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From criminal justice reform to how to best teach American history, race continues to be one of the most contentious issues in American politics. On one side of this volatile debate, a number of cities and states have begun debating reparations: a form of payment to African Americans to compensate for slavery and other past mistreatment.
Most recently, a California task force issued a report calling for cash payments of up to $1.2 million to millions of African Americans living or who have lived in the state. This closely follows a similar recommendation in San Francisco where the local Board of Supervisors unanimously endorsed an even-more-extravagant proposal to provide a one-time $5 million payment to every Black resident of the city, along with other benefits.
While the idea may seem far-fetched, we should not dismiss reparations out of hand. Although some proposals are difficult to take seriously, the idea that America owes a moral debt to African Americans for centuries of maltreatment is a longstanding one. The past informs the present, and inequalities of opportunity for the descendants of victims of slavery and segregation remain.
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These enduring inequalities contribute to the reason 26% of African Americans live in poverty — compared with just 10% of White Americans — and why 36% of African American children are poor.
A sign demanding reparations in California. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Poverty rates for African Americans exceed those for White Americans regardless of education, work effort, or family structure. Of course, the United States has undertaken significant efforts to address the history of unequal treatment for African Americans. Yet, we have not eliminated disparities in economic opportunity.
Moreover, paying reparations would not be an imposition of collective guilt on White Americans; rather, they offer restitution to Black Americans for explicit wrongs perpetrated or condoned by the government. Collective liability for government malfeasance is a longstanding principle of law.
To cite a common example, if someone’s car is damaged by a pothole that the city failed to repair, the car owner can seek restitution for his or her damages, even if that requires taxes paid by residents who had nothing to do with road maintenance. The government action in the treatment of African Americans likewise imposes a collective responsibility.
However, whatever the moral justifications for restitution, reparations are an ineffective way to produce real and lasting improvements for African Americans. The practical difficulties of any large-scale reparations program would be virtually impossible to overcome, involving serious questions about who should be compensated, how much, and in what way.
Most proposals on the table amount to little more than tax-and-spend wealth redistribution schemes that will not dramatically expand economic opportunities. A long-term fix to the plight of poorer African Americans will require more than just doing what has been done before, while rebranding it as reparations.
Most significantly, the taxes or debt necessary to pay the billions or trillions of dollars in reparation payments would seriously damage the economy and reduce economic growth for every American.
African Americans are unlikely to gain from the higher unemployment, slower wage growth and less entrepreneurship that would result. The goal of any reparative policy should be to move poor people of color into the mainstream of a growing economy, not to slow economic growth itself.
Finally, we need to recognize that reparations are a deeply divisive issue, in part because the people who would be asked to pay for the sins of the past were not directly responsible for them. Fully 80% of White Americans oppose reparations, while 77% of Black Americans support them.
Reverend Tony Pierce calls for more than $5 million in reparations for each Black Californian at a meeting of the California Reparations Task Force on March 29, 2023. (YouTube screenshot from California Department of Justice channel)
Most White Americans oppose reparations regardless of age, socioeconomic status, education or political affiliation. Additionally, a majority of both Asian Americans and Latinos also oppose reparations.
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While politics need not be zero-sum, political capital is not infinite. Is a quixotic push for reparations the most productive use of that capital?
There are wiser policies that would go further toward overcoming the downstream effects of slavery and segregation, leveling the playing field, and increasing opportunity for African Americans, especially those at the bottom of the economic ladder today.
Finally, we need to recognize that reparations are a deeply divisive issue, in part because the people who would be asked to pay for the sins of the past were not directly responsible for them. Fully 80% of White Americans oppose reparations, while 77% of Black Americans support them.
Such reforms include eliminating exclusionary zoning, reforming the police and reducing mass incarceration, giving parents greater choice and control over schools and encouraging Black entrepreneurship.
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Importantly, these are reforms that, while particularly beneficial to African Americans, have the added advantage of helping low-income and struggling Americans regardless of race. Therefore, they have the potential for building a large, multiracial and cross-ideological constituency.
There is clearly a moral debt owed to African Americans, but reparations are not the way to pay it.
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