Reparations for the descendents of slaves.

     "Yahweh, Yahweh, a God compassionate and gracious. . . forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet he won't declare as innocent the guilty, and he will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon the children and grandchildren, to the third and fourth generation."

                             Exodus, 34 

"Reparations" is a red-flag word. 

I can think of no word more politically toxic for Democrats than the word "reparations." It is worse, even, than "defund the police." Most White Americans who would freely admit that slavery was cruel and unjust, as was Jim Crow, simply do not want to hear that this history is any of their responsibility. That was then. This is now. 

A majority of White Americans adopt a value of self-reliance and individual responsibility when thinking about whether they owe a generational debt to the victims of prejudice. Even if everyone doesn't start off life with equal advantages, the cure of  race-based advantages going to other people seems so unfair, so un-American, so morally wrong when it is applied against oneself and one's children and grandchildren. Slavery and Jim Crow aren't my fault. Why punish me! To be politically viable, people who want policies that help equalize opportunity cannot call it "reparations," nor can it be overtly discriminatory based on race.

Constance Hilliard posits a way to get a job done that might avoid setting off land mines of backlash. She is a college classmate. She is a student of history and genetics, particularly as they relate to Americans of African heritage, where she pioneered a sub-field of ancestral genomics. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in African history and Semitic historiography. She is a professor of evolutionary African history at the University of North Texas. 

Hilliard

Guest Post by Constance Hilliard

Driven by timidity or perhaps just cowardice, I had, as an African-American professor, tip-toed around the controversy surrounding slavery reparations for years.  But in April of 2022, my alma mater announced that it was setting up a $100 million endowment to help close the educational and socio-economic gaps created by slavery by offering financial support to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).  As a Harvard University alumna, whose education had benefitted from affirmative action, I could no longer hide. And yet, what kept me awake at night was bearing witness to our fragile democracy’s accelerating slide into neo-fascism. Maybe now wasn’t the time for such gestures of compensatory justice. But a quiet bout of soul-searching led me to a deeper lode of truth.   

 

Those of us who treasure the promise of our democracy ache as we must witness the GOP’s defense of Donald Trump for sexual abuse, the mishandling of classified documents and more criminal indictments to come. His supporters are  incapable of being shamed by electoral fraud, financial corruption, racism, and sexism. So what alternatives do we have other than begging and pleading with the ever present reservoir of disengaged voters  “to do the right thing”? Let’s consider for a moment the possibility that electoral politics, albeit essential, may not be the only path forward.  

 

A growing but not yet clearly-defined movement among universities in the United States has emerged to discuss ways of compensating the descendants of slaves. Not surprisingly such efforts are being met with conservative push-back. But what if we as a society re-envisioned the missions of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)? Perhaps now is the time to see them for what they really are, i.e., cultural juggernauts, anchored to the heart space of the old Confederacy. However important their educational value, the vibrant cultural exposure for a growing generation of culturally-isolated young Americans could prove transformational.  HBCUs’ present-day emphasis on maintaining interracial campuses and the fact that they remain an institutional presence below the Mason-Dixon line could contribute to re-framing the ethos of the American South. That is, these schools  represent a kinetic force capable of driving a wedge through the soul of American authoritarianism. They do so wielding the soft but vibrant touch of multi-culturalism. And yet at the present time, many of these schools are dying, a fact that was dramatically noted in a 2015 article in Forbes Magazine.

 

I have taught African and African-American History at the University of North Texas (a non-HBCU) for the past thirty years. That experience has honed my awareness of how young Texans and others are drawn to multicultural educational experiences if given the opportunity.  Funds made available to HBCUs through the slavery reparations movement would allow them to re-seize their historical mission, but on a more expansive platform.  Students in both HBCUs and community colleges finance their educations through student loans. However young people who come from low-income rather than middle-class families, often give up on higher education, fearing their future ability to repay college loans. HBCUs, bolstered by reparations funding would be able to fill this gaping hole in our higher education system. That is, they could offer needs-based scholarships to academically-deserving, but economically disadvantaged students of all races.  This is the America that both the Reverend Martin Luther King and Malcolm X sacrificed their lives to attain. It is one in which the restorative justice of slave reparations would be used to heal our nation’s old, suppurating wounds rather than inflame them.

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