The Reparations Debate

The House of Representatives is considering legislation to empower consideration of paying reparations to the descendants of slaves. At a committee meeting today, black authors spoke on both sides of the question. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a best-selling book a few years ago advocating reparations, focused on Senator McConnell's recent argument that Americans in 2019 can't be held responsible for offenses from more than 150 years ago. Attempting to refute McConnell, Coates resorted to a number of analogies to cases in which the U.S. recognizes and honors obligations dating back generations or centuries. Comparing reparations to treaty obligations or long-term Civil War pensions is questionable, however, since those involved formal commitments made to be binding indefinitely or well into the future, while Coates wants legislators only now to acknowledge an old moral debt. This sophistry aside, Coates asserts a principle of collective responsibility similar to the citizens' obligation to pay tax regardless of our individual personal responsibility for government policies. In his view, citizenship binds us to "a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach." In practice, this means that citizens today remain responsible for unpaid moral debts of the past. Presumably anticipating those who argue that the Union dead of the Civil War paid that debt, Coates argues that the debt only grew during the Jim Crow era, which extended into the lifetimes of McConnell and others who disclaim responsibility for racist injustice. I haven't read Coates' book, but the impression I take from his testimony today is that he may be less interested in a monetary payout than in some sort of national humbling. It seems at least as important to him that Americans acknowledge the debt as that they pay it. For him, I suspect, the reparations debate itself serves as a corrective to a perceived moral arrogance among Americans, from which, Coates may believe, follows a sense of exceptional entitlement in the wider world as well as a chauvinism at home that inevitably takes on a divisive ethnocentric character.

Coleman Hughes lacks Coates' cultural pedigree, having neither won a Pulitzer Prize nor written for Marvel Comics. The report of today's hearing identifies him mainly as a contributor to Quillette, an online magazine known for opposition to political correctness. Hughes himself makes a point of informing the congressmen that he consistently votes Democrat, while predicting pessimistically that he'll be branded as a Republican stooge for opposing reparations. Some observers may think that his declaration of partisanship is belied by his resort to a common Republican talking point: the repudiation of victimhood. One of his arguments against reparations is that it will somehow stigmatize the recipients as historical (and permanent?) victims, but that argument is pointless against those who genuinely believe that they as a people have been historically victimized and feel empowered by asserting what they see as self-evident truth. Hughes may think that the claim of permanent victimhood will contribute to what he predicts will be a further division of the country resulting from reparations. While Coates is careful to say that reparations are a national obligation, Hughes states bluntly that it will be perceived as a penalty imposed on white people, reducing race relations to "a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants." Somehow, however, he seems to think it would be less divisive to pay reparations to living victims of Jim Crow injustices. While that sounds unlikely, Hughes does think it more fair since it presumably would target true hardship, as would better legislation to address urban crime, whereas reparations for slavery would indiscriminately reward well-off people like himself who neither need nor want a payout from the government. Reparations for slavery may once have been a good idea, he argues, but regardless of what Coates thinks about enduring obligations, Hughes believes that the time when they would have been practical and effective passed long ago. Something should have been done immediately after the Civil War, he claims, arguing implicitly for a more draconian Reconstruction policy that seemed politically viable at the time. My own view is similar, but you still have to wonder how draconian it could have been to avoid an even worse reign of racist terror than the South actually saw in those years. Americans simply aren't that draconian as a rule, but perhaps a really useful discussion of race relations and mutual obligations could start by getting the Mitch McConnells of the country to concede that the Confederacy deserved worse than it actually got. There's no guarantee that anything meaningful would follow from such a concession, but it would still be an interesting national conversation....