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A review by lenzen
From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by A. Kirsten Mullen, William A. Darity
2.0
HR-40 is a bill that has be reintroduced every year since 1989 and finally cleared committee this year. It would create a commission to study reparations for descendants of slaves. From Here to Equality is supposed to be THE book to make the case for reparations. Although it has received glowing reviews on Amazon and on goodreads and I went into it inclined to support reparations I felt less inclined to do so after reading the book.
The bottom line is probably the most important part of this book if you are interested what any HR-40 committee is likely to conclude: Their conclusion, no surprise, is that descendants of slaves should be awarded reparations. The amount should be enough close the gap between the average family wealth of white versus black families. The total invoice would come to about $10 trillion or about $250,000 to each black person in the US descendent from slaves. They feel this money should go into trusts for individual black people (regardless of age) with a reparations committee approving of expenditures. To generate this kind of money they say that either the Fed should just print it, or that it be tacked onto the national debt. They feel that Congress is the entity that must bring about reparations. They see the courts as a dead end: they will just rule that most of the actions were legal at the time so there is no authority to correct them now.
They spend a chapter discussing objections to reparations. Some they deal with well, but often they miss the point of the objection and end up dealing with straw-men. For example, they cite as an objection that since Africans sold other Africans into slavery it should be African nations who have to pay reparations. I think there are a couple of points to this objection and that authors are misrepresenting it. Anyone who makes the objection is certainly not saying only African nations should have to pay. They are pointing out that Western nations were not uniquely evil at that time which many on the left today would like to make us feel. The objection is meant to be reductio ad absurdum: if the US should to pay so too should Africa, do you really believe that? By missing the point they end up merely dealing with a straw-man.
Another objection they miss the point of is "if we pay black people reparations won't we have to pay other groups"? Their answer is "yes, that should happen and especially for natives". Again the argument is meant to be reductio ad absurdum: what limiting principle would make us stop at any point if black people are compensated for past injustices? Should we pay all Irish? All Catholics? All women? Should we just do a reset where we redistribute until everyone has equal wealth now and start again? From what they state I cannot rule out that this is their ultimate intention. They hint that the principle might be that in addition to past injustice you also have to be subject to ongoing prejudice today, but they do not explicitly state this. Indeed, if that were the limiting principle then a sufficient remedy would be to get rid of present day racism. No need for reparations.
Other problems with the book are the way it presents history. There is some outright revisionist history. The main culprit here is the claim that slavery ended in England in 1772 and that a major motivation of the American Revolution was fear that Americans would lose the right to own slaves because of this. This claim was also stated in The 1619 Project and forced to be corrected. This book, however, was written just last year so the authors should know better. Since one of the authors is a professor at Duke, versus some random Joe on the Internet, I can only conclude that he is deliberately spreading misinformation. There is also a claim that all slaves were promised 40 acres of land after the civl war. This turns out to not be true when you dig into it: there was a field order to provide 40 acres to some slaves, but there was not enough land allocated for it to be all slaves. There was also a provision to allow the Freedman's Bureau to confiscate planter estates and lease them to black farmer with an option to buy but there was no mandate to give all black males in the US 40 acres of land.
The book has the the usual problems you see these days with statistics reportedly proving ongoing racism. Any inequality is taken to be proof that the cause must be racism. For instance, the authors conclude that a black life is only considered to be worth 30% as much as a white life due to the fact that, per capita, blacks people are about 3x more likely to be shot by police. No discussion of the fact that higher crime rates, particularly due to gang violence might account for this. Along with this the authors try to imply that there are more lynchings today than during Jim Crow based on the fact that about 1000 black people are shot by police every year. The circumstances do not seem to need to be considered: if a black person was shot by police it counts as a lynching.
Other reasoning in this book: if your ancestors were involved in commerce involving the cotton trade at all you are on the hook for ill-gotten intergenerational gains. There could be some truth here, but they take it too far. For example even if all your ancestors did was sell food and clothing to slave plantations they were part of the problem. At the same time they mention that when there were disruptions of food supplies to the West Indies as a result of wars many thousands of slaves ended up dying. So was providing food and clothing wrong or was it good because it prevented starvation?
I do give the book 2 stars instead of 1 since there are some tidbits that were descent. There is a short history of rulings of committees with narrow mandates on reparations for specific incidents. They also discuss an interesting study that immigrants tend to move horizontally in terms of relative economic standing once they come to America. They also go into considerable detail about political violence by the KKK and other Southern Democratic groups like the Red Shirts. With a few glaring exceptions, the history of the failure of Reconstruction is decent, but there are other better books like The Republic for which it Stands if that is your interest.
The bottom line is probably the most important part of this book if you are interested what any HR-40 committee is likely to conclude: Their conclusion, no surprise, is that descendants of slaves should be awarded reparations. The amount should be enough close the gap between the average family wealth of white versus black families. The total invoice would come to about $10 trillion or about $250,000 to each black person in the US descendent from slaves. They feel this money should go into trusts for individual black people (regardless of age) with a reparations committee approving of expenditures. To generate this kind of money they say that either the Fed should just print it, or that it be tacked onto the national debt. They feel that Congress is the entity that must bring about reparations. They see the courts as a dead end: they will just rule that most of the actions were legal at the time so there is no authority to correct them now.
They spend a chapter discussing objections to reparations. Some they deal with well, but often they miss the point of the objection and end up dealing with straw-men. For example, they cite as an objection that since Africans sold other Africans into slavery it should be African nations who have to pay reparations. I think there are a couple of points to this objection and that authors are misrepresenting it. Anyone who makes the objection is certainly not saying only African nations should have to pay. They are pointing out that Western nations were not uniquely evil at that time which many on the left today would like to make us feel. The objection is meant to be reductio ad absurdum: if the US should to pay so too should Africa, do you really believe that? By missing the point they end up merely dealing with a straw-man.
Another objection they miss the point of is "if we pay black people reparations won't we have to pay other groups"? Their answer is "yes, that should happen and especially for natives". Again the argument is meant to be reductio ad absurdum: what limiting principle would make us stop at any point if black people are compensated for past injustices? Should we pay all Irish? All Catholics? All women? Should we just do a reset where we redistribute until everyone has equal wealth now and start again? From what they state I cannot rule out that this is their ultimate intention. They hint that the principle might be that in addition to past injustice you also have to be subject to ongoing prejudice today, but they do not explicitly state this. Indeed, if that were the limiting principle then a sufficient remedy would be to get rid of present day racism. No need for reparations.
Other problems with the book are the way it presents history. There is some outright revisionist history. The main culprit here is the claim that slavery ended in England in 1772 and that a major motivation of the American Revolution was fear that Americans would lose the right to own slaves because of this. This claim was also stated in The 1619 Project and forced to be corrected. This book, however, was written just last year so the authors should know better. Since one of the authors is a professor at Duke, versus some random Joe on the Internet, I can only conclude that he is deliberately spreading misinformation. There is also a claim that all slaves were promised 40 acres of land after the civl war. This turns out to not be true when you dig into it: there was a field order to provide 40 acres to some slaves, but there was not enough land allocated for it to be all slaves. There was also a provision to allow the Freedman's Bureau to confiscate planter estates and lease them to black farmer with an option to buy but there was no mandate to give all black males in the US 40 acres of land.
The book has the the usual problems you see these days with statistics reportedly proving ongoing racism. Any inequality is taken to be proof that the cause must be racism. For instance, the authors conclude that a black life is only considered to be worth 30% as much as a white life due to the fact that, per capita, blacks people are about 3x more likely to be shot by police. No discussion of the fact that higher crime rates, particularly due to gang violence might account for this. Along with this the authors try to imply that there are more lynchings today than during Jim Crow based on the fact that about 1000 black people are shot by police every year. The circumstances do not seem to need to be considered: if a black person was shot by police it counts as a lynching.
Other reasoning in this book: if your ancestors were involved in commerce involving the cotton trade at all you are on the hook for ill-gotten intergenerational gains. There could be some truth here, but they take it too far. For example even if all your ancestors did was sell food and clothing to slave plantations they were part of the problem. At the same time they mention that when there were disruptions of food supplies to the West Indies as a result of wars many thousands of slaves ended up dying. So was providing food and clothing wrong or was it good because it prevented starvation?
I do give the book 2 stars instead of 1 since there are some tidbits that were descent. There is a short history of rulings of committees with narrow mandates on reparations for specific incidents. They also discuss an interesting study that immigrants tend to move horizontally in terms of relative economic standing once they come to America. They also go into considerable detail about political violence by the KKK and other Southern Democratic groups like the Red Shirts. With a few glaring exceptions, the history of the failure of Reconstruction is decent, but there are other better books like The Republic for which it Stands if that is your interest.