Reparations

I’ve been thinking lately about reparations for blacks in the United States, a hot-button subject that will likely keep coming up for the rest of my life, my children’s lives and their children’s lives.

It is a nearly-unsolvable issue, one that keeps getting more and more complicated as time passes. And, many people have decided to simply leave it for someone else to solve. You know, like our changing climate.

So, why am I adding my two cents?

Well, every topical issue that comes up lately seems to go away before I can finish writing about it. Tariffs are on and then off and then on again. Russia tests a hypersonic missile, then we test one that just breaks the non-proliferation treaty we said was already broken. North Korea fires off a new flurry of missiles, then sends President Trump a Hallmark friendship card.

Or the economy is on the verge of collapse again. Or going into a mild recession. But not for everybody. So, who? And, until we know, why worry?

See what I mean? The issue of reparations will be around for a long, long time. More than enough time for this blog to still be relevant. I can catch some of the rapidly-changing stuff later on.

And one more thing. I an finding that my blogs have gotten a little preachy, a lot more like a term paper than an opinion, and - frankly - rather predictable. You know, you mention a subject and you know what I will say about it before I say it.

So, let me do one last, long, preachy and maybe boring blog, then I will revert to the sparkling, witty and a bit shallow blogs that we had so much fun with before,

I picked reparations as a subject because it is important and because it meets my test for one of the biggest challenges facing humanity, big issues that people have never really been able to deal with. They are, of course, sex and race. And reparations touches on them both.

 To get to the point quickly - and I will just as quickly go back to my normal rambling - the issue of reparations could be solved relatively fairly and relatively quickly if we all agreed just what people mean when they talk about it. But, everyone has their own idea, and as usual our common language serves to keep us apart instead of getting us together.

Let the ramble begin!

There are only a few kinds of reparations. The simplest to understand is a car crash. You hit my car. It is your fault. You pay to fix my damages. That is a reparation.

Or, you are a successful businessman. You bribe some politicians to change the local zoning so that your competitor has to spend a half million dollars just to meet the new town code, and they are forced to close. It all comes to light three years later. She sues you for the loss of her business, and a jury comes up with some cash value they think is appropriate. That, too, is a reparation.

Or you and your allies go to war with another nation and its allies. You lose, and the winners force you to pay for all the costs of the war.

That would be a big reparation. It’s happened many times over the centuries. Heck, we can probably find some people arguing that those lovely lands on the French side of the English Channel are really British possessions. You know, the “Let’s make Britain great again” crowd.

And let’s not get into the big related subject of colonization. Or whether women have been treated worse than men, and deserve a larger reparation.

Let’s simply start by looking at one of the world’s biggest reparations, and what came of it. It happened after the end of World War I, a war where - until the United States was finally dragged into it - our nation wasn’t sure which side we wanted to support.

Anyway, after they lost, the Central Powers were forced to make payments in cash or in land to the winners. Smaller nations like Turkey and Bulgaria had so little money that their reparations were cancelled. Germany got the big bill - 132 billion gold marks, worth about $33 billion in our currency.

Payment got complicated, since the Central Powers had to issue three sets of bonds to start payments, only two of which mandated unconditional payment. The total reparation was later reduced, but not enough.

Germany’s economy was crippled. Young men who were 8 years old when the war started were nearly 30 when their nation went in to a deep recession. Businesses failed and jobs were scarce, and a man named Adolph Hitler came to power on a wave of economic resentment. Of course, he blamed the Jews for all of Germany’s problems.

The common theme is that reparations are imposed by a winner. Often after war, sometimes in a court. And, rarest of all, by social pressure.

Which gets us back to where we started. Should the United States pay reparations to the dependents of slaves, or to blacks in general, or is there a third alternative?

In fact, there is. Not a perfect one, of course, but something that gives us a guideline to what reparations should be and what they should do. It happened in South Africa in 1994, after the government collapsed under international and internal pressures that forced the end of Apartheid.

Apartheid was a system of blatant racial discrimination by a tiny white minority that held most of the land, most of the money, most of the resources and all of the power in South Africa.

The country was so broken that its government gave up. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, became President and spent the next six years trying to deal with the legacy of Apartheid - the bitterness, the hatred, the pent-up demands for revenge.

What that nation got was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which did an imperfect job of trying to right the nation’s past wrongs. Part of the work involved helping individuals. Another part involved public acknowledgment of past wrongdoings. Very few people whose suffering had gone on for generations ended up getting any money.

How it happened is a long and complex story, of hopes that were dashed and efforts that broke apart on the hard rocks of reality. Who would be helped and how to do it was debated over and over, as well as little things like who should be taxed to pay for the benefits, and how much of the country’s budget should be used, when there were so many other pressing needs to be met.

Ultimately, as more and more people demanded aid, the country set up a scale of who would be helped first. It also had to decide what to do about its infrastructure - build paved roads in poor black areas, improve schools, see that adequate health care was available, address the yawning gap between the life expectancy of blacks and whites. 

By the time it was all settled, few people qualified for direct reparation payments, and the money - originally set at the median income of the nation - had dropped so far that proposed payments were close to the poverty level.

The lesson that comes through for me is that reparations can’t go to people who died many years ago, and shouldn’t just be given out to anyone who asks for it. And it’s tough for any individual to prove in court they were harmed by a racist society.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t take big, costly steps to fix the problems that are the legacy of inequality. You can easily look at roads, and see how the ones in poor areas are rarely repaired, while the ones in wealthy areas get repaved regularly. It’s tougher to look at the nation’s education system and see whereto inequalities exist.

Or, just start simple. Who still needs clean water and adequate hospitals and fire protection? How many millions of dollars are spent each year to deal with beach erosion, compared to how much is spent to lower the infant mortality rate, which is outrageously high in poor and minority communities.

‘sIf you need some kind of light to burn at the end of the particular tunnel, it is this. When you have a society that had - deliberately or accidentally - destroyed families for generations by denying one ethnic group good schools, good jobs, and the ability to accumulate wealth by making it difficult to buy housing you have a multi-headed problem that it will cost a lot to fix.

And the longer you wait, the more expensive it will get.

You know, like climate change.

Footnote - Lovell Fernandez, a professor of law at the University of Western Cape, provided a good overview of South Africa’s reparations struggle in his paper on Reparations Policy in South Africa about 20 years ago. Makes interesting reading.