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REPARATIONS
Reparations For White People Makes a Mockery of Black Americans' Efforts
A historical and contemporary op-ed about this irony
While any mention of reparations for Black Americans is met with pearl-clutching and eye-rolls, America is no stranger to restorative justice. For instance, in 1948, Congress approved $38 million in reparations for Japanese Americans due to their internment during World War II, and forty years later, $20,000 to each surviving individual through The Civil Liberties Act of 1988. In 1980, the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act provided the Passamaquoddies and Penobscots tribes $81.5 million in restitution for land taken from tribes. Thus, the federal government has shown its capacity to acknowledge its culpability in harming some racial minorities. The problem is that the same reasoning seems to crumble whenever proposed on behalf of Black people.
The federal government provided White enslavers reparations but failed to acknowledge any debt to the formerly enslaved and their descendants. This must have felt like salt in the wound for the newly freed Black people deprived of wealth. On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, offering "up to $300 for each freed slave." Such a statute challenges the notion that most White people in Union-controlled states ideologically opposed slavery. In reality, many had to be financially coaxed into abolition. While this strategy addressed that they'd lose money by granting them freedom, the legislature failed to provide Black people compensation for loss of wages or the physical and psychological abuse they endured — leaving them penniless.
In a speech delivered in Charleston, SC 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr noted that "in 1863, the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation, but the Negro was not given land to make that freedom meaningful," referencing the land promised by Sherman's Field Order №15, quickly confiscated following Lincoln's assassination. King compared the injustice of refusing to assist Black Americans to release an innocent man from jail after years of wrongful incarceration and denying him bus fare to travel to reconnect with family or money to get something…
