by John N. Mitchell
One after another, Democratic presidential candidates strode across a Manhattan stage at the annual National Action Network conference and proclaimed that if they were elected president they would convene a study on reparations for the descendants of slaves.
From Bernie Sanders to Kamala Harris to Beto O’Rourke to Cory Booker, at least 12 candidates articulated their positions on a first step to address 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, 60 years of separate but equal and 35 years of racist housing policy.
Let’s be clear: Reparations is not just about the compensation for the enslavement of the deceased by the dead; it’s far more. It’s about the lasting effects of the degradation of a people by multiple institutions—slavery being the most nefarious—that have left African Americans with a median net worth of $8 in Boston and disproportionately displaced by gentrification in cities like Philadelphia.
None of these maladies will go away if Black people simply work harder, as some suggest.
The Institute for Policy Studies has estimated that the average Black family would have to work for 228 years to accumulate the same amount of wealth as the average white family.
Much of this conversation is spurred by Rep. Sheila Johnson Lee’s (D-Texas) push for the creation of a commission to study reparations proposals (House Resolution 40).
It comes at a time when the nation has responded to the election of its first African-American president with the election of his antithesis, Donald Trump, a political divider of the races the likes of which we haven’t seen since George Wallace in the 1960s. In a nation that so precariously walks the line of racial inequality and disenfranchisement, this is a very bad time to take two steps forward and a giant one back to that never-identified moment when Trump claims America stopped being great.
Unfortunately, the reparations conversation is nothing more than a trial balloon for too many Americans. It has been floated before, back in 1989 when former Democratic Michigan Congressman John Conyers first introduced H.R. 40.
And each time it comes up, so do the questions: Where will the money come from? How will it be determined who gets it? If payment comes from a tax, will the tax be just on white people? Is LeBron James going to be compensated differently than a homeless person? And what about the Africans who sold other other Africans into slavery? On and on it goes, and the questions are usually random and whimsical, a dead giveaway that the subject matter isn’t being taken as seriously as it should be.
Listen closely to those who oppose them and it’s clear that many either don’t have the appetite to resolve what has resulted—good for some and bad for others—from more than two centuries of slavery, or they simply don’t believe that all that free labor has anything to do with the entrenched differences we see today in education levels, earning power and the overall differences in quality of life that exist between Blacks and whites.
That the subject has come up again so early in the race for the White House is convenient for Democratic candidates. We are 19 months away from the 2020 election and they know if they say the right things now the question of where they stand on reparations will go away as it has in the past.
This is why Sanders, recognizing the importance of the Black vote and how important it was to say the right thing in front of Rev. Al Sharpton, reversed his stance against reparations earlier this year when he said, “I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check.”
Writing a check may not be the answer, but it may be part of it. I don’t know what recompense should be for something that has been tearing at the fabric of this nation like its original sin. Who does? But just bringing out the concept and trotting it around to see what the response is like only serves to deepen a longstanding wound.
(John N. Mitchell has worked as a journalist for more than a quarter century. He can be reached at jmitchell@phillytrib.com and Tweet at @freejohnmitchel.)
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