The African-American Monument in Savannah, Georgia features a family of slaves; memorials like this one can serve as a form of reparations.
In the early months of 2008, my grandmother Inge — then in her late seventies — petitioned the City of Vienna, Austria, for restitutions. Her paternal grandmother’s property, Inge’s childhood home, had been seized by the government during the war. Her father was sent to Dachau, her grandmother to Treblinka. When the former returned to Austria, all his family had owned was lost, and they were forced to start anew in the United States.
This series of events, in all its gruesome detail, was articulated by my grandmother in a letter she wrote to the Chairperson of the Arbitration Panel General Settlement Fund for Victims of National Socialism. She sent a copy of the letter via email to my mother and a number of other relatives: “The ultimate purpose of my letter,” she wrote, “is to try and get restitution from Austria for the apartment house the city of Vienna stole from my paternal grandmother just before transporting her in a cattle car to the Treblinka concentration camp.” Her language is blunt: “ultimate purpose,” “stole,” “concentration camp.” She doesn’t make any concessions. In return for her efforts, she received some lump sum of cash from the Austrian government; I do not know how much. Not nearly enough to make up for the horrors she and her loved ones had undergone, certainly — but still, enough to lend some tangible weight to what was. The reparation was, at its core, a symbolic, ethically-mandated acknowledgment of atrocity. The crimes themselves may have been committed in the mid-20th century, but the recovery process continues to this day.
The United States — with one major exception — has not been so proactive in making its own reparations. As Ta-Nehisi Coates so powerfully described in his 2014 Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations,” those whose lives have been impacted by slavery — men and women enslaved themselves, as well as their descendants — have been agitating for reparations for hundreds of years. Such reparations could go far in improving the modern plight of communities of color in the United States: improving job and education prospects, revamping neighborhoods, and providing assets to future generations. However, explains Coates in his article, “while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same.” And that answer is silence — at best.
It is not immediately clear why the American government has been so averse to providing reparations to the descendants of enslaved people. After all, reparations are not entirely unheard of in the United States. In 1988, the Civil Liberties Act provided restitution to the victims of Japanese internment: survivors of the camps were eligible to receive $20,000 each in compensation. And yet, the many generations of people of color whose lives have been fundamentally altered by forced labor and its repercussions have received nothing comparable. In a national survey distributed by YouGov, an odd but not surprising disconnect becomes clear: many Americans support reparations for Jewish individuals who survived the Holocaust (55 percent in favor to 25 percent against), for Japanese-American citizens who were interned during World War II (37 percent in favor to 41 percent against), and even for individuals who were themselves enslaved (37 percent in favor to 31 percent against) — but very few of the people surveyed, a mere 15 percent, support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people (and 68 percent oppose the idea).
Where does this disconnect come from? Perhaps it is the language itself. The United States, after all, is no stranger to miscommunication, and one must look no further than the past decade to see a political scene increasingly rife with misunderstanding. Take, for example, the Affordable Care Act. A 2017 poll conducted by Morning Consult found that 17 percent of respondents thought the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare were distinct, separate policies, and a further 18 percent were uncertain whether they were separate or synonymous. Morning Consult’s Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp stated in an interview with NPR that 80 percent of Republicans strongly disapproved of Obamacare, but only 60 percent of the Affordable Care Act. A similar force of misunderstanding may exist in conversations about reparations — about the connotations and denotations of the particular word “reparations,” and about the politics that accompany it.
Cornell Brooks, former president of the NAACP, said in an interview with the HPR that “‘reparations’ sounds historical, retrospective, not present and legal. And it also sounds as though it’s a gift.” These implications lead to a plethora of negative responses. “[Those eligible for reparations],” said Brooks, “don’t want to see themselves as being presently victimized, and the reparations language sometimes makes people feel … not merely that ‘I was victimized,’ not merely that ‘a harm was done to me and my family and my forebears,’ but that ‘I am being victimized, I am suffering the harm.’ And most people just don’t want to deal with that. It’s psychological, and the psychology is reflected in the language.” People recoil, then, at the thought of receiving “handouts” as much as they do at the thought of issuing them. Here is where a language change could perhaps shift the conversation: the word “reparations” itself could be exchanged for “damages” or something equally “present and legal,” according to Brooks.
In a technical sense, “reparations” is simply an umbrella phrase. Contained within its purview are the more specific legal terms of “compensation,” “restitution,” and “satisfaction,” each of which constitutes a possible response to a wrong. According to a paper released by The UN Refugee Agency Policy Development and Evaluation Service, restitution — which my grandmother sought — necessitates the “[restoration of the situation that existed prior to … [a] wrongful act.” Compensation, meanwhile, requires “repair [of] … damage through payments,” and satisfaction refers to the righting of wrongs “not made good by restitution and/or compensation.” While my grandmother demanded restitution, restoring what once was was never a probable outcome: surely someone else occupies the home her grandmother once owned, or perhaps it has since been torn down to make way for a supermarket or parking lot, or else grown so dilapidated with age that its worth has decreased to a mere fraction of its former value. In each of these scenarios, there is no way to reinstate what once was — no way to restore a dated economic era, a changed real estate market, an altered city street. Hence, what Inge actually, inevitably, received from Austria was compensation: money in exchange for damages — more symbolic, really, than anything, and issued to my grandmother more than sixty years after her own grandmother was sentenced to death.
All of that is to say that when individuals discuss reparations for the descendants of enslaved Americans, they are not referencing a single, monolithic model of repair. While some certainly advocate for a $20,000-per-person payout model, many thinkers have argued for more multifaceted legislation. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School and prominent advocate for reparations, wrote in 2002 that “the reparations movement should not … focus on payments to individuals. The damage has been done to a group … [and] the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in America is seen in well-documented racial disparities in access to education, health care, housing, insurance, employment and other social goods.” Here is where the term “satisfactions” re-enters the conversation: many reparations models proposed in the American context have nothing to do with individual cash allotments, and everything to do with job-training, affirmative action, and educational initiatives — righting wrongs that cannot be fixed with checks alone.
Mitchell Maki, President and CEO of Go For Broke National and author of Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress, echoed this sense that a multifaceted wrong requires a multi-directional response. “I think the words ‘reparations,’ ‘redress,’ and ‘atonement’ all speak to different aspects of what it is [that these movements are] actually trying to achieve,” he said in an interview with the HPR. “In the case of African-American reparations, clearly there’s a tremendous financial component to it — but it’s [about making amends for] much more than just the financial component. It’s [about making amends for] the sin of enslaving a whole people, and then prospering from that, and not acknowledging that, and not apologizing for that — and in essence, truly, not atoning for that, to the victims, but also to ourselves as a nation.” In recognition of this national cognitive dissonance, Maki introduced the term “atonement,” which was circulated during the fight for Japanese-American redress as well. “Representative Jim Wright introduced [this] language on the House Floor,” Maki said. “He was quoting an author, [who] says, ‘The atonement is not what we owe to others. The atonement is what we owe to ourselves.’” Perhaps this is the lens missing from too many Americans’ minds: reparations are about much more than money. They’re about righting a wrong that festers deep in the psyche of this country, that haunts every stretch of land between the Atlantic and Pacific, and that will continue to suppurate if action is not taken, if atonement is not made.
Americans need not stand idly by, however, waiting for this atonement to manifest itself. By taking active steps to demystify reparations, Americans can begin a process of education and dialogue, emphasizing that reparations by any name can be realistic, reasonable, and powerful. First, the continued circulation of relevant literature — like that penned by Coates, Ogletree, and others — is critical. After all, it is through Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” that many reckoned with, or even considered, the idea for the first time. Second, as Coates argues in the piece, Congress must pass HR 40, also known as Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, which would initiate a national conversation about the restitution process. The legislation already exists; it is incumbent upon Americans to join the movement demanding its passage. Finally, Americans, particularly those shielded by privilege, must, on a more individual level, reckon with the inextricable fiscal and social disparities that characterize this country. These injustices cannot be combated with words alone, but must also be approached with economic solutions that improve conditions for Americans of color and that demonstrate genuine commitment to the rhetoric of racial equality. Such is the need for reparations by any name.
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