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A black Union soldier and his family during the Civil War.
Alamy |
| In the 50 years since the civil rights pioneer James Forman demanded $500 million in reparations for African-Americans from synagogues and white churches in his 1969 "Black Manifesto," the United States has largely avoided any serious discussion of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and the structural racism that continues to permeate American society. |
| This week might have evinced signs of change. A series of public events signaled the arrival of a new cultural moment, one in which Americans are ready to discuss past sins. |
| The most prominent of these occurred on Wednesday, when a House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on a bill that would commission a study on reparations. The meeting took place on Juneteenth, a day commemorating the announcement of the end of slavery in the United States. The hearing also came five years after the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who testified before the subcommittee, helped rekindle the reparations debate with his essay "The Case for Reparations." |
| [Read the full remarks by Ta-Nehisi Coates.] |
| Mr. Coates and others have traced racial disparities in wealth, health and criminal justice to government policies and decades of indifference. And Americans are listening. Today, 63 percent of adults believe that slavery's legacy affects the position of black people in society either a great deal or a fair amount, a recent Pew Research Center survey showed. |
| Gov. Gavin Newsom of California issued a formal apology this week to the state's Native American communities for the state's history of repression and violence. |
| "It's called genocide," Mr. Newsom said Tuesday in a featured story in the California Today newsletter (sign up here). "That's what it was, a genocide. No other way to describe it. And that's the way it needs to be described in the history books." |
| The governor's executive order has been called the first broad-based state apology for atrocities against Native Americans. In another effort, Maine has created a reconciliation commission, which Mr. Newsom also plans to do in California, as a repository for stories and scholarship. |
| But a similar apology to African-Americans for the sins of slavery and other crimes — whether at the state or federal level — must be seen as only a starting point, international human rights experts say. |
| "There should be a really serious apology, and it would have to be made by the president and have buy-in from governors of all states that slaves were ever held," said Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. "And it would have to be done very, very seriously, with a lot of ritual, and include representatives of descendants of slaves." |
| She said that African-American leaders would have to approve the text, and that it would have to show "good faith," which would mean including reparations. |
| [Read what reparations for slavery might look like in 2019.] |
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Danny Glover prepared for a House Judiciary hearing on reparations.
Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times |
| Ms. Howard-Hassmann, who has studied the reparations paid to Japanese-Americans, said that compensation for descendants of slaves would have to be collective reparations that would go toward improving schools and health care, or funds granted to predominantly African-American areas. |
| "Then you have to accept that there are children who will benefit who are not direct descendants of enslaved people," she said, adding that there would also have to be many more memorials and museums built to honor slaves. |
| The challenges that African-American claimants of reparations face, according to Ms. Howard-Hassmann, are many: that the victims of the direct harm are dead, that the perpetrators are diffuse, and that some of the actual harms were legal at the time they were committed. Some estimates of the reparations due exceed $1 trillion. |
| There is no template for providing reparations to descendants of enslaved African-Americans, but Americans have received compensation for historical injustices before. Along with Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps, survivors of police abuses in Chicago, victims of forced sterilization, and black residents of a Florida town that was burned by a murderous white mob have all been compensated. |
| [Read about some of the lessons that can be drawn from previous reparations.] |
| At the House Judiciary hearing on Wednesday, a filmmaker, Katrina Browne, who is white, recounted learning that her ancestors had been "the largest slave-trading family in United States history," and that they had brought more than 12,000 African individuals to the Americas in chains. |
| "It is good for the soul of a person, a people and of a nation to set things right," she said. |
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