to the black community, perhaps by demonstrating that

failure to make such a transfer might result in an economic wastage of even larger magnitude. But to label such a capital transfer as “reparations,” and to justify it solely on the basis of economic efficiency while ignoring the myriad equity considerations which the term reparations implies would be so sterile and mechanistic as to constitute a near insult to the black community’s humanity. (p. 39) Zack (2003) simplifies the argument: “Slavery would be wrong if the labor extracted from slaves had no value and never profited those who extracted it” (p. 140). In short, the fundamental flaw in the “reparations-as-debt” argument, espoused

by Randall Robinson and most of the recent proponents for reparations, is that it focuses attention on the net worth of a slave rather than the crime against humanity committed by the perpetrator. It has proved impossible and impractical to calculate the financial loss suffered by slaves and their descendants. But there is absolutely no argument that the Jim Crow policies forced on African Americans were wrong and unjustifiable. Brown v. Board of Education clearly represents a government admission that Jim Crow policies harmed the African American community. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, and other legislative acts implicitly acknowledge that previous governmental policies constituted an infringement of basic human rights for the African American

community. The question should not be “What are African Americans owed?” The question should be “How can the U.S. government demonstrate that it no longer endorses or associates itself with the genocidal policies of past administrations?”

The Genocide Convention creates an obligation under international law to pay reparations, and such reparations could be easily paid out.Allan D. Cooper, 2012, [Otterbein University] “From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse.” Journal of Black Studies 43(2); p. 121-122, // JM

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The Genocide Convention, and other declarations of international law, provides a legal basis for a justification of reparations for African Americans. In actuality, international law compels the United States to act on these past injustices. As Anthony Gifford has noted, “international law recognizes that those who commit crimes against humanity must make reparations as defined by the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1928” (see Henry, 2007, p. 25). Furthermore,

as Robert Westley (2005) has observed, “there is no statute of limitations on certain human rights violations, such as genocide” (p.

88). Structuring reparations to acknowledge genocide also simplifies the distribution of compensatory damages. Rather than calculating the personal losses for any given individual, the understanding under international law is that the victim of genocide is any individual identified as a member of the targeted community, in this case, African American citizens of the United States. It matters not where he or she lived or whether he or she personally suffered physical injury. An African American residing in a state that did not enforce Jim Crow policies is equally entitled to reparations since he or she was inhibited from visiting relatives and friends in a state that did enforce such policies. In short, every living U.S. citizen identified by the U.S. Census or other official documentation as “Negro,” “Black,” or “African American” prior to 1964 is entitled to reparations.

Spillover Effect Our racial policies can go globalRandall Robinson, 2000, Harvard law Grad, political activist, author, “The debt : what America owes to Blacks”, pg 123 // JM

To many, the story may initially seem out of place because it is foreign. This is hardly the case. The United States is so unprecedentedly powerful that it can best be understood (even in its domestic race relations) when observed from without. Those who run America and benefit materially from its global hegemony regard the world as one place. So, then, must those around the globe who are subject to America’s overwhelming social and economic influence. American racism is not merely a domestic social contaminant but a principal American export as well . The very notion of the nation-state has become little more than a convenient legal fiction or hiding place for anonymous and rapacious interests.

Potential Impacts Self Sufficiency

Reparations create self-sufficiency – they overcome the effects of dependency on welfareConstitutional Rights Foundation, 2009, non-profit organization designed to educate persons about the importance of civic participation, “Reparations for Slavery.” 2009. // JM

The claim for reparations is not against white Americans or even individual Americans. It is a claim against American government and society, which has continued from the time of slavery. As all members of society share in society's benefits, they also must share the burdens in

the form of taxation. Through slavery, African Americans were terribly wronged and modern blacks were robbed of their inheritance. Further, blacks face racism every day. They deserve to be compensated. The problems faced by many blacks today come from slavery and society's ongoing racism. Blacks were uprooted from their homes in Africa and brutalized in America by a system that destroyed the family structure and degraded the individual. When slavery ended, African Americans owned nothing. Isolated and discriminated against, they were denied education, contacts with society, and economic opportunity . Compared to whites, blacks remain in a disadvantaged position and will remain so until they receive compensation and society's racism ends. Welfare, subsidized housing, affirmative action, and other previous efforts to address socio-economic problems of the black underclass have been too little and too late. They failed because society has failed to come to grips with the central problem--its own racism and discrimination . In some cases, social

programs, though well-intentioned, actually increased black isolation and further degraded the black community. In addition, these programs benefitted

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other groups, not just blacks. By doing so, they failed to address the unique claims based on slavery that African-Americans have. Reparations will not promote dependency. Instead, they will give individual African Americans and the community as a whole a chance to create their own economic base and become self-reliant. The cost of reparations may be great, but a debt is owed and must be paid. The moral claim for reparations at least equals that of any other government program. America is a rich country, and if the will exists, the money can be found.

Reparations are key to overcoming the ongoing threat of racism – this compensation is key to self-sufficiency Constitutional Rights Foundation, non-profit organization designed to educate persons about the importance of civic participation, “Reparations for Slavery.” 2009.

The claim for reparations is not against white Americans or even individual Americans. It is a claim against American government and society, which has continued

from the time of slavery. As all members of society share in society's benefits, they also must share the burdens in the form of taxation. Through slavery, African Americans were terribly wronged and modern blacks were robbed of their inheritance. Further, blacks face racism every day. They deserve to be compensated. The problems faced by many blacks today come from slavery and society's ongoing racism. Blacks were uprooted from their homes in Africa and brutalized in America by a system that destroyed the family structure and degraded the individual. When slavery ended, African Americans owned nothing. Isolated and discriminated against, they were denied education, contacts with society, and economic opportunity. Compared to whites, blacks remain in a disadvantaged position and will remain so until they receive compensation and society's racism ends. Welfare, subsidized housing, affirmative action, and other previous efforts to address socio-economic problems of the black underclass have been too little and too late. They failed because society has failed to come to grips with the central problem--its own racism and discrimination. In some cases, social programs, though well-intentioned, actually increased black isolation and further degraded the black community. In addition, these programs benefitted other groups, not just blacks. By doing so, they failed to address the unique claims

based on slavery that African-Americans have. Reparations will not promote dependency. Instead, they will give individual African Americans and the community as a whole a chance to create their own economic base and become self-reliant. The cost of reparations may be great, but a debt is owed and must be paid. The moral claim for reparations at least equals that of any other government program. America is a rich country, and if the will exists, the money can be found.

Reparations are a vital form of economic freedom – this independently promotes African-American self-determinationArceneaux, Taniecea (L) 2005. ("Reparations for Slavery: A Cause for Reparations, A Case Against David Horowitz" The Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 32, No. 3-4, Winter-Spring, pp. 141-148 @EBSCO/ // JM

Furthermore, welfare is a program that has the effect of maintaining the current level of poverty among America’s Black people.5 The best chance for lifting the poor out of poverty is not to give them the property of others, but rather to grant them economic freedom (Block, 2000). Poor African Americans tend to live in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, where school dropout rates are high and test scores are low. Employment opportunities are few and far between, and this lack of opportunity because of structured segregation is in itself a racist consequence. As

evidenced by Charles Murray (1984), the act of giving money to Black people in a method that discouraged the formation of their families only undermines their economic and social condition. Therefore, one cannot claim to attempt to heal the wounds of discrimination with medication that only deepens them. Ninth, Horowitz makes the claim that Blacks owe a debt “to America—to White Americans—for liberating them from slavery . . . there was never an antislavery movement until White Englishmen and Americans created

one” (2001). As slaves, Black Americans lost a sense of individuality and humanism—qualities that were stripped of them from the White Englishmen and Americans who enslaved them. There is no debt owned to those who liberated slaves. Slavery is a crime; it is a basic human right

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of Americans to be protected of such crimes. Also, there was never an anti-slavery movement until White Englishmen and Americans created one because slaves were not even considered human. It is impossible for someone who has no idea what self worth and human rights are about to rebel against the oppression of a society that constantly reinforces this inhumanity. Only after White Englishmen and Americans have admitted their wrongs can Black Americans rightfully seek reparations for these injustices. Lastly, Horowitz asserts that “the final and summary reason for rejecting any reparations claim is recognition of the enormous privileges Black Americans enjoy as Americans, and therefore of their own stake in America’s history, slavery and all” (2001). It is true that as Americans, we do enjoy certain rights of freedom and liberty that citizens of other

countries are not as fortunate to enjoy. But, Black Americans do not enjoy enormous privileges as Horowitz claims. Black Americans have certain inalienable rights that all Americans possess. Current privilege of Black Americans is not a relief for the Whites who currently own illegitimately obtained property. Furthermore,

reparations are justified only to the extent that they serve to directly alleviate the ills of the past. Horowitz claims that “for all their country’s faults, African Americans have an enormous stake in America and above all in the heritage that men like Jefferson helped to shape. This heritage— enshrined in America’s founding and the institutions and ideas to which it gave rise—is what is really under attack in the reparations movement” (2001).

What is under attack in the reparations movement is the crime of dehumanizing a race of people who were taught to devalue themselves in a society that even today continues to deprive Black Americans of the opportunities to enjoy the basic rights of American citizenship. Truthfully, the institution of slavery is a part of America’s history, but it should not be an aspect of American livelihood that is held in esteem, as Horowitz attempts to portray. Furthermore, it only makes sense that those seeking reparations have a lack of American pride and loyalty. Why should they claim to love a place where they once were and continue to be victims of such a hateful act for which the country does not even want to provide

justice? The argument of reparations for slavery is enriched with several strong points presented on either side. What is most important to consider when approaching this

debate is not the question of whether stolen property should be returned to its rightful owner, but what has been stolen from a race of people so brutally oppressed for hundreds of years. It is no longer only a matter of giving “forty acres and a mule” to every proven descendent of

slavery. This ancient deprivation of land and property is but a symbol for the true property that has been stolen from Black Americans—the possessions that are dearest to their survival and prosperity as American citizens. Those,

like me, who are fervent in their cause for reparations are only asking for the resources required to remove all badges and indicia of slavery. Reparations are needed to repair the wrongs, injury, and damage done to Black people by the United States federal and state

governments, their agents, and representatives (The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, 2004). The government’s past principles and current actions have made clear that its vision for African Americans is one of a jobless , imprisoned

people with a lack of self-worth and identity. The United States Eurocentric educational system has failed to prepare African American children for liberation, nationbuilding, and self-determination; this educational system produces people, many of which who are Black Americans, who are self-alienated and anti- Black. It is true that the leaders of the American government have acknowledged that slavery was one of the greatest crimes in history and that enslaved, unpaid labor created the prosperity of the United States (Millions for Reparations, 2004).

Future Policy Failure The avoidance of reparations has led to a morally bankrupt state – reparations are a vital pre-requisite to avoiding future policy failure Janna Thompson, Melbourne professor & member of the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, “Memory and the Ethics of Reparation” pg 17, 2005. // JM

If a government is to act as an intergenerational agent: if it is to be able to make promises that future people will be required to keep, if it is to take responsibility for failing to keep promises, including promises made by past generations, if it is to pursue long term policies and make reparation for unjust policies of the past, then its citizens must be prepared to take responsibility for deeds that were done by their predecessors. Nevertheless, we have seen that many people, including some defenders of black reparations, insist that it is morally obnoxious to make people assume such responsibilities. One of the reasons for this opposition has already

been defeated. It is sometimes morally legitimate for people to make moral demands of their successors: the freedom of individuals of each generation to make their own decisions and live life according to their ideals does not free them from having obligations in respect to the past and people of the past. So an objection to reparation which assumes that it is unacceptable to make present people take any responsibility for the past is unsound. Moreover, there are reasons why citizens should want their government to act as a morally responsible intergenerational agent: to keep its agreements, to maintain valued institutions and practices, to pursue policies for the good of themselves and their successors, and to acknowledge and make up for past wrongs. Citizens have lifetime transcending interests; they believe in some cases that they can make legitimate demands of their successors. They need and are entitled to demand

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that their government maintain the institutions and pursue policies that support morally important intergenerational practices and make it likely that their important lifetime transcending interests will be satisfied. These requirements mean that a government has to act as a responsible intergenerational agent, maintaining the security of the polity in a world of polities, initiating and carrying out long term environmental and social policies, maintaining through the generations the institutions that underwrite intergenerational practices and ensuring that important lifetime transcending interests of citizens will be respected. But this presupposes that citizens regard themselves as having a duty to support and maintain

the practices that enable their government to be a responsible intergenerational agent. The belief that a government is, or should be, a responsible agent underwrites the legitimacy of the demands for justice made by individuals who are oppressed or disadvantaged by its policies. They have a claim against their government: against the polity in whose name it acts. Its responsibility as an agent does not end with disappearance of the generations who carried out these policies. It has an obligation to acknowledge the historical injustices it has done, and when, as in the case of injustices to African Americans, these injustices have been persistent and directed against family lines, its duties of reparation will be far more extensive.

Justice

Reparations are key to justice for African Americans – biological constructionNaomi Zack, Philosophy @ University of Oregon, Reparations and the Rectification of Race, The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 139-151, 2003, Springer, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115752/ // JM

Why is it necessary to dig so deep? Because recognition of the social construction of racial categories raises questions of when they were constructed, by whom, and for what purpose, and also questions of whether they were on the whole good or bad social constructions.

Most writers now concede that race was socially constructed as an ideology that would justify and enable the practice of slavery, but they often make the concession superficially, because they want to carry on with their work on the basis of the same social

construction. The nature of the value of the social construction of race is thereby often neglected, glossed over. The value of the social construction of race has a moral component and one relating to truth and falsehood: It was morally wrong to create a hierarchy of human worth, based on biological racial categories, and the biological taxonomy of human racial categories is now known to be false.5 The false biology of race was taken as true within the social - in this case scientific - construc tion of race from the beginning, and it persists to this day, in racialized society that is partly the historical effect of slavery. The larger project of rectification, not

to mention the even larger project of existing morally and thoughtfully in the world, requires a radical rethinking of those racial categories. If this call for a rethinking of racial categories themselves is difficult to fathom in the present, highly racialized context, imagine a case of reparations for descendants of a religion whose practitioners were enslaved by members of another religion. Imagine that the enslaving religion had contemporary members who were much better-

off than the descendants of the enslaved religion. Imagine that you think all religious categories are socially constructed and that there is no evidence for the superiority of any of them. Now assume that you have sound reasons for being an atheist and that you are obligated

to consider how we should think about the people in the past who were enslaved on account of their religious difference. If your atheism is well-grounded, would you not try to imagine the slaves in a way that did not buy into the ways in which their owners categorized them religiously? Notice that such reflection goes beyond assumptions that religious freedom is an inalienable right. The project of rectification thus requires more than egalitarian pluralism on the grounds of race . It is not enough to say, "It is morally wrong to treat

people differently on the grounds of biological race and people who behaved that way in the past were wrong." We have to be prepared to say "Not only is it morally wrong to treat people differently on the grounds of biological race but it is mistaken and wrong to think that there are biological racial differences among people, and it is mistaken and wrong to think that such differences existed when they were used as a basis for slavery?' That is, we have to be prepared to think about slave owners and their slaves as members of the same biological race, because nothing less than that will fully restore humanity to our ideas of slaves. While it may seem disrespectful to suggest that African Americans who may resist the idea that they are same race as whites are thereby mistaken, I think it is worse than disrespectful to deny that slaves were of the same race as their owners. They were of the same race according to universal human rights

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doctrine, insofar as that doctrine purported to extend to all of mankind, its hypocrisy not withstanding. And they were of the same race to the extent that social constructions of racial categories rest on biological categories that are now known not to have factual support in biology .

Reparations is the only route to justice.Rodney D. Coates, 2004 [Professor of Sociology@ Miami University, OH] “If a Tree Falls in the Wilderness: Reparations, Academic Silences, and Social Justice” Social Forces 83(2); p. 855)

Mr. West, daydreams continue to produce nightmares, frustration begets hopelessness, and the victimized continue to spiral down the path to increased poverty. Freedom absent choice produces anxiety, and choice absent power produces frustration, and power absent responsibility anarchy. The slaves were told they were free, but as pointed out by Frederick Douglass

and W.E.B. Du Bois, all they were free to do was starve, sleep in the cold, and eek out a meager existence. The proposed reconstruction made promises of choice but failed to deliver the sustained power to alleviate over 300 years of racial oppression, exploitation, and repression. But ever so brief, the light in the darkness shined, but the darkness comprehended it not. For power never willingly concedes anything, and power was once again snatched from the African, and the regime of the South was re-installed in power. Black codes, chain gangs, and the violence and lynching of the KKK reined hell throughout the south and much of America for the next hundred years. Again the dawn of the 1960s brought new hope and power. As this power, black and unshakeable, threatened to drench urban America in the wake of their sorrow, and fearing anarchy — the voices of appeasement, complacency, and the conservative promised change with all deliberate speed. As the long hot summers filled more and more of our realities, other band aids were proposed — culminating in Johnson’s promises of a new reconstruction — the Great Society, etc. Today, as we watch these promises erode and the last relics of our collective guilt, affirmative action, slowly dismantled, a more significant, lasting, and permanent remedy must be achieved. I see no other remedy, no other measure that would provide for justice, of what West called redistributive justice but that of reparations. Anything short of full remediation, full restoration, and full reparations will continue the process of applying Band-Aids to hemorrhaging wounds. Any program, policy, executive decision, or concerted efforts, history being our guide, will punish the victim with the stigma of a handout, the perception that blacks are getting something underserved, or the jealousy of whites that this benefit is “reverse discrimination.” Such practices ultimately become excuses for system failure, societal

inadequacies, and political weakness. Such practices, during times of economic necessity or political complacency, quickly are reversed, reduced, or reconsidered as the failures, inadequacies, and weaknesses are transferred upon the backs of the victims. As a new generation, now politically astute and correct, learn how to “talk nasty” about blacks politely, we self-righteously turn our backs on the plight of the poor, urban underclass. Reparations are not about placing guilt at the feet of whites, nor is it about claiming victim status for blacks. Blacks have experienced America as victims. Whites have benefited from their whiteness, and they have experienced American guilt. Reparations, however, are not about blacks feeling better

about their blackness, or whites wincing with the weight of 500 years of collective guilt. Guilt and victimhood politics, practices, and solutions rarely lead to anything but embarrassed reluctance on the part of the guilty and frustration and anxiety on the part of the victim. The guilty, attempting to seek absolution, are encouraged to make some gesture of atonement. Such gestures, rarely anything but tokens of attrition and contrition, always delivered with great fanfare, encourage the victim to believe that finally their remedies are forthcoming. Alas, as the guilt subsides, typically with the passage of time or the press of economic realities, resolve is weakened, programs are reduced or eliminated, and another cycle of unmet promises is recorded. Each cycle of guilt and victim identification, with its resultant policies and practices of appeasements producing even more anxieties and frustrations, culminates in another generation on both sides who loose faith in the capacity of the other to appropriately respond. These cycles, being repeated several times over the course of the American experience, have produced waves of guilt, victim identification, and frustration. This cyclic process has produced, within the white community, what Kozel has

described as compassion fatigue, and, within the black community, what West describes (but mistakenly explains) as nihilism. The guilt cycle, producing at both extreme compassion fatigue and nihilism, can only be broken by a complete solution, a real attempt to restore people of African descent to their proper place in our global universe. We must repair the damage, we must remedy the harm, and we must reclaim that which was stolen. Put simply, social justice calls for reparations.

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Harms Value of Life Lack of reparations precludes a legitimate embracing of African-Americans – undermines their fundamental value as an American citizenHoward McGary, Philosophy @ Rutgers, Achieving Democratic Equality: Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Reparations, The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 93-113, Published @ Springer, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115750/ // JM

I will begin with an account of reparations in general and then present briefly one explanation of why many present day African Americans believe they are entitled to reparations from the U.S. Government. This explanations should not be seen as a final justification, but only as an indic ation why the demand for reparations for African Americans might be seen a plausible. Next, if it is reasonable to assume that reparations to African Americans are plausible, I then go on to explain why reparations might be necessary to fill the breech that is perceived to exist between many African Americans and their government. This explanation will involve an examination of the relations ship between three concepts: forgive ness, reconciliation, and reparations. Then I explore why an apology or reparations for slavery and Jim Crow might be necessary for reconcili ation between many African Americans and their government. Finally, I examine the contention that the legislative process

can be used to obtain an apology or reparations from the government. An important part of this examination is a fairly close reading of Lani Quinier's

proposals for making the democratic process responsive to the perceived interests of African Americans as a group .16 I close with some skeptical remarks about the efficacy of using Guinier's proposals to obtain an apology or repara tions from the U.S. Government for the injustices of slavery

and Jim Crow and about the likelihood that members of the majority will see the demand for reparations as something they can endorse. I There are three ways that such an apology or black reparations might come about: (1) by executive order (2) by judicial decision and (3) through the legislative process. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton suggested the executive order route and met with great opposition.17 And a number of groups and individuals are trying to pursue reparation claims in the courts18 and some legislators19 have endorsed legislation that would address these concerns. But

to date none of these efforts have been successful. Given the importance of the legislative process, I would like to spend some time discussing Guinier's proposal for changing this process to make it more responsive to the perceived interests of African Americans. I will not attempt to give necessary and sufficient conditions for democratic equality. However, I will assume for the sake of argument that democratic equality has not been achieved when there is the

existence of permanent minorities. A permanent minority exists when the majority is in agree ment on all or most of the important issues and the minority disagree with the majority. And where the consequence is that the minority is unable to achieve its important ends through the political process. I will also assuming that this can occur even when the minority is not denied its political or economic rights in a de jure

sense. II But before we turn to Guinier's proposals, I want to say a few things about how the U.S. as a society has come to be where it is. For a country that is hundreds of years old, African Americans secured the right to vote only a few decades ago . And this right to vote did not come about because the majority saw it simply as the right thing to do. Quite to the contrary, it came about because of a process of political struggle and turmoil in which many people sacrificed their lives to obtain the right to vote . So even

though there have been legal and economic changes for the better in U.S. society, many African Americans still believe that the U.S. owes them a debt of justice for what they and their ancestors have endured. The historic and present demand for black reparations is a call for the settling of this debt. Above I claimed that many African Americans believe that they cannot fully embrace the U.S. Government until these negative

feelings and rightful resentment are addressed. As the title of this article suggests, forgiveness, reconciliation, and reparations are possible ways to over come this resentment felt by many African Americans. But do present day African Americans have to receive reparations before they can forgive and reconcile with those who they deem to be responsible for the trans gressions? Is forgiveness for slavery a necessary part of a program of reconciliation? Before we answer, let us briefly review the argument for black reparations. According to the argument for black reparations, African Americans are owed reparations

because some transgression has occurred. And those who have a transgressed have a moral duty to repair the results of their transgressions. Unlike a compensation argument, the reparation argument depends upon identifying the wronged party and the wrongdoer. A

prin ciple of reparation is not a principle designed to promote social utility or promote an egalitarian outcome of economic goods. It is designed to rectify violations of people's rights. For John Locke and other liberal political theorists to deny a person's right to reparation amounts to a refusal to recognize the full moral status of the person .20 In fact, acknowledging a duty of reparation is good evidence that one views the wronged party as a bonafide member of the moral and political communities. According to Lockeans, a political morality is rights-based and the proper role of the legitimate state is to protect rights and address rights violations. Locke did not believe that the state should use its coercive powers to promote social utility if this involved violating people's rights. It is clear that the political morality in the U.S. is strongly influenced by Lockean ideas. As U.S. citizens, African Americans also have strong Lockean intuitions. So they often frame their political concerns in Lockean rights-based terms. The demand for black

reparations is no exception. Very few contemporary U.S. citizens would deny that U.S. slaves deserved reparations for slavery . The

debate over reparations for slavery focuses on whether present day African Americans are entitled to repara tions and

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on whom would be obliged to settle this debt; not on whether slaves were the victims of a terrible injustice. The critics question whether it would be just and wise for the U.S. Government to use tax dollars, tax exemptions or some other means to settle a debt of justice to present day African Americans. The thoughtful and sincere criticisms of reparations for African Amer icans rest on the complications involved in providing a compelling case. The critics of reparations question the legitimacy of the demand because all present day African Americans are not the descendants of chattel slaves. In fact, some are fairly recent immigrants. Critics argue that the call for reparations conflates the following groups: (1) the willing perpetrators of injustice, (2) the culpable beneficiaries of injustice, (3) the non-

culpable beneficiaries, and (4) the innocent bystanders. Or put in another way, all African Americans are not victims and all white Americans are not perpetrators.21 believe that these complications can be addressed and I have tried to address them in some of my other work.22 However, in this discussion, I do not wish to take up those issues. I want to focus on why the debt of justice, if owed to African Americans, ought to have some priority. As I have

claimed elsewhere, a duty of reparations has two dimensions: a material and a psychological dimension. Both are important ,

but I wish to explore why reparations are very important and necessary. Perhaps too much attention has been given to the material aspects

of the demand for reparations. The psychological aspect of reparations may be more important. The call for reparation can be seen in part as an apology for slavery and as a way of overcoming victimization and , in the minds of some supporters, as a way moving closer to the ideal of a racially assimilated society. If putting the victimization behind one is an indispensable first step in achieving forgiveness and reconciliation, a failure to do this may cause many African Americans to sit on the fence and not fully embrace their U.S. identity because the U.S. Government has not acknowledged in an official way its role in the victimization of

African American people. This is not to say that African Americans have not served their country in times of need . Clearly they have supported the country in numerous ways, and they have fought and died in defense of U.S. ideals, but, nonetheless, many have remained ambivalent about fully identifying as U.S. citizens. Many African Americans believe that they still suffer because of the legacies of U.S. slavery and Jim Crow, but they realize that we live in political climate that stigmatizes black victimization. In fact, a prevalent

view is that a person who sees herself as a victim of past discrimination is someone who is unwilling to take advantage of existing opportunities. Acknowledging black victimization is often described in pejorative terms as "playing the race card ,"23 or as a "victim's mentality."24 And playing the race card is a practice that is taken to be at odds with the U.S. ideal of judging persons by their deeds rather than their racial identities. This practice is taken to be incompatible with genuinely working to achieve a racially assimilated society. There is not a logical or practical incompatibility between acknowl edging a history of racial discrimination and working hard to be successful in life. However, because of their life circumstances, people deal with discrimination and injustice in different ways. Some people are able to succeed in spite of it

while others may be broken by it. But success and failure is usually not an individual achievement, it often depends upon networks and support systems. African American children who live in poverty need to know that they bear no responsibility for being born into a family that lives in a poor black community with inadequate schools and other services.

Acknowledging the historical conditions that contributed to the formulation of such communities is not to coddle these children. Nor does it blind them to real opportunities. In the debate over how to remedy the effects of past racial discrimi nation we find two approaches: backward-looking and forward-looking justifications. Reparations are an example of the former approach. Those who are called upon to give up holdings that they presently have in their possession because they have a duty of reparations are only asked to do so because they have been wrongdoers. And those who

receive these holdings are entitled to them only because they have been wronged. Supporters of black reparations want to change the status quo, but they do so for different reasons than egalitarians or utilitarians.

Democratic Politics Reparations will create a sustainable democratic politics – establishes social justice by eliminating institutional racismLawrie Balfour, @ University of Virginia, Reparations after Identity, Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6, December, pp. 786-811, Sage Publications, Inc., http://www.jstor.org/stable/30038464/ // JM)

Crucially, the idea of reparations as a critical discourse is always linked to efforts to make material change in the lives of African Americans. Here too, it is important to note that specific commitments to African American commu-nities need not benefit them exclusively . The example of Reconstruction, which targeted the welfare of the freedmen and women but also created new educational

possibilities, social welfare programs, and more democratic state constitutions throughout the South, indicates the broader democratic effects that might follow from attending to the lingering impact of slavery .89 Ideed, one of the central contributions of reparations activism is its capacity to undermine the idea that effecting improvement in some of the

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most neglected U.S. communities would somehow only be to the good of black citizens . As Kelley observes: "By looking at the reparations campaign in the United States as a social movement, we discover that it was never entirely, or even primarily, about the money. The demand for reparations was about social jus-tice, reconciliation, reconstructing the internal life of

black America, and eliminating institutional racism."90 It is not necessary, finally, to see in the quest for reparations an example of "left melancholia," a brooding antipolitics that stands accusingly "to the left of the possible."91A lthough Brown paints a recognizable picture of a kind of radical posturing that focuses on unsatisfiable grievances, and her account aptly captures some elements of the reparations movement, the dismissal of all reparations demands as examples of this kind of posturing disguises the ways in which the idea of redress for slavery has been, since the nineteenth century, figured as outside "the possible." It elides those reparations claims that go beyond good and evil, that contest the assumptions of liberal legal dis-course and imagine how to evoke the complex haunting of the American present, that aspire to obtain redress without requiring that African Ameri-cans present themselves as helpless victims or as super-Americans, and that attempt to harness state power and criticize it simultaneously. Thus, one might ask why critics are so quick to dismiss a movement that has galvanized a range of

actors, including grassroots activists as well as lawyers, lawmak-ers, and academics. The rejection of reparations per se--rather than critical assessment

of different, specific arguments for reparations-and the desire to eschew any complicity with state power raise unsettling questions about whose left melancholia pervades the most acute political theorizing today . If the political energy and purpose generated in the pursuit of reparations does not represent a promising example of democratic politics, then what does?

Harms Democracy Lack of reparations is a breech in civic democracyHoward McGary, 2003, Philosophy @ Rutgers, Achieving Democratic Equality: Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Reparations, The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 93-113, Published @ Springer, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115750 // JM

Assimilationists are more optimistic about what people of different races can achieve by cooperating with each other even against a back ground of a tragic history of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism. Some racial assimilationists in this group even believe that the way to achieve such cooperation is to do away with the very idea of races and move forward from this point under some version of a race-blind principle.8 However, others claim that we must still acknowledge racial identities, and the exper iences that have accompanied those identities, though we should not let our painful memories prevent us from achieving a more inclusive and just U.S.9 But

even some of the supporters of the assimilationist ideal are skeptical of the view that African Americans should forgive and forget their awful history. Like Baldwin they support working towards one U.S., but they reject the idea that Africans must forgive and give up their racial identities before they can engage in such a transformative effort . But before we can say whether African Americans should forgive and forget, we must have an adequate account of forgiveness. I have attempted to provide such an account in Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery.10 There I argue that the reasons for forgiving or failing to forgive are "self-pertaining"

and that forgiving or refusing to forgive primarily involves the agent's feeling about the elimination of her resentment that is caused by wrongdoing. Eliminating this resentment is often a way of getting on with one's life and shaping a different future. On my account, it might make sense for African Americans to forgive those who have caused harmed to them individually and as a people . However, some ways of understanding forgiveness are such that in the case of certain wrongs that are so awful and far reaching that the victims should never forgive the

wrongdoers. How we decide this question has an important bearing on achieving democratic equality? As we shall see, there are various proposals and ways of conceptual izing how we can move from our present situation to a more democratic society. Rorty's neo-pragmatist way of understanding this transformative effort expresses a lack of interest in the usefulness of viewing this project in terms of knowledge

and truth. He rejects any philosophical basis for assessing competing claims about how to understand and achieve genuine human flourishing. His strategy is to use the pragmatist tradition as a way of assisting intellectuals in places like Central and

Eastern Europe who are struggling to shape the post-totalitarian democratic institutions and public policies. Judith Green11 has applauded Rorty's efforts at revising Amer ican pragmatism, particularly the work of John Dewey, but she criticizes him for distorting Dewey's message. In particular, she criticizes him for his swift dismissal of multicultural education and other related diversity efforts in the U.S. for promoting understanding across racial differences. However, it is not my purpose hear to evaluate Rorty's neo-pragmatism or Green's criticisms of it. I mention them only to point out that even amongst philosophers who believe that

working towards an inclusive democracy is a laudable goal, there is serious disagreement over how this task should be conceptualized. Any viable account of how to achieve democratic equality in the U.S. must address group domination . And, I believe, any realistic account of group domination must be holistic. It cannot be explained only by reference to the attitudes or psychologies of the dominant group. Nor can it be explained by reference to economic forces. Nor can it be explained by reference only to the political structure. Nor can it be explained by refer ence only to culture. It is instead to be explained by the complex interplay of all of these determinants.

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115750%20//


Nonetheless, it is clear that the political struc tures and processes have played an important role in any viable explanation of why certain groups are dominated.

Given the horrible legacy of U.S. slavery and Jim Crow, is it realistic to think that the U.S. can eliminate the vestige of racism without adopting policies and programs that give moral and legal significance to racial identities? This question is complicated by the fact that

the vestige of racism still haunts us.

Leads to Activism Reparations are a productive use of the past, and a continuation of the spirit of rebellion that characterized struggles for freedom.Jacqueline Bacon, [Scholar in San Diego, CA; Peer Reviewed]; “Reading the Reparations Debate.” Quarterly Journal of Speech V. 89 N. 3 (August 2003): p. 173-4, //JM

Similarly, supporters of reparations challenge the equation of patriotism with celebratory history. Poet and activist Askia Toure asserts that genuine patriotism would lead to an acknowledgment that a debt is owed for the past: “African Americans have been the most patriotic people in this country … . We fought in every war … . We worked in this country for [hundreds of years] without receiving pay. What about America’s patriotism toward us?” Reparations , he argues, would bring African Americans “onto a par with white America” and show that Americans truly “believe in patriotism applied to the poor and oppressed in this country.” Indeed, for many African Americans, patriotism is complex, based on a fundamental tension between loyalty to the promise of freedom and democracy and commitment to push the nation to live up to its ideals. Roger Wilkins describes this perspective and its implications for his view of history: “I consider myself to be enthusiastically patriotic … . I don’t need for this nation to be perfect in order for me to love it; I love it because it is home … . More than anything, though, I suppose I love the opportunity this nation affords me to

engage in struggles for decency.” Many supporters of reparations place their efforts in this context, arguing that calling for the U.S. to make restitution for past faults and continuing oppression is a patriotic use of the past. This attitude represents , in a sense, a reclaiming of the oppositional nature of the traditions of radicalism and protest in the U.S. As we have seen in the rewriting of the history of the abolitionists, remembrances of agitators in U.S. history are often co-opted; yet, as Wilkins suggests, this process can be contested.

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Con

Reparations codify African Americans as subjects of a subordinate social structure

Balfour 5 (Lawrie, @ University of Virginia, Reparations after Identity, Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6, December, pp. 786-811, Sage Publications, Inc., http://www.jstor.org/stable/30038464//northwestern-ak)

During roughly the same period, however, a substantial group of scholars questioned the value of "identity politics," contending that political organizing around historically marginalized group identities substitutes preoccupation with past injuries for emancipatory aspirations and divides the left into rival factions and the world into victims and villains. These arguments, like the identity-based movements they challenge, are heterogeneous, but Susan Bickford usefully crystallizes three central complaints: "ressentiment, balkanization, and

regulation."1A0 t first glance, reparations politics appears susceptible to all three. Insofar as reparations advocates focus on past and present injury and insist on the relationship of injury and identity in their appeals for redress , they risk enshrining a view of black citizens as victims whose moral authority is not subject to discussion or critique; insofar as they restrict their focus to injustices suffered by African Americans and remedies that target black communities, they invite the charge of divisiveness; and insofar as their understanding of those injustices and remedies relies on unproblematized conceptions of blackness and whiteness, they engage

in the kind of shoring up of borders, internal and external, that produces new exclusions. Critics of identity politics and advocates for reparations thus appear to be at an impasse. Is the recent popularity of the idea of reparations politically counterproductive, an instance of one or more of the pitfalls the critics of identity politics describe? Or are anti-identity politics arguments merely a recent manifestation of a longer history of resistance, particularly on the part of white Americans, to acknowledging the grievances of black citizens? Believing that there is a limited truth to both sides, this essay aims to engage them together by reading Wendy Brown's subtle and troubling account of the ways that identity-based movements can subvert their own democratic aspirations against what I take to

be the most persuasive arguments for reparations.B rown worries that the pursuit of legal redress for the subordination of racial and sexual minorities, women, and other marginalized groups signals a departure from the pursuit of freedom. This approach, she

writes, bears too close a resemblance to what Nietzsche calls a "politics of ressentiment": Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured , it delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the "injury" of social subordination. It fixes the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning. This effort also casts the law in particular and the state more generally as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure. Thus, the effort to "outlaw" social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors

against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such pro-tection by such protectors. Finally, in its economy of perpetrator and victim, this project seeks not power or emancipation for the injured or the subordinated, but the revenge of punishment , making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.l1

Reparations are counterproductive – focusing on past African American suffering displaces a true compassion to blacks – undermines policy action and reinscribes a racist mindset

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Responsibility Debate Slaveowners/Direct Perpetrators

It’s not the government’s fault- it’s the slaveowners and the direct perpetrators of crimes.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest// JM

First, it might be said that sometimes wrongdoers, specifically governments, owe compensation to their charges even absent evidence of a causal connection. Specifically, where the government betrays the trust its citizens place in it, the government owes compensation even without evidence of a causal connection with the victim's injuries. Of course, this principle is inapplicable to slavery, since slaves did not count as citizens, but we could extend it to non-citizens: those living in one country and forcibly transported to a second country trust the government of the second country to protect them from

mistreatment. When that trust is betrayed, no causal link need be shown. Governments on this view are strictly liable for protecting human rights (construed loosely, not in any technical sense of rights guaranteed by the U.N. Charter).

However laudable, this view is false (because there are counterexamples), and it sets the standard of trust unreasonably high. On its face it is false, because the causal link needs to be established regardless. A government might, for example, be justified in refusing to compensate visitors for betrayal of its trust, even though the government has an unstated policy of not

protecting human rights where there was no connection established between such betrayal and their injuries. We might suppose that private parties violate the human rights of two visitors, let us say, by kidnapping them with the intent of forcing them to work. The government makes no effort to rescue them, but they escape unharmed before any forced labor occurs and shortly

thereafter both visitors lose all their possessions for two different reasons . One is a victim of a street crime that the

government could not prevent even if one of its citizens were a victim, and the other loses all her belongings in an unpredictable windstorm. In such cases the government's policy of not protecting human rights played no role in the losses, so it would be absurd to insist that it compensate these visitors for the loss of their possessions because they betrayed their trust by being unwilling to protect their rights . On the other hand, if we could establish a causal link between the losses and the

betrayal of trust, the case becomes stronger. Even if we assume that when a government betrays a trust it is liable for all losses sustained by those in the territory, the important question is which betrayals of trust give rise to a right of compensation. Clearly, we expect governments to enforce their own laws even if those laws fall short of protecting human rights, so

governments that fail to enforce such laws should compensate their victims. But, in cases in which the laws are enforced and the citizenry violates human rights of third parties, the appropriate parties to make good the damage are the wrongdoers. American slavery is an instance of these, because positive law gave rights to slaves, and the federal government enforced those, as the case of the Amistad demonstrated. The third parties involved in slavery committed the wrongs, not the federal government.

To hold the federal government strictly liable is to let the direct perpetrators go free.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest // JM

In addition to this, the federal strict liability rule fails to distinguish among morally relevant degrees of complicity by holding one agent, the federal government, liable regardless of blame for failing to control the wrongful conduct of the individuals who were to blame. The individuals and other entities who voluntarily

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maintained slavery performed inherently wrong actions, but instead of holding them liable for the damages, the federal strict liability rule holds the federal government liable even though it regulated slavery but is not to blame for maintaining it. This runs counter to our considered moral judgment that the more complicit parties to a wrongful practice owe more compensation to the victims than the less complicit.

Federal Government The government was not responsible- to extend the indirect blame to them would be to extend it to everybody around the world. And if it was they would only have to pay a fraction of the reparation.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest//JM

A third objection to the causal principle is that the definition of "wrongdoer" is excessively narrow. The term, it might be said, should be extended to those who made indirect contributions. Any such suggestion blurs the line between wrongdoers who infringe the rights of others and those who do not. For example, abolitionist northerners who purchased goods consisting in part of the products of slave labor contributed to the perpetuation of the institution and therefore indirectly participated in the institution. If individual consumers who benefited from slavery by purchasing goods for less than the amount for which the goods would have sold had free workers produced them are wrongdoers, then consumers in other countries who bought the goods were also wrongdoers. As the list of wrongdoers grows longer, whatever federal obligation follows would extend to only a fraction of the total damages.

The government isn’t responsible- they weren’t the enabler.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest//JM

That conclusion brings us to the second issue of whether the government owes compensation for the role it did play. My answer is negative because of the following rule: (2) The enabler principle: Agents who enable W to perpetrate P owe

compensation to V only if the agents are to blame for enabling W to perpetrate P. An agent is to blame for enabling others to perpetrate wrongdoing if the agent knew or should have known that it was duty-bound to perform an alternative act within its power that would have prevented the wrong-doing. Applying the enabler principle to the case of American slavery, the federal government's responsibility to the victims of slavery can be summed up in the following two applications or instantiations of the enabler principle. (2a) The federal-blame rule: The federal government owes compensation to the victims of slavery only if it is to blame for allowing private parties and State officials to maintain slavery. (2b) The federal-duty rule: The federal government owes compensation to the victims of slavery only if it knew or should have known that it was duty-bound to abolish slavery. "Duty-bound" here means under a moral duty that trumps other duties. This excludes supererogatory acts or acts that are beyond one's power. Showing that such a duty binds the agent involves demonstrating that it was within the power of the agent to perform a morally superior alternative act to what the agent in fact did (or failed to do).

Using the federalblame and federal-duty rules, the federal government owes no compensation for two reasons: it was not under a duty, and if it were, it discharged the duty. The latter is true because it did abolish slavery with the

passage of the thirteenth amendment. The obvious response to this is that the federal government enabled slavery to thrive until the Civil War amendments, so it should pay for the damage caused by its failure to cease regulating slavery sooner. If the federal government were under a duty to abolish slavery sooner, then, under the federal-duty rule, as defined earlier, there would

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be a morally superior alternative action that was within its power, an alternative that was not supererogatory and would have

been effective in abolishing slavery sooner. But, as I show in this part, there was no such action. Therefore, it was not to blame. The federal government owes no compensation to the victims of slavery, because it could not have known that it was duty-bound to perform a morally permissible act that would have effectively ended slavery sooner .

Because the founders ratified a Constitution that mandated that the federal government play a role in regulating slavery, to hold that it should not have played that role is tantamount to saying it was obligated either (a) to attempt to do what the federal government had no Constitutional power to do, as for example, to attempt to abolish slavery before 1808, or (b) to breach its duties under the Constitution by , for example, not enforcing the fugitive slave clause or refusing to suppress the Nat Turner rebellion, or (c) to perform a duty it could not have known it had. But in none of these cases is the government is responsible for damage that results.

The federal government isn’t responsible- they didn’t actually have the power to end slavery.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest//JM

First, the federal government is not the only agent that could have ended slavery. The states could have done so individually. Or the state legislatures could have called for a constitutional convention and have enacted an amendment similar to the thirteenth.3 Second, even if these were not possible ways to abolish slavery, a duty to perform extraconstitutional actions is limited to cases in which the government has the "power" in the sense of the military or police manpower or armament to perform some act that it has no legal "power" or authority to perform. Here, however, we have no power in the first sense; we only have a declaration (that slaves are henceforth free persons) it has no legal authority to make. The federal government had no power in the military or police sense to enforce it. Without such power, holding it as a duty violates the principle of "ought implies can." A final rejoinder here is that if the states could have abolished slavery, or the people through a constitutional convention could have abolished slavery, then the people who could have done this along with the state governments and the federal government are all liable for failing to do so. In

other words, the agents who owe reparations include parties in addition to the federal government. Granting that the federal government has the power, it owes only a portion of the damages due the victims of slavery, since there were so many other agents with the same power . Now, one might argue that the federal government owes the entire amount of the damages by invoking a concept of joint and several liability. But one needs a moral argument for adopting such a view. There might indeed be a utilitarian argument for the policy, but such arguments are beyond the scope of the present discussion, which is limited to responsibility for harm an agent causes. Even if the utilitarian calculus for such a rule is favorable, it runs against our moral intuitions that those who are more complicit owe more than those who are less complicit and those who cause more suffering owe more to their victims than those who cause less.

The federal government had no duty to breach the constitution to end slavery, and if it had it would have led to more disparities.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest//JM

Notwithstanding its responsibility on that view, the federal government cannot be blamed for the damage caused by acts falling under (b), that is, its failure to breach its duties under the Constitution, because it could not know that doing so would be morally superior to regulating slavery. It would have to be the case that the consequences of breaching its duties would have been no worse morally than continuing to regulate slavery until the Civil War erupted and effectively abolished the practice.

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But there is no reason to believe this is true. Indeed, breaching its Constitutional duties may only have led to multiple republics, some slave owning and some free, lingering beyond 1865. Or, a civil war may have resulted sooner, with either a negotiated settlement recognizing slavery or the union subdued.4

The federal government has no responsibility- it could not have known that it should’ve ended slavery.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest//JM

We turn now to (c), the view that the federal government had a duty of which it was unaware. In hindsight we may realize that there was a morally superior alternative action the federal government could have taken to abolish slavery sooner, but the government could not have known that it would ultimately have been better to abolish slavery this way. For example, it might be said that it was within the federal government's power to abolish slavery after 1808 but before 1865 and compensate all slave owners out of the federal treasury for their losses. So, if it were under a duty to do this, the reasons would be that compensating slave owners would

have been less costly than the Civil War and its amendments. However, the federal government could not have known that and is not blameworthy. Now, it might be objected that this standard too easily absolves the federal government . All that need be shown, it might be said, is that the federal government could have abolished slavery sooner without all the horrors that continued slavery followed by the Civil War would have

caused. Such an objection is wrong on two counts. First, it does not require that the federal government could have known this; it simply holds it strictly liable regardless of what it could have known. My claim is that it is inconsistent with our moral intuitions to hold liable those who did not cause the damage without a showing of some moral shortcoming. Strict liability ignores this, and I will say more about this in the next section. The second defect of this argument is that it is highly unlikely that had the federal government could have avoided the Civil War by trying to abolish slavery sooner . In 3.d.4 below, I present the historical argument for this. In short, the federal government is not responsible for the marginal damage it caused by not abolishing slavery before 1865, because it cannot be blamed for the marginal damage that resulted, and it cannot be blamed because it could not know that the alternatives from which it could choose were morally superior, either because they were not morally superior or because it is uncertain that it could have known of these alternatives. (We might note that no part of this argument presupposes that the federal government could have done otherwise; the issue here is knowledge of morally superior alternatives, even if it could not have done otherwise.)5

To extend the blame to the federal government for no reason other than that it could have stopped slavery is to hold the entire world responsible.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest // JM

It might be said that the relevant fact is that federal government protected slavery by, for example, deterring and suppressing slave rebellions, and protecting slave shipping, regardless of what it knew or should have known. Had the federal government withheld such protections, slavery would have ended or suffered serious setbacks. The focus, it might be said, should be on the violation of the rights of the victims, apart

from the degree of culpability of those with the power to hamper or end slavery. On this view, one would reject the enabler principle (and, along with that, the federal-blame rule and the federal-duty rule) in favor of a principle of strict liability, the upshot of which would be the following rule: (3) The federal strict liability rule: The federal government is obligated to make reparations for slavery for allowing private parties and State officials to maintain slavery regardless of whether it knew or should have known that it was duty-bound to perform a morally permissible act that would have

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effectively ended slavery sooner. The difficulties with the federal strict liability rule are that it does not distinguish among degrees of complicity and it holds responsible parties under no duty to abolish slavery . To understand the second difficulty, we need to appreciate the significance of holding that the federal government is obligated to pay for the damage slavery caused

regardless of what it knew or could have known. Rejecting the enabler principle above entails holding responsible other agents who are in all morally relevant respects situated as the federal government was, namely, they are not to blame for establishing or maintaining slavery, but were in a position to abolish it. We would hold responsible those who were not to blame for allowing slavery and those who were not duty-bound to abolish slavery, so long as they could have abolished it . This runs counter to the well-settled judgment that one owes no

compensation where one violates no duty. Moreover, if we assume that the use of violence to abolish slavery is justified, any nation or combination of nations that could have invaded the United States and succeeded in a government takeover that would have abolished slavery would also be liable . Thus, we reach the counterintuitive conclusion that virtually any nation or entity that could have abolished slavery alone or in concert with others would owe compensation. Furthermore, responsibility could be extended to those parties who could not have abolished slavery but could have hampered it, much as the federal government could have, for example, withheld protection of slave shipping. Thus, the federal strict liability rule leads to a reductio and runs counter

to our settled moral judgments. But, even if it did not, the federal government owes only a fraction of total reparations owed by so many other entities.

States Government

The states are responsible for a larger part of slavery than the federal government.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest//DN)

A similar but different approach would be to extend "wrongdoers" to governmental entities and ignore individual citizens. It might be said that the individual States owe compensation, since they had laws regulating slavery and the treatment of slaves, but applying the causal principle to this kind of wrongdoer would stretch the meaning of "caused" beyond the slave owners, traders, and transporters who inflict the suffering to embrace second-order wrongdoers who not only inflict no suffering but may

have no contact with or dealings in slavery. Assuming nevertheless that we could do so, the federal government was not a direct participant in the process, and its regulation was even more remote than that of the States. To be sure, the government stood by and allowed the practice to continue, but on the basis of the causal principle, a wrongdoer's obligation to compensate is limited to the damage the wrongdoer caused. If the federal government did cause damage, the causal connection seems remote or not as clear as the connection with the

participants in the institution. But even if the case can be made, its contribution to the reparations fund would be smaller than the individual slave States, comparable perhaps to the fraction owed by non-slave States that surrendered runaway slaves to their owners.

State reparation practices are modeled by the Federal Government.(Adjoa Aiyetoro, Associate Professor of Law at UALR William H. Bowen School of Law, A. B. Clark University, M.S.W. Washington University, J.D. St. Louis University, P. http://newsone.com/nation/not-so-fast-senate-how-slavery-reparations-might-work///DN)

But, she says, the fight will continue throughout the country. “They say all politics is local, and the more we organize in Tulsa and other cities, the more we get resolutions from state and city governments in favor of H.R. 40 [Conyer’s reparations legislation in Congress], all those things will help.

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The states had the ability to end slavery, and are thus responsible for reparations.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois University, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest//JM

A final rejoinder here is that if the states could have abolished slavery, or the people through a constitutional convention could have

abolished slavery, then the people who could have done this along with the state governments and the federal government are all liable for failing to do so. In other words, the agents who owe reparations include parties in addition to the federal government.

The states were responsible for the continuation of slavery.George Schedler, M.A., University of California, San Diego, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, J.D. cum laude, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Chair of philosophy department at Southern Illinois Univeristy, “Should the Federal Government Pay Reparations for Slavery?,” Tallahassee: Oct 2003. Vol. 29, Iss. 4; pg. 567, P. Proquest//JM

The historical argument is in part based on the conclusions reached earlier about the United States being a slaveholder's republic and in part on what it means

to have the power to change a state of affairs. An agent has the power to change some state of affairs if there is a close possible world in which the agent can bring about that change. Since the Supreme Court did not have the constitutional power to abolish slavery, the power resides in either Congress or the President. But there was no close possible nineteenth-century world in which either the President or Congress could have chosen to abolish slavery, largely because of the power of the Southern states. Until passage of the seventeenth amendment in 1913, state legislatures chose the Senators, whose views on slavery reflected those held in the state legislatures. A Senate majority that would agree to abolish slavery would not exist in a close possible world of the nineteenth-century Senate. For similar reasons, holding that the President could have abolished slavery presupposes a nineteenth-century United States that is not a close possible world. The state legislatures chose the presidential delegates, so an anti-slavery President could never have emerged, given the Southern legislatures' commitment to slavery.10 In other words, the political power of the Southern states is a feature of the slave system that the nineteenth-century federal government faced. One must take that into account when one considers whether Congress or the President had the power to abolish slavery.11

AT: Popular Opinion Polls Margin of error is out of control Craemer, Thomas. "Framing Reparations." Policy Studies Journal 37.2 (2009): 275-298. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 July 2015. // JM

While the surveys generally agree on the fact that, at present, most Americans oppose slavery reparations, population estimates of support or opposition fail to converge and vary over a range of 32 percentage points. This raises the question how to account for the

diverging population estimates. Differences may be due to random error by a public largely uninformed about the issue (e.g., Converse, 1964). Alternatively, they may reflect complex and meaningful considerations about "who" should be compensated "by whom" in "what form" and "for what" injustice.

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Harms of Reparations Continues Problems

Legal remedies to complex problems court cultural blindness and academic imperialism.Kimberly Wedeven Segall, 2002, [Asst. Professor @ Seattle Pacific University] “Postcolonial Performatives of Victimization.” Public Culture, 14(3), p. 617-8 // JM

Law complicates postcolonial identifications. As recent criticisms of the U.S. court system reveal, legal language and narratives, as cultural constructs, influence national history and constructions of identity. In postcolonial states, the globalization of legal systems closely follows the development of nation-states, international trading demands, and government transitions after civil war. The constitution of courts in postcolonial and postwar societies begets transitional amnesties, reparations, or silent amnesia, and public hearings and mandates inaugurate forums for testimony that have powerful effects on the way stories of the past will be reconstructed or obliterated. Indeed, these

postcolonial legal narratives and identities set precedents for national identifications and bolster the central democratic state. The conventions of legal discourse and procedure also constrain subject narratives—through, for example, the imposition of time constraints, formalized qualifications for benefits, codified identifying language as deployed in legal mandates, and narrative formulas that require condensed beginnings and conclusions, not to mention the hermeneutics of audience expectation and media interpretation. To ignore the cultural invasion of legal forms and local adaptations to them—as exemplified in the operations of the postcolonial performative of victimization—thus courts the charge of a cultural blindness, an academic imperialism.

Causes Trauma Reparations as a legal remedy constrain the expression of experience resulting in trauma for those who are subjected to it, which is hopefully reformed in resistance to the legal structures that inaugurate the secondary trauma.Kimberly Wedeven Segall, 2002, [Asst. Professor @ Seattle Pacific University] “Postcolonial Performatives of Victimization.” Public Culture, 14(3), p. 617-8 // JM

An investigation into the structuring of law and legal identities in postcolonial countries leads to a second problematic: postcolonial trauma. The Enlightenment called for a structuring of reason, and the state responded with a legal forum dependent on ocular proof, fact-fulfilled theses, and limited narratives in Socratic form. Storytelling was invited on the condition that it was highly directed, and in many ways testimony does trouble legal systems with its traumatic and cathartic interludes. In a state forum, traumatic interruptions of weeping can limit legal procedures of questioning, interrupt the concrete evidence, and influence national catharsis (much in the

manner of Julia Kristeva’s “pre-symbolic”). Traumatic memory revises itself to work toward healing, refining or resisting legal precedents. Haunting revisions of trauma erupt in local storytelling, performance, and other artistic works—interventions potentially disruptive not only of

the constructions of law, but also Mbembe’s severe dichotomy of sacrificial victims and war-goaded subjectivities. In a postcolonial state, the testimony of traumatized witnesses inflects legal claims both past and present. In South Africa, the performative language of victims

inundated the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, the mandate for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Verdicts such as those for amnesty applicants, “you were under political orders,” or for reparations, “you are a victim of human rights violations,” constructed multiple scenarios for victim speech acts. A performative, as Judith Butler argues, is where the “act of recognition becomes an act of constitution . . . the terms by which recognition is regulated, allocated, and refused are part of larger social rituals of interpellation.” The cursory narrative structures and victim identifications of a legal ritual such as that inaugurated in South Africa provide an overt way to speak of the tragedy of the past, often for the first time in public. Law thus structures a space for the marginalized to speak and augments acceptance for these tragic tales, breaking the silence often

surrounding atrocity. However, these public spaces and processes, frequently marked by implicit performance and language 35


demands, select for specific victim-acts. The complexity of postcolonial acts resides in temporality. While the term victim may capture the helpless psychological position of a subject during the moment of torture and terror, the second performance of identity under the structure of law enforces a continued victimization role. Public performers, Erving Goffman

argues, must maintain a group identity for staking convincing claims, as in the case of reparation. This second “staging” of victimization resubjects the individual to feelings of helplessness, feelings that may only be altered in legal, local, or artistic settings if the subject is given the agency to perform complex roles—not just “victim,” in other words, but “fighter,” “survivor,” “healer,” “community member.”

While law establishes a precedent of relating injury, artistic performances can trace unfinished traumatic hauntings, the ghostly memories not yet put to rest by the state-sponsored forum. Because of the paradoxical nature of trauma, which is virtually unspeakable because of the shocking nature of its originary event and which, when spoken, must be approached through continually changing and revised memory forms to avoid reentering shock, traumatic narratives challenge law’s desire for stasis and reflect both the influence of and resistance to postcolonial victim-acts. Trauma attains permanence, Mbembe argues, through embodied memory, as made evident in Africa’s fractured countries and wounded bodies. Yet

cultural contestation over the interpretation of injury, and trauma itself, presents a site for possible resistance and change.

Reparations Fail Costs Too Much

Cost of reparations in 2015 dollarsCraemer, Thomas. "Estimating Slavery Reparations: Present Value Comparisons Of Historical Multigenerational Reparations Policies." Social Science Quarterly (Wiley-Blackwell) 96.2 (2015): 639-655. Academic Search Complete. Web. 4 July 2015. // JM

Various methods have been proposed

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to estimate the size of the reparations debt, withestimates ranging from $17 billion (Ransom and

37


Sutch, 1990), to $1.4 trillion (Neal,1990), up to $4.7 trillion (Marketti, 1990), all in 1983 dollars. In

38


2009 dollars, this wouldrepresent $36.14 billion, $2.98 trillion, and $9.99 trillion, respectively.

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Ransom and Sutch (1990:32) use the market value of a slave from historical records as“the buyer’s calculation of

40


the present value of the stream of income which the buyer couldextract from the slave.” With that expected

41


income stream representing the difference ofthe slave’s productivity and the cost of feeding and

42


housing the slave, according to Ransomand Sutch (1990:32), “the price of a slave summarizes the capitalized

43


value of the economicexploitation inherent in the slave system.” They define the term economic exploitation

44


as “that part of labor’s product which is not returned to the slave as food, shelter, andother consumption

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items” (Ransom and Sutch, 1990:32). Using a rate of return of 6.6percent, Ransom and Sutch (1990:32–

46


33) “estimate the dollar value of exploitation fromthe crop output produced by slaves in each year using

47


evidence on the slave populationand the average price of slaves.” Ransom and Sutch (1990:47)

48


calculate the total value ofexploitation per slave and subtract from it the estimated value of

49


consumption provided tothe slave. These numbers allow Ransom and Sutch (1990) to compute the total amount oVarious methods have been proposed to estimate the size of the reparations debt, with estimates ranging from $17 billion (Ransom and Sutch, 1990), to $1.4 trillion (Neal, 1990), up to $4.7 trillion (Marketti, 1990), all in 1983 dollars. In 2009 dollars, this would represent $36.14 billion, $2.98 trillion, and $9.99 trillion, respectively.

Ransom and Sutch (1990:32) use the market value of a slave from historical records as “the buyer’s calculation of the present

50


value of the stream of income which the buyer could extract from the slave.” With that expected income stream representing the

difference of the slave’s productivity and the cost of feeding and housing the slave, according to Ransom and Sutch (1990:32), “the price of a slave summarizes the capitalized value of the economic exploitation inherent in the slave system.” They define the term economic exploitation as “that part of labor’s product which is not returned to the slave as food, shelter, and other consumption items” (Ransom and Sutch, 1990:32). Using a rate of return of 6.6 percent, Ransom and Sutch (1990:32–33) “estimate the dollar value of exploitation from the crop output produced by slaves in each year using evidence on the slave population and the average price of slaves.” Ransom and Sutch (1990:47) calculate the total value of exploitation per slave and subtract from it the estimated value of

consumption provided to the slave. These numbers allow Ransom and Sutch (1990) to compute the total amount of exploited slave labor for each year, summing it across years, while compounding interest, yielding the “present value of past exploitation in 1860,” which they estimated in 1983 at $17.4 billion (Ransom and Sutch, 1990:33), $36.99 billion in 2009 dollars.

One Group Fails Giving reparations to one group exacerbates current public opinion and racism.Lawrie Balfour, @ University of Virginia, Reparations after Identity, Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6, December, pp. 786-811, Sage Publications, Inc., 2005 P. JSTOR/ JM

Related to the prospect that an effective reparations campaign would both trade on and reproduce a conception of African American

victimhood is the danger that it could entrench distinctions between deserving and undeserving recipients of compensation. While arguments for reparations can evade some of these traps by balancing the emphasis on the suffering of African Americans

with an appreciation for their contributions,46 such an approach has its own risks. Among them is the possibility of contrasting those citizens who embody an ethic of hardwork and self-sacrifice against those who represent a perversion of those values, those identified as the “underclass.”As Eric Yamamoto explains, this is an aspect of “the underside of reparations.”

Examining the arguments that led to reparations for Japanese Americans interned duringWorldWar II, Yamamoto notes the significance of an ideology of “group worthiness” and posits that the effectiveness of those arguments was at least partly traceable to Japanese Americans’ self-presentation as “deserving superpatriots.”47 In light of the dependence of this image of Japanese Americans as a model minority on a distinction from black Americans, Yamamoto’s argument provides a crucial reminder of how reparations claims can be used to support, rather than to transform, public perceptions of whose citizenship counts.

Preclude Future Repair Reparations would be perceived as a final payment even though they cannot truly solve racism, and would preclude any future repair. Lawrie Balfour, 2005, @ University of Virginia, Reparations after Identity, Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6, December, pp. 786-811, Sage Publications, Inc., P. JSTOR//JM

Enacting such a practice, however, requires resisting the allure of closure. In this regard, my argument departs from Robert

Westley’s conclusion that “the closure afforded by reparations means that no more will be owed to Blacks than is owed to any citizen under the law. This is the effect of any final judgment on the merits . Once reparations are paid,

Blacks will be able to function within American society on a footing of absolute equality.”81 Given the depth of societal denial about the significance and effects of slavery and the pervasiveness of antiblack racism, about which Westley writes so eloquently,

it is unlikely that reparations alone could accomplish so much . And while my view is substantially informed by Marable’s

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argument, I am wary of his reading of the etymological kinship of reparations and “repair” as a promise “to make whole again.”82 The pursuit of final judgment or wholeness might well appeal to white Americans eager to put the ugliness of U.S. racial history permanently in the past. It might, furthermore, disallow what Martha Minow calls “a constant double move” between the salience of group-based claims and the recognition of the multiplicity of perspectives and identities that compose the groups in whose name the claims are made.

Poor Focus Fails Focusing on reparations only for the poor create divisiveness among the black community, but unity is key to solving for disparities.Yussuf Nuruddin, adjunct professor of African American Studies and social science at the New School University, “The Promises and Pitfalls of Reparations,” Socialism and Democracy. New York: Winter 2001. Vol. 16, Iss. 1; pg. 87, P. Proquest//JM

That conflicting class interests--those of the working class, upper middle class, and underclass--would emerge in the struggle for reparations should not be surprising. Struggles for national liberation always have internal class conflicts. The principle of unity and struggle defines the working class strategy in national liberation struggles. In other words, the black working class must unite with the black bourgeoisie in the struggle to gain reparations from the white power structure, but black workers must struggle against the bourgeoisie for control

of the specific reparations agenda. In the face of white supremacy, the unity of African people is an absolute necessity. But emotional calls for black unity often becloud the conflictual class interests that exist within Blackamerica. Because the transfer of wealth involved in a just reparations settlement would not be trivial, it is important that the black working class move , in a Lukacsian sense, from being "a class in itself" to being "a class for itself," in short, that it become conscious of its particular interests and organize around a reparations agenda which represents these interests. Reparations settlements could involve individual cash payments, investments

in community development projects, the transfer of land, tax exemptions, tuition-exemptions or any combination of these factors. The way reparations settlements are structured could be more advantageous to one class than to another. It is often argued that class divisions among African Americans are largely fictional, that there is no real black bourgeoisie--that at best Afroamerica has a class of petty bourgeoisie or even lumpenbourgeoisie, i.e., tenuous struggling sub-bourgeoisie, who are "one paycheck away from being homeless," i.e., if laid off or

fired they would not be able to make their mortgage payments. I argue that there are substantial class cleavages among African Americans and that the internal struggle for the shape of reparations will sharpen these cleavages. We cannot ignore ideological differences either; some demands for reparations are more revolutionary than others. Some formulations of reparations are consumer-oriented palliatives while others challenge the very legitimacy of the existing nation-state (perhaps prematurely). In launching a reparations movement it is necessary that we be very conscious of the class issues and the ideological issues that shape the various types of reparations demands.

Monetary Fails

Can’t justify reparations with economic means.Ofari, No Date Radical Education Project, vice-president of the Black Student Union at CAL STATE, no date (Earl, BLACK LIBERATION, http://archive.lib.msu.edu/AFS/dmc/radicalism/public/all/blackliberation/AAN.html)Revolutionary nationalism, both in theory and practice, is a far reaching variant on the traditional concept of black nationalism. Revolutionary nationalist, unlike

cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist . For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.

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http://archive.lib.msu.edu/AFS/dmc/radicalism/public/all/blackliberation/AAN.html


Generally speaking, cultural nationalists have a one-sided view of American society. The struggle for black liberation to them would be won if only white racism were eliminated. Such a view is absurd. Revolutionary nationalists have clearly seen that white racism is only a convenient tool used by the corporate power structure to divide the working masses in America while maximizing profits . Cultural nationalists also tend to identify only with the liberation struggles on

the African continent rather than to see the need for a total world revolution. Any number of examples throughout the world of homogeneous national populations who are not discriminated against because of race but are nonetheless poor and exploited could readily cited as proof of refuting cultural nationalism’s claim that white racism is the only problem black people must deal with .

The economic claim for reparations is terribly flawed.Cooper, 2012 (Allan D. [Otterbein University] “From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse.” Journal of Black Studies 43(2); p. 110)

To reiterate, reparations have been justified because slavery constituted an exploitative theft of the value of African American workers. The descendants of these slaves have been denied the inheritance that the current generation of White Americans has enjoyed from their respective ancestors. Be that as it may, U.S. courts have consistently ruled that the descendants of slaves have yet to demonstrate “standing” (they have not demonstrated that the defendants personally injured them) and that these descendants have taken too long to file their claims. Opponents to reparations have a legitimate case when they assert that (a) there is no single group responsible for the crime of slavery; (b) there is no single group that benefitted exclusively from slavery; (c) only a minority of White Americans owned slaves, whereas others gave their lives to free them; (d) most living Americans have no connection (direct or indirect) to slavery; (e) the historical precedents used to justify the reparations claim do not apply, and the claim itself is based on race not injury; and (f) the reparations argument is based on the unsubstantiated claim that all African Americans suffer from the economic consequences of slavery (Horowitz, 2002, pp. 12-15). In short, the economic basis of the reparations claim is highly problematic and has failed to earn the minimum standard for standing in the American judicial system.

Solely throwing money at people and all in one moment won’t remedy the culture of poverty. Reparations can’t solve. Yussuf Nuruddin, adjunct professor of African American Studies and social science at the New School University, “The Promises and Pitfalls of Reparations,” Socialism and Democracy. New York: Winter 2001. Vol. 16, Iss. 1; pg. 87, P. Proquest//JM

Given the pervasiveness of this popular culture, culture of poverty, underclass culture or lumpen culture--with its emphasis on present time orientation (immediate rather than delayed gratification), "gettin' paid," fun and games, and conspicuous consumption--, a blanket cash payment of reparations would not be in the best interests of community development or community uplift. I may be roundly criticized for this assertion as a "bourgeois social scientist" who is insensitive to the needs of the poor. Furthermore, given the feminization of poverty and the number of female-headed households that are impoverished, my remarks could be misconstrued as insensitive to the needs of black women. So let me clarify that I am not anti-cash payment. In fact, I would emphatically state that if reparations are structured in part as cash payments, then the poor/underclass is the segment of the black community which, being most in need, is

most deserving of receiving individual reparations checks. I am arguing, however, that such checks should be designated for specific purchases; that payments be made in small installments over a period of years rather than in one lump sum; and that prior to the receipt of such payments the designated recipients enroll in a mandatory six-month seminar in money-management and consumer education. 38 Imagine for a moment if none of the above stipulations were applied. In the worst-case scenario, a lump sum payment of reparations, in lumpen culture, would be considered "mother of all mother days" ("mother's day" is ghetto slang for the first of the month, the date when welfare checks--or aid

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to mothers with dependent children--arrive in the mail). Sales of liquor and illicit drugs would reach an all-time high, as would sales of designer clothes. Tommy Hilfiger or Ralph Lauren might even have a special reparations sales event or design a special "Free at

Last" Reparations shirt. Everyone would be talking about buying a Lexus or a Mercedes , and there would be coast-to-coast

parties and barbecues as a new black jet-set flew from New York to Atlanta to Los Angeles in search of the best Reparations bash. If reparations checks arrived on a Friday, half the recipients would be broke by Monday morning--with nothing to show for it but fancy new clothes, gold-plated jewelry, a collection of the latest CDs and videos, a 53-inch high-definition wide-screen projection tv, and memories of a great weekend. Of course I exaggerate, in order to make a point,

but as a community of consumers rather than producers--and conspicuous consumers at that--the African American poor would not enjoy long-term benefits from sudden wealth. As C.J. Munford pointed out in his Reparations

Conference paper, cash transfers are at best short-term redistributions of wealth because in a capitalist system the money is ultimately re-circulated to the ruling class. All one has to do is read about the number of million-dollar lottery winners who soon found themselves in economic difficulty in order to realize that massive social problems caused by centuries of oppression and institutional racism, cannot be solved or repaired by putting a check in the mail. 39

Monetary reparations cannot achieve full repair, but they do increase resentment.Lawrie Balfour, 2005, @ University of Virginia, Reparations after Identity, Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6, December, pp. 786-811, Sage Publications, Inc., P. JSTOR//JM

The first meaning of Baldwin’s “for nothing” emphasizes the value of the uncompensated labor performed by generations of African Americans, a staggering theft whose legacy can be traced in the economic inequalities of Baldwin’s day and our own.68 This alone provides a forceful moral basis for the demand for reparations, and a growing body of literature attends to the question of just how much is owed.69 While such calculations provide testimony to the scope of slavery and the effects of decades of discrimination on the lives of individuals and communities, however, arguments for reparations tied primarily to this kind

of calculus reveal several of the traps to which Brown alerts her readers. First, insofar as the claims are framed as a return of resources stolen by white Americans from African Americans, with presentday individual whites and blacks standing in for their forebears, they risk reinforcing precisely the kinds of identity against which Brown warns. As Robert Fullinwider notes, reparations arguments that trade on notions of personal guilt and innocence can distract from questions of collective responsibility. 70 A second peril resides in the effort to build the case for reparations from a notion of inheritance. Although a compelling argument can be made along these lines,71 to do so requires accepting inegalitarian aspects of

liberal individualism. A single-minded emphasis on fixing, precisely, the meaning of slavery in monetary terms raises a third set of concerns insofar as it precludes a more complex analysis of slavery’s reach into all domains of American life. For example, the centrality of sexual slavery is not easily reckoned with in this kind of accounting; nor is the worth of years of underpaid domestic work performed by African American women susceptible to measurement in market terms. Finally, even if advocates were successful in obtaining a substantial settlement, a focus on the value of what was taken from African Americans under slavery and in its aftermath highlights the insufficiency of any form of material redress. Because the value of reparations will be far smaller than the approximate value of what was stolen, arguments organized around measurements of the debt inevitably highlight the ineradicability of the loss. Thus although rectification of the pattern of unjust enrichment is a significant part of the demand for reparations, too narrow a focus on this aspect of the larger struggle could sow the seeds for a future politics of ressentiment.

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AT: Educational Reparations Education is not what African Americans need – it’s the reparationsKatherine Newman, 5-29-2014, "No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are.," Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/no-college-isnt-the-answer-reparations-are/ // JM

I am mostly uninterested in political rhetoric about education being the “new” civil rights movement. The old civil rights movement waged a battle for citizenship

through school legislation because that was the nearest available political tool. The landmark civil rights case, Brown versus the Board of Education, was initially conceived as a means for justice, not its end. I also think that narrowly focusing on college completion is not a good thing. The job market is volatile for African Americans in the best of times and these are not the best of times. During difficult economic cycles, black workers and students should benefit from the flexibility of moving in and out of college as their life circumstances allow. Without that flexibility, every educational moment becomes a zero sum decision: “If I leave school this semester to take that job or care for a

family member, I probably will never be able to return.” We’re poorer as individuals and groups when people least likely to get a call back because of a “black” name or negative credit check or criminal conviction have to make a decision to take a job or opt out of college forever. In short, I’m a heretic about almost every fundamental populist education belief we’ve got.

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http://tressiemc.com/2013/05/07/things-im-not-supposed-to-say-make-it-cheaper-to-fail/

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