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Reparations for slavery.
If
I learned, for instance, that someone had kidnapped my parents and held
them in some weird forced labor setting for the rest of their lives,
stole all their belongs and sold me off in the adoption market as an
infant, the law would allow me to successfully sue the people who made
money from my parents labor and pain and recover the accumulated estate
that would have been mine in had not the crime occurred. That is reparations.
This is, of course, what happened on a massive scale for over three
hundred years in this country.
The issue of reparations becomes more complex the more distance in time it is from the actual crime. In the case of the WWII Japanese Americans there were and are actual living victims and first generation descendents. I had a neighbor in Highland Park who was one.
African Americans are separated from the slavery crime scene by four or five generations. [However there are many living victims of Jim Crow laws, laws that denied the victims jobs, education, and other 'equal opportunities', but that’s another case.]
To assess who should be paid, in a court setting, evidence of slave lineage would be required. If it were done merely by some skin color, some intermixed descendents could be left out while recent African or Jamaican immigrants could collect. Yet at a very basic level, descendents of victims should be allowed to sue for proven damages. If you could demonstrate that your great-great-grandmother was a slave then you should be able to collect for that percentage of your lineage plus court costs.
That would still leave out most victim descendents as the largely illiterate freed slaves rarely left genealogical evidence. So to make up for that I think a reparation fund should be established. Using the Japanese American reparation as a model [$20,000 per victim] that would create a fund of $600 billion dollars for what I calculate to be descendent population, in varying fraction, of 30 million.
Part of the fund should be used to undertake massive genealogical research to determine the victim descendents as well as to prevent false claims. Part of the fund should be used to pay proven claims. The remainder should be set aside in an endowment fund for scholarships for job training and higher education scholarships, home loans, etc. made available on a needs based system – poorest first.
The actual endowment fund would not have to be amassed through taxation. Indeed I could not be. It would only exist on paper such that the government would only have to pay out the annual interest and part of the principle on the endowment as if it actually existed. At a modest 5% payout that would make available be $30 billion a year + whatever mount of pay down on the principle is determined. The interest amount would diminish as the debt is paid down and the reparation paid off.
Much of the prosperity of this country is the result of borrowing and theft. The current war clouds are a result of an import dependent energy policy where we pay for oil by expanding our balance of trade deficit. Additionally we pay for the wars and defense of oilfields with an unnecessarily large defense establishment and the cost of wars. This is added to our national deficit, now nearly six trillion dollars. In essence our present prosperity and wars are paid for by passing on the cost to, well, your generation.
In the case of slavery, most of the south and, by indirection, much of the rest of the country was built by the stolen labor of slaves including many of the buildings of Washington DC itself. Since it was a massive theft, it was never on the books, but like any crime once it is discovered, it legally goes on the books.
Finally you will notice that I only include for economic damage and do not include pain and suffering or punitive damages which any court would allow for in such a situation. That amount would simply be too huge repay and the actual criminals who held, beat, abused and killed the slaves are long dead.
Best wishes, Lowell