Light On Dark Water

Reparations for Slavery and Segregation?

This lengthy piece in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations," is getting a good bit of attention, and deservedly so. Coates (I wonder how his first name is pronounced) is an intelligent and thoughtful man, and I think he makes a pretty strong moral case for reparations from the U.S. government to the descendants of slaves. Moreover, he writes very well. It's a powerful statement, and you really should read it before drawing a conclusion on the question.

Any decent person will be appalled and angered by the oppression Coates details. And it is not just a rehearsal of stories about slavery, with which we are all familiar, but of things that have taken place much more recently, and not just in the South but in, for instance, Chicago–tactics deliberately undertaken to keep blacks in segregated neighborhoods and, much worse, to cheat them of what little wealth they managed to get hold of. The case for some sort of attempt to make restitution is, as I say, strong.

But in the end I remain unconvinced that the proposal is a good idea, or even workable. Or rather I should say I don't think it's a good idea because I don't think it's workable, and would probably do a good deal of harm. 

I'm speaking there of the idea of material reparations. But that's not what Coates wants, really. Early in the piece he dismisses the practical concerns in favor of making the moral case. Later on he seems to see the material reparations as principally a means toward a deeper end, or perhaps even only a symbol of it:

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

If only. That would be a price worth paying if it could actually purchase the healing he describes. But I don't think spiritual renewal can be obtained by any means other than spiritual renewal. 

And yet…it is a persuasive case. And unlike most white Americans I know that some of my ancestors were slave owners, and so I have a sense of real personal involvement in the history. I'll be thinking about this for a while. I could change my mind if I heard a really plausible and effective plan for implementing the idea. 

(N.B., he might have left out the Confederate flag dig, which as a matter of rhetoric is not well-chosen.  There's plenty of justification for it, but there are also plenty of people for whom the flag is a cultural symbol displayed without any particular racist intent, and reconciliation would require leaving them alone. I don't think the flag should fly from public buildings, but let's not try to stamp it out.)

Maclin Horton
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35 responses to “Reparations for Slavery and Segregation?”

  1. Art Deco

    Sorry, not buying. It’s been five generations since the manumission of the slaves, ample time for any and all immigrant groups to have established themselves as part of the prosperous working-class by default. Per capita income among blacks is about 2/3 the national average – or about the mean of a southern European country (or Israel, if you want to set your buddy Daniel off) and similar to the white American mean registered ca. 1978. From a deficit of salable goods and services the black population in general is not suffering.
    In recent years, it has been the mode to make a great deal of the difference in per capita personal assets between the black population and the remainder. There are a number of antecedents to that, but a salient one concerns propensities to save, which are not uniform across the population. There was a controversy about 20 years ago concerning differentials in rates of mortgage approval; one datum remarked upon that was embarrassing was that professional-managerial class blacks tend to have credit histories which resemble those of working-class whites. That sort of thing is not something imposed by the larger society and cannot be corrected by the larger society.
    There is a way in which black suffer from deficits not revealed in national income statistics, and that is in the quality of public goods they receive. At some level Coates knows this the way I do: he grew up in Baltimore and was a child there when I was living there. The trouble is, the manifest commitment of the black chatterati, the black political class, and the professional managerial element in the black population to improving matters in regard to this question approaches nil. It’s been grossly manifest in Baltimore, where the current mayor rescinded modest initiatives of her predecessor to attempt to improve public order.
    The problem with ‘reparations’ is that it’s the answer to a question that’s been asked in lieu of those the might be asked toward a project of improving the quality of life for blacks.

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  2. Art Deco

    “modest initiatives her predecessor attempted to improve public order”

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  3. Mac

    Your view is roughly along the same lines as Kevin Williamson’s at NRO.
    What Coates wants, concretely, is vague, but it seems to be some contemporary implementation of 40 acres and a mule. That might have been a solution, or at least a whole lot better than what actually happened, but I think it’s too late for something along those lines.

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  4. Art Deco

    The United States and Prussia were atypical among occidental countries during the 19th century in that agrarian reforms were limited to abolishing hereditary subjection. In other loci (e.g. the Hapsburg dominions and Russia), the peasantry were extended allodial rights over the rustical lands. Not sure why what was done in Prussia was done that way. The U.S. had chattel slavery rather than serfdom and salable allodial tenures of a sort which were unusual in Europe, so I guess that explains what was done here.
    I would wager that that the manumitted slaves were less skilled than proximate yeoman farmers but still had a mess of practical knowledge about farming and the habit of exhausting labor. Different scene today. Entrepreneurial skills are not widespread in the population at large and IIRC the black bourgeoisie are disproportionately civil servants. Best case is that the forty acres and a mule would be put in a mutual fund and not touched for a decade or two or three.

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  5. Art Deco

    There’s lots that can be done to improve the quality of life in slum neighborhoods and other measures which could render the labor market more congenial for lower-tier working-class blacks. The thing is, some of the material interests of the bourgeoisie would be lost in the process and certain non-material benefits would have to be surrendered. I suspect its these things which would render such initiatives a non-starter for black politicians and academics and journalists even if they gave them any thought at all.

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  6. Mac

    “Best case is that the forty acres and a mule would be put in a mutual fund and not touched for a decade or two or three.”
    Worst case: OD.
    I need a translation of “salable allodial tenure”. Land that can be bought and sold?

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  7. Art Deco

    Ya. Not much in the way of factor markets in Europe under the ancien regime. Seigneurial tenures varied a great deal re their terms, but just putting a piece of your demesne on the market as was done in North America was (I think) possible here there and the next place but not often done.

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  8. Mac

    Going back to your opening: ” It’s been five generations since the manumission of the slaves, ample time for any and all immigrant groups to have established themselves as part of the prosperous working-class by default.”
    I think that’s disputable. Part of Coates’s point, and it’s at least somewhat valid, is that deliberate efforts were made by both private and public forces to prevent blacks from establishing themselves as you say. I don’t think there can be any question that at many times and places this was true. But there is room to question whether that accounts for the fact that fifty years after most of those practices were outlawed there should not have been greater progress. Possibly the most troublesome item there, to my thinking, is the continuing low level of educational achievement among blacks. I don’t think the legacy of slavery/segregation is enough to account for that. Even if yo allow for a strong effect from the legacy, there’s still a whole psychological/cultural problem there which is where I think, like you, that there’s not a lot the larger society can do about it.

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  9. Marianne

    I just watched part of a video of Coates talking with Bill Moyers about this. He seems to be mostly concerned with having a serious national examination of slavery and its legacy and what can be done to make the lives of blacks at the bottom better.
    Reading comments today on some blogs about Maya Angelou’s death makes me think that really is something that needs to happen. Many show no understanding at all of the importance of someone like her in the lives of African Americans, and the esteem in which she was held by them. At least, I hope they don’t. If they do know this and still feel the need to show only disrespect, it would very worrisome.

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  10. Marianne

    Make that “it would be very worrisome.”

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  11. Mac

    I’ll have to wait till later to watch the video, but that does seem to be the core of what he’s advocating, not so much the actual reparations, about which he’s completely vague. And you’re right, it is something that needs to happen. But how? Comments on the Kevin Williamson piece I linked to above exhibit the reaction that a very large number, probably a majority, of whites will have–my ancestors didn’t own slaves, they came here as immigrants facing prejudice, they managed anyway, get over it, etc.
    I’ll confess that if anyone had asked I would probably have said something dismissive of Maya Angelou, because all I know of her work is a couple of really awful poems and a few silly public statements. But I read a couple of things about her as a person, and about her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and felt abashed.

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  12. Art Deco

    I think that’s disputable. Part of Coates’s point, and it’s at least somewhat valid, is that deliberate efforts were made by both private and public forces to prevent blacks from establishing themselves as you say.
    Nope.
    1. What Coates is not telling you (and what he does not know) is the actual economic effect of practice x, y, or z in aggregate and in particular the difference in dimensions of such effects on one side of the color bar v. the other.
    2. The market for any good or service can be distorted by state regulation and (conceivably) by anxieties about social ostracism. It can also be infected by information deficits (e.g. rules of thumb and such which are in error but which do not damage one’s competitive edge because the addlement is universal in that market). It can also be damaged by corruption or common swindling (which derives from asymmetric information). However, if Coates fancies businessmen will systematically forego profitable opportunities out of spite, he is seriously disoriented (and perhaps projecting).
    3. What do you mean by ‘established’? We can understand personal assets as derived from four sources:
    a. Inheritance
    b. Entrepreneurship
    c. Lucrative salaried occupations
    d. Ordinary household accumulation
    The first of these is derived from the others. The last of these is broadly prevalent in the population. The second and third are not.
    Given prices and the selection available due to effective demand, a great many people in this country are at or below baseline, and not in much of a position to save money derived from their earned income. Roughly 30% of the general population is in this position and I’d guess about 50% of the black population, and these people can benefit from collective financing of certain services (e.g. medical care) and from income re-distribution; people who fit this description are disproportionately elderly or disabled as well.
    So, ordinary accumulation is not really an option for a great mass of people at any one time (though it may be now and again). This applies across the board. At any one time, north of 40% of the population are living in households with a negative net worth. Most of them are non-black.
    Endowing the black population is not going to alter the balance of time-preferences within that population and is not going to alter the balance of occupational choices, either. It does not really address the salient reasons the asset profiles of blacks differ so much from the general population.

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  13. Mac

    I’m not sure what your “nope” is replying to, but if you mean that what Coates describes there didn’t happen, I wonder if you read the piece. He provides a good bit of evidence. Not that it’s happening now, but that it happened up to and past the middle of the last century. His argument that the effects of it are still very much with is very plausible.
    Now if you just mean that no special infusion of money outside the established mechanisms is likely to help the situation, I lean toward agreeing.

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  14. Art Deco

    I’m not sure what your “nope” is replying to, but if you mean that what Coates describes there didn’t happen,
    Things happen out of which you can concoct narratives. That does not mean they are contextually important. By way of example, there were several thousand lynchings in the Southern United States in the post-bellum period down to 1946. Without a doubt, that had an effect on race relations. It had little effect on mortality rates; its a two or three digit sum among hundreds of thousands of Southerners who died every year. Coates has written in the past about the use of corvee labor by penal systems. Only a small minority of the working-age population is incarcerated at any one time, so that really has little effect on labor markets.
    You have human-capital deficits, occupational preferences, and time-preferences. These differ between population subsets and these will determine over time the asset profile of a population. That so and so many people were swindled by unscrupulous mortgage lenders in the 1940s is regrettable, but it cannot be but a very small part of what influences the comparative asset profile of the population today. Recall that income derived from capital and land in 1950 was in real terms perhaps 20% of what it is today. Your assets are the lump sum value of those income streams.

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  15. Mac

    Well, yes, it’s true that a few dramatic events don’t necessarily change the fundamental picture, but your view of things like the unscrupulous lenders as having little widespread impact is certainly debatable. Coates would probably say, and I’d agree, that the ripoff was sustained and very hard to escape. The Chicago thing is only one mechanism in one place, and I’m sure there were many others–I’ve read, for instance, that many unions excluded blacks for a long time. And the federal housing agency (FHA?) practiced explicit exclusion.
    This doesn’t mean that behavioral factors like the ones you cite don’t also have an influence, but those were surely worsened by the pervasive discrimination.

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  16. Paul

    if Coates fancies businessmen will systematically forego profitable opportunities out of spite, he is seriously disoriented
    “out of spite” is rhetorical: the motivation would be out of a desire to defend the social status quo, the disturbing of which might seriously harm any possibility of making profit. Not would it necessarily be to forego profitable opportunities.
    When the social situation means that one large set of customers “don’t mix” with a smaller (but still substantial) set, it’s perfectly possible to refuse to treat the second set of customers the way you would the first, for example by only giving them access to worse goods at higher prices. Especially if this garnered approbation from sufficient members of the first set, and active disapprobation only from a minority.
    This is quite the opposite of systematically foregoing profitable opportunities, and it has historically happened not only to blacks but in other places also to Jews, Asian coolies, various Indian castes, and the Irish. The United States and Northern Ireland are the only first-world places where the legacy of it is still a live issue, but to think that abstract economic calculation was a driving force behind it (or behind its disappearance) in the US or elsewhere is to misunderstand the limited place that abstract economic calculation actually plays even in businessmen’s lives.

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  17. Paul

    (change “place” to “role”, or “plays” to “holds”)

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  18. Paul

    This is why “my money is as good as anyone else’s” is such a pathetic and ineffectual objection: it assumes that economic calculation, rather than social considerations, is (or should be) the driving force behind a one-off sale, when breaking the social rules to make that one-off sale could lead to future loss of business. The discriminating businessman knows that in this social context even economic calculation is on his side, but spurning this line gives him the fuzzy feeling that he “isn’t for sale”, and there are certain things even he wouldn’t do “for a quick buck”.

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  19. Mac

    Very true, I think. Segregationists in the South had few reservations about foregoing the revenue they could have gotten from black customers. Moreover, the exclusion of the undesirable group from normal commerce leaves the way open for them to be preyed upon by the truly greedy and unscrupulous. That’s part of the lesson of the Chicago story.

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  20. Art Deco

    Paul, blacks earned income and had money to spend. Income levels for black Americans in 1960 were lower than was the case for the remainder of the population (but still comparatively agreeable on a global scale at 55% of the American mean). Obviously, someone was selling to them. You had businesses in the black community itself with a specialized clientele, you had white merchants who sold to a black clientele (like the Bryant duo who killed Emmett Till), and you had business with a mixed clientele in which service followed certain rubrics (often delineated in state law). This last was common in food service where you had designated areas in diners. Businesses limited and regulated their custom according to the market niche they were pursuing.
    A mortgage lending enterprise is not a dance hall, diner, or clothing store. The other customers do not come into contact with the applicant except in a service queue (which may be quite short and, in any case, segregated).

    And none of this applies with regard to blacks living outside the South in 1955 (about a third of the total at that time, I believe).

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  21. Art Deco

    that the ripoff was sustained and very hard to escape.
    Eventually people get wise to it.

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  22. Art Deco

    Segregationists in the South had few reservations about foregoing the revenue they could have gotten from black customers.
    The question would have been in that context what would have been the effect of having unrestricted custom on your total revenue stream. My guess is that businessmen were likely rough satisficers in this regard rather than optimizers, as they are with making locational decisions.

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  23. Art Deco

    is to misunderstand the limited place that abstract economic calculation actually plays even in businessmen’s lives.
    We can check, but I do not think retail trade generally has bodacious profit margins; distributorships certainly do not. If you are not giving pride of place to economic calculation, you’re out of business.

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  24. Art Deco

    I’ve read, for instance, that many unions excluded blacks for a long time.
    The Longshoremen had segregated locals, I believe. I do not think unions were ever that important in the Southern states. Please note that unions are labor cartels. They render arbitrary discrimination easier to maintain, not harder.

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  25. Mac

    I don’t have time to reply to each point, but granting that each of them is at least somewhat valid, they don’t add up to a refutation of the view that the majority of blacks were effectively shut out of the middle class by forces beyond their control until after the mid-1960s, and that they have been handicapped by that and other forms of oppression. It can’t be proved either way, but I think the weight of the evidence is against you. I saw the segregated South up close.

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  26. Art Deco

    I don’t have time to reply to each point, but granting that each of them is at least somewhat valid, they don’t add up to a refutation of the view that the majority of blacks were effectively shut out of the middle class by forces beyond their control until after the mid-1960s, and that they have been handicapped by that and other forms of oppression. It can’t be proved either way, but I think the weight of the evidence is against you. I saw the segregated South up close.
    I would never take exception to your observations of the world around you. My point has been about the proper framing and downstream implications of what you saw (and what is somewhat familiar third hand to shnooks like me).
    Most people at any one time are wage-earners, so not part of the middle class.
    The bourgeois component of the black community was proportionately smaller in 1950 than that of the rest of the population, and it still is. You’d have seen a modest corps of merchants, artisans, and professionals who served a black clientele (for the most part). What you would not have seen was blacks in supervisory and management positions bar in black-owned companies; I do not think that social practice was limited to the South. You also would not have seen an abnormal presence in public employment (though I think the postal service has long been a much sought-after destination for blacks).
    Cannot say about Alabama, but nowhere I’ve lived in my lifetime have there been manifest the sort of caste attitudes which would prohibit blacks from holding jobs as foremen, office supervisors, and managers. I’ve never heard an objection to it or a complaint about it in any work situation. The conception of blacks as a permanent guest worker population was modal 70 years ago but has not been since about 1955 (see David Beck’s denunciation of this attitude during his years as President of the Teamsters; Beck was hardly an egalitarian sentimentalist).
    I will repeat the questions at hand:
    1. To what extent are latter-day differences in asset accumulation attributable to a history of swindling blacks, to a history of employment discrimination, to a history of unfair lending practices &c.?
    2. Can this problem be remedied without generating other problems which might be just as troublesome?
    3. What would we be too preoccupied to address while we apportioned endowments to blacks?
    Again, there is a difference between demonstrating that ‘x’ had an effect of some sort and demonstrating that ‘x’ was an important force in generating the present state of the world. There is further a difference between demonstrating that ‘x’ is important and demonstrating that you can do much to repair matters (without injuring yourself in the process).
    One bad-attitude blogger I occasionally cross paths with said he’d be pleased to pay reparations to blacks – if that would insure we would never have to hear another word about it. His objection was that of course we would continue to hear about it. We’d continue to hear because some people (like TNC) are verrry invested in a certain sort of ‘conversation’, because some people’s vocation is to act as patronage brokers and distributors, and because the results of paying reparations would disappoint. It’s conjecture, but I suspect he is right.

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  27. Art Deco

    Many show no understanding at all of the importance of someone like her in the lives of African Americans, and the esteem in which she was held by them. At least, I hope they don’t. If they do know this and still feel the need to show only disrespect, it would very worrisome.
    Last I heard of Marguerite Johnson (a.k.a. Maya Angelou), her regular employment was a position on the faculty of a college in North Carolina which paid her a bodacious salary. A critic remarked that the college could have hired a four real professors for what it was paying MA to teach one course a semester (or was it one every other semester?). You could not just register for her courses; attendance was by invitation only after an interview with the ‘professor’. At one point the faculty directory listed as her office number a ‘room’ which was actually a janitor’s closet; she had no office on campus with which to hold office hours. That was the deal there ca. 1993.
    I’ll leave to others to assess her as a purveyor of literature. I do not know poetry from tiddlywinks.
    I think she’d earned some of her critics.

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  28. Paul

    I do not think retail trade generally has bodacious profit margins; distributorships certainly do not. If you are not giving pride of place to economic calculation, you’re out of business.
    I’m a small businessman myself. It’s true that I don’t have magnificent profit margins, but I can afford not to live in thrall to profit, and have passed up business opportunities that conflicted with social obligations. And every year, just to give one broader example, I see small businesses giving away stuff they could sell, to benefit charities, churches, and local schools. Social expectations are powerful things. One great gap in much economic theory is its failure to notice that markets are social institutions.
    To give a very different example, when my wife and I bought our house, the estate agent said afterwards (when the sale was made) that he’d been glad we’d put in an offer, because the only other serious interest had been from “a foreigner”. “I’m not from here myself,” I said somewhat stiffly. “Oh, but you know what I mean,” replied the estate agent, leaving it hanging, and I can only assume he meant somebody more visibly foreign than me. I’m sure the “foreigner’s” money is every bit as good as ours, so what does this say about the real estate market in my part of the world?

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  29. Mac

    “Again, there is a difference between demonstrating that ‘x’ had an effect of some sort and demonstrating that ‘x’ was an important force in generating the present state of the world.”
    Well, sure, and in this case there’s really no demonstrating to be done. It’s like trying to prove whether or not global warming plays a part in unusual contemporary weather events. There just isn’t any way to prove it either way. One can only argue one’s view and hope to persuade. In this matter I think you’re failing to grasp imaginatively what the old segregated order was really like, and I don’t mean just in the South.
    Re your three points, the preceding paragraph is my response to 1, and as to 2 and 3, remember, I’m not arguing for reparations. As I said in the original post, I lean rather away from it. I’d be willing to consider it if someone could make a really good case for a plan that’s workable and would do what Coates hopes it would, but I’m very skeptical.
    Re businesses turning down profit for non-economic reasons, good or bad: it’s a false dichotomy to say they’d go out of business if they did this. Sure, if they did it all the time, so of course they don’t. But that’s not the argument. The argument is only that it can happen if the businessman feels strongly enough, which doesn’t seem controversial to me.

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  30. Art Deco

    There just isn’t any way to prove it either way.
    Depends on your data.

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  31. Art Deco

    He referred to ‘economic calculation’ as having a ‘limited place’ in business. That’s rather more elaborate than suggesting that men of business do not optimize with every transaction. (You do recall I made use of the term ‘rough satisficers’).
    As for Paul’s last anecdote, the estate agent loses if he gets a smaller commission than he otherwise would. Paul does not say that he did, merely that he suggested he would do so in order not to have to traffick with people he did not care for; there’s going to be deadweight loss of the sort you can measure (not of psychic income) if the transaction between the foreigner and the seller does not take place and the foreigner has to make do with a second choice. Deadweight loss is an overall loss in collective utility. I’m not sure that the distribution of utility is affected. (It’s been a while for me).

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  32. Paul

    Ah – I actually referred to “economic calculation” having a limited part in “lives”, even the lives of businessmen; not “in business”. That kind of misreading can easily lead to people being at cross purposes.

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  33. Mac

    “Depends on your data.”
    I don’t see how any data could prove that deliberate actions by whites are or are not the major cause of blacks being generally poorer, in both income and accumulation, than whites.
    “Deadweight loss is an overall loss in collective utility. I’m not sure that the distribution of utility is affected.”
    I guess that’s economics jargon? Sounds like it refers to the system as a whole, rather than the possible effect on the foreigner himself.

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  34. Art Deco

    I don’t see how any data could prove that deliberate actions by whites are or are not the major cause of blacks being generally poorer, in both income and accumulation, than whites.
    Depends on how narrow the question is. There was a controversy about 20 years ago re mortgage lending. A cross-sectional study actually was possible to ascertain a suggestive result with a limited range of data. Thomas Sowell pointed out at the time that some of the regression analyses done were unnecessary because the salient descriptive statistics discredited the thesis advanced by the bivariate studies.
    When you are talking about a historical study of the evolution of income and asset differentials, you can have a series of studies which might produce suggestive results, statistical or otherwise. It is a research programme, not a study. Thomas Sowell, who has not done econometric studies in four decades, has long been skeptical of the effects of contemporary discrimination or even historical discrimination due to comparative historical study (in which he finds disparities similar to those you see in America in countries with no history of the sort of inter-group antagonism you have here &c).
    What I think is true pretty generally in economic phenomena is that each discrete force you suggest is a tile in a mosaic. In the less sophisticated sort of literature in economic geography, you see phrases like “such and such was the locomotive of economic growth over the following decades”. Cliometricians like Stanley Engerman have demonstrated that phrases like that are commonly in error.

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  35. Mac

    “What I think is true pretty generally in economic phenomena is that each discrete force you suggest is a tile in a mosaic.”
    Surely. And when you add in non-economic cultural and racial factors it’s even less easy to single out one thing. Well, it’s always easy to do that and stop there, but not very productive for any but propaganda purposes.

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