The Complicated Road to Slavery Reparations — and the Need for An Apology

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Apr 27, 2021

In Washington, Georgetown University has announced a fundraising goal of $400,000 a year to benefit the descendants of the 272 slaves who were sold to help keep the college afloat almost 200 years ago. Now students who had voted to pay for it through additional fees won’t have to do so.

Yet while some other states, mostly where Democrats control the legislatures, have introduced proposals to study the possibility of reparations, most have stalled, according to various reports.

Particularly among Republicans, there is widespread agreement with McConnell’s sentiments that granting reparations is an idea whose time has not come.

But the debate so far has centered mainly on who has benefited from what happened years ago. Yet, as in lawsuits, it’s important to establish money damages, which seldom have amounted to more than a token amount in reparations efforts compared with how much damage was suffered.

For example, a commission formed after World War II paid out about $1.3 billion to Native Americans by the time it dissolved in 1978 — but that sum amounted to less than $1,000 for each Native American.

Congress voted to extend an apology and pay $20,000 in 1988 to each Japanese American survivor of the World War II internment, a token gesture compared with the property and freedom they lost.

Similarly, in my view the Black descendants of American slavery, like yours truly, need not hold our breath waiting for monetary reparations unless we have a claim as specific and documented as those at issue in Evanston or at Georgetown.

That may take some digging, but it would be worth it. Celebrated Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, got the current reparations ball rolling with his reporting for The Atlantic on how federal housing policy, among other abuses, cost countless Black folks the ability to build wealth that routinely was granted to white homebuyers.

“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for which none of us currently living is responsible is a good idea,” McConnell said as the House began hearings on the issue in 2019. “We’re always a work in progress in this country. But no one currently alive is responsible for that.”

No, but some people still alive did benefit from it. An official apology would be nice.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)