Ten Reasons for Reparations

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet. Posted April 3, 2001.

Conservative muckraker David Horowitz has been verbally mugged for peddling an ad to college newspapers giving ten reasons why reparations are racist. But the name callers have done little more than canonize Horowitz as a martyr for truth and free speech. Even worse, they've failed miserably to tell why reparations merit a serious look. There are ten compelling reasons it does.

1. The U.S. government, not long dead Southern planters, bears the blame for slavery. It encoded it in the Constitution in article one. This designated a black slave as three-fifths of a person for tax and political representation purposes. It protected and nourished it in article four by mandating that all escaped slaves found anywhere in the nation be returned to their masters. In the Dred Scott decision in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that slaves remained slaves no matter where they were taken in the United States.

2. Major institutions profited from slavery. In October, the California state legislature passed a bill requiring insurance companies to disclose whether they wrote policies insuring slaves. This was recognition that insurance companies made profits insuring slaves as property. The insurance industry was not the only culprit. Banks, shipping companies, and investment houses also made enormous profits from financing slave purchases, investments in Southern land and products, and the transport, and sale of slaves.

3. Slavery ended in 1865 but the legacy of slavery still remains. A report by the National Conference for Community and Justice, a Washington D.C. public policy group in 2000, found that blacks are still the major economic and social victims of racial discrimination. They are far more likely to live in underserved segregated neighborhoods, be refused business and housing loans, be denied promotions in corporations and attend cash starved, failing public schools than whites.

4. There's a direct cost for slavery's legacy. Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Andrew Brimmer estimates that discrimination costs blacks $10 billion yearly through the black-white wage gap, denial of capital access, inadequate public services, and reduced social security and other government benefits. This has been called the "black tax."

5. The U.S. government has shelled out billions since the 1960s to pay for resettlement, job training, education, and health programs for refugees fleeing Communist repression. Politicians and the majority of the public enthusiastically backed these payments as the morally and legally right thing to do.

6. The reparations issue will not fuel more hatred of blacks. Most Americans admit that slavery was a morally monstrous system that wreaked severe pain and suffering on America. City councils in Chicago, Dallas, Oakland, and Los Angeles, and other cities in the past year have passed resolutions supporting a federal commission to study reparations. Also, there was no national outcry when the U.S. government made special indemnity payments, provided land and social service benefits to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, Native-Americans for the theft of lands and mineral rights, and Philippine veterans who fought with the American army during World War II.

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