If we can trace this line—from the chair that Danny Glover sat in to the colonies of the Virgin Islands and other Caribbean states—then we can draw two startling conclusions: First, contrary to public wisdom, the case for reparations was not invented by campaign strategists in the Democratic Party in 2016. Nor even in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ famous article for The Atlantic. It was “invented” by emancipated slaves themselves. No “statute of limitations,” in other words, can be used to dismiss a moral case that has never been dropped. The case is not new, and in the United States it started on the day after the Emancipation Proclamation, when the first slave demanded remuneration for all of the unpaid work they had done.
Second, even those skeptical souls who believe reparations to be a campaign ploy must concede that, before it reached the U.S. Congress, before it was preached by parliamentarians in the Caribbean, and before it was advocated by Chief Abiola, a Nigerian politician who would have become president had he not faced a coup, it was a demand made by ex-slaves. The demand has been kept alive by their activist descendants, chief among whom were black women. This has been the precise argument that exciting contemporary historical works, by scholars like Ana Lucia Araujo and Ashley Farmer, have honed in on.
There is little debate among most Americans that taxpayers ought to contribute for the memorialization of the past, through cemeteries, statues, museums, and parades. Who gets to be memorialized most definitely is a trigger for passionate debate, visible, for instance, in the battle over confederate statues. But memorialization itself is not controversial.
Restitution, however, is. We can all agree, in other words, that we can reflect on the past, but not that we can right its wrongs. The lines of the debate have been predictable. One side passionately makes the moral and legal case. The other side says that they will not pay for crimes committed by people who are long dead. One side says reparations are due; the other asks where the historical line is drawn. Should Rome pay the UK? Should Japan pay Korea? Should Arab states pay for slavery too?
Occasionally someone may even remark that they shouldn’t pay reparations because they are the progeny of unfair circumstances themselves. They too can trace an ancestor who was wronged. If anybody deserves reparations, it is none other than them. In other words, there are three lines of rebuttal: (1) I wasn’t there when the crime happened. (2) I shouldn’t pay for decisions made by others in the past. (3) I myself am a descendant of the oppressed. It is unclear whether the boundaries of the debates will ever expand further than this.
Ultimately, however, reparations advocates have pointed to judicial precedents. When reparations have been paid, even those who took a moral stand against the injustice contributed. At some point, the Germans who resisted fascism contributed with their taxpayer money to German reparation payments for the victims of the Holocaust (and to the cash stimulus that played an important role in establishing Israel). Japan was also made to pay reparations, for war crimes committed in World War II, even those who found those crimes morally repugnant and did not commit any themselves. The U.S., in turn, paid reparations to the families of Japanese people it incarcerated in internment camps, even though many protested the existence of these concentration camps. Even direct collaborators with “the other side,” such as the secret British accomplice who may have provided donations and arms to the anti-colonial Mau Mau uprising, during the Kenyan war of Independence, contributed to the reparations that the United Kingdom paid to atone for the war crimes it committed against the Mau Mau.