This was originally a paper I wrote for a Sociology course over at UCSD back in 2012. Even after the passage of several years, I still consider what I articulate in this paper to be representative of my current views on the topic.
Are Black Americans owed reparations for the oppression they have suffered throughout American history? Many if not most White Americans would say no, whereas many if not most Black Americans would say yes. The question of reparations is a racially polarizing one, and since Whites form the demographic majority and socioeconomically dominant ethnic group in America, this has meant that reparations have never been paid. This payment is long overdue. Since Black Americans have suffered from and continue to suffer today an ancient legacy of racial oppression, a reparations program for them is long overdue.
The most commonly cited objections to reparations for African-Americans’ suffering are that slavery ended too long ago and that many White Americans’ ancestors never owned slaves, therefore absolving Whites as a collective of any responsibility over the issue. The former argument would be valid if slavery was the only historical crime against Black Americans and if modern Blacks did not suffer from its effects, but neither of these conditions have been met. The oppression and unfavorable treatment that Blacks received continued even after slavery was formally abolished and still affects the modern Black experience. As for the second argument, while Whites as a whole may not have been guilty of slavery, they have benefited from a racist social hierarchy that favored them over Blacks. This is not a question of making White people feel guilty about what a few of their ancestors did over 150 years ago. The fundamental issue is one of healing a larger legacy of racism that elevated Whites about Blacks.
Racial Inequality and Racism in the Modern Age
Most White Americans want to believe that anyone can prosper in America regardless of race, but this is a delusion. There is in fact an abundance of evidence for racially based socioeconomic inequality between Black and White Americans.
For one example, White Americans are statistically wealthier by far than Black Americans, especially when wealth is measured as relative net worth and assets. At the beginning of the 21st century the median net worth for White households was eleven times greater than that of Black households (Orzechowski & Sepielli, 2003). Most young Black couples will start out with a net worth over $20,000 less, or less than one fifth, of White couples with comparable education (Oliver & Shapiro, 1996). Making things even worse is that Black wealth and assets are more likely to be bound up with home value whereas home value represents only thirty percent of Whites’ overall wealth; once we control for these differences in home equity, Whites end up having a median household wealth over twenty times that of Blacks. If the average White household were Black, their net worth would decrease by $100,000 (Shapiro, 2004).
These wealth differences do not merely reflect the extremes of White wealth and Black poverty, but instead appear at every income level. While the lowest-income fifth of Whites have around $24,000 in assets, their Black counterparts have a paltry $57 for the comparison. Moving on to the middle fifth of income, White households have 5.2 times more wealth than Black households, and Whites in the top fifth have 3.2 times more wealth than comparable Blacks (Orzechowski & Sepielli, 2003).
Obviously this makes Black people more vulnerable to nationwide economic crises than Whites. Over half of all Black families have so few assets that they could not sustain as many as three months without income and still remain above the poverty line, whereas only one in four Whites are in a similar condition (Shapiro, 2004).
In addition, wealth disparities between Whites and Blacks create problems for Black college students relative to their White counterparts. Young Whites are twice as likely as young Blacks to have parents who can help them financially, and the families of Black students are only a third as likely to afford the entire cost of their child’s education (Shapiro, 2004). On average, Black students’ families can only cover around 42 percent of the cost of college at the nation’s most highly rated institutions whereas White students’ families can cover 74 percent of that cost (Massey, 2003). Contrary to conservative propaganda claiming that racially based scholarships provide unfair benefits to students of color, such scholarships account for only 0.25 percent of all scholarship dollars and only around 3.5 percent of non-white students receive such benefits. Because Black families are in a worse position to pay for their children’s college education, the median debt for Blacks with PhDs is roughly double that of similarly educated Whites (Wise, 2010).
Not only do Blacks suffer from less wealth, they also suffer from lower payment, lower employment, and lower quality jobs. At every age and level of education, Whites earn 20 percent more than Blacks (Wise, 2010). Blacks are twice as likely as Whites to be employed in low-wage jobs and twice as likely to be unemployed even in economically prosperous times (Brown, 2003). Even Black men with college degrees were twice as likely to be unemployed as comparably educated Whites (Luo, 2009). Black people are also more likely to remain unemployed for long periods: Black men remain unemployed for seven more weeks than White men and Black women for five more weeks than White women. On the other hand, Whites hold 83 percent of management-level positions despite constituting only 68 percent of the American population (United States Department of Labor, September 2009).
Whites can be considered privileged over Blacks in another important way: they are far less likely to suffer from racial discrimination. One national study of 160,000 employers found that at least 75,000 of them intentionally discriminate against 1.3 million people of color (including 600,000 Blacks) every year (Wise, 2010). Another study found that job applicants with European-American names were 50 percent more likely to be called back for a job interview than equally qualified applicants with African-American names (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004), and a third study reports that Black males without a criminal record are less likely to be called back than White males with such a record (Pager & Western, 2005). In the service industry, Whites are more likely to be called back than even more qualified Blacks (Lodder, 2003).
Moving on to the realm of housing, 2–3.7 million instances of racially motivated housing discrimination against people of color occur every year. High-income Blacks are more likely than even low-income whites with comparable credit scores to be steered to subprime mortgage loans (McKoy & Vincent, 2008). One study found that even Black families with better credit and less debt than Whites were vulnerable to racial discrimination; Black applicants were treated worse than Whites 60 percent of the time. They were more likely to be actively discouraged by lenders, told they would not be able to afford a home, and were given less information about loan or home availability (Spatter, 2009).
The many other ways in which Blacks suffer racial discrimination could be listed ad infinitum. What has been shown is that Black Americans suffer from less wealth, lower income, higher unemployment rates, and greater vulnerability to racial discrimination than Whites. What has been called White privilege is a very real phenomenon even today.
Faced with all this, conservatives nonetheless love to claim that Black people’s progress is impeded less by racism than by their own moral and cultural inferiority to Whites. For instance, they love to bring up the fact that single-parent families and children born out of wedlock are more common in Black communities than Whites. It is undeniably true that Black Americans do suffer from certain social problems, but conservatives exaggerate how important they are. As an example, one study has found that at least 80 percent of racial disparities in wealth would still exist even if Black family structure didn’t change (or break down in the conservatives’ view) since the 1960s (Brown, 2003); in other words, whatever the negative effects of single-parent families in Black communities, they are not the major reason for racial wealth inequality in America. Furthermore, given that African-Americans have been disproportionately forced into impoverished positions and bombarded with racist stereotypes that dictate how they must conduct themselves, it should not be surprising that many Black communities have social and cultural problems. Ironically, the conservatives’ racist victim-blaming itself reflects the racism that permeates American society.
Another common conservative attempt at rebuttal is to bring up the relative success of Asian-Americans. If American society was really as racist as claimed here, they claim, why do Asians as a rule have higher incomes than even Whites, let alone Blacks? This argument is invalid because it fails to take into account that most Asian immigrants to the US (and for that matter most overseas immigrants in general) arrive with pre-existing educational backgrounds and economic advantages and a motivation to get into higher education (Wise, 2010). This means that Asians entering America are statistically better educated than native-born Whites and should therefore be expected to earn more. Furthermore, although Asians are not invulnerable to American racism (although a discussion of this is beyond this paper’s scope), most Asian-American families have not suffered as deeply rooted a legacy of racial oppression that Black Americans have, so they have experienced nowhere near the same social and cultural damage.
Present-day discrimination definitely impairs Black people’s socioeconomic progress, but we must also consider that Blacks writ large have also reaped the disadvantages forced upon their ancestors. Likewise, Whites as a whole benefit from privileges they have inherited. Now a condensed recitation of America’s long history of racial oppression and White privilege shall ensue.
A History of Racism
The popular caricature of the reparations argument makes it seem like Blacks are bellyaching about not being paid in compensation for something that happened to their ancestors roughly a hundred and fifty years ago. This strawman neglects to mention that the oppression of Black people did not end with the formal abolishment of slavery in the southern United States. Nor was it even always associated with slavery.
In fact, even before the end of Southern slavery, Blacks in Northern “free” states suffered from residential segregation, poor living conditions, racial discrimination, and in some cases even the lack of the right to vote. According to one Philadelphia study, almost all poor Black infants in 1846 died shortly after childbirth. Even the most prosperous Blacks were barred from White neighborhoods due to White fears of declining property values. Northern Blacks also experienced routine violence and riots that burned down their churches, schools, and homes (PBS, 1999). It is simply not true that Blacks in free states were free from racism simply because of slavery’s illegality there.
Even after slavery was abolished in the South, white Southern legislatures nonetheless passed “Black Codes” which denied Blacks the right to purchase or even rent land. Evolving from this was the exploitative sharecropper system, in which freed Blacks agreed to raise a cash crop such as cotton for a White landlord in exchange for land and supplies. In practice, this usually led to Black sharecroppers owing more to their landlords than they could repay, forcing them into debt, and overall did little to improve their situation (Digital History, 2012).
Blacks not only experienced institutionalized segregation in the South after Reconstruction, but Northern racism continued during this same time. It was customary in many parts of the country outside the South for Blacks to be chased out of White neighborhoods after sundown, hence the term “Sundown Town”. Thousands of White communities across America were once Sundown Towns, including 440 in Illinois alone (Loewen, 2005). This obviously helped reinforce racially based residential segregation throughout the US.
Moving into the 20th century, when states were allowed to set their own eligibility standards for the distribution of G1 Bill benefits, Southern states could either outright deny the benefits to Black veterans or ensure that any Blacks who did receive benefits would be relegated to the worst jobs and barred from mostly White colleges (Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System, 2007). Even far outside the South, in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, Blacks could be relegated to the lowest-paying jobs regardless of their military service (Brodkin, 1998). In addition, Blacks were largely blocked from participating in most New Deal programs during and after the Great Depression, and three in four blacks were denied Social Security benefits until the 1950s (Brown, 2003). One-third of Southern counties lacked any four-year high schools for Black students and Black schools received only a third of per capita Southern spending as White schools (Fischer, 1996).
On the other hand, while Blacks suffered, White reaped in benefits. During the whole slavery era, Whites earn as much as one trillion dollars from Blacks’ unpaid labor for the benefit of the national economy (Wise, 2010). Even as slavery was dying, the Homestead Act of 1862 distributed 250 million acres of land to 1.5 million White homesteading families and none to Blacks or any other people of color. Between 20 and 50 million White people living today are descended from the Homestead Act’s beneficiaries (Feagin, 2004; Shapiro, 2004). In the mid-twentieth century, under the FHA and VA loan programs, Whites received $120 billion in housing equity, with all that money supporting half of all American suburban housing; Blacks were almost invariably excluded from these benefits (Brown, 2003). Combined with the nearly $100 billion that White veterans received because of the GI Bill, this can be credited with the creation of today’s White middle class (Katzelson, 2005).
Why does all this history of Black oppression and White privilege matter? Since the best predictor of a young family’s net worth is their parents’ net worth (Brown, 2003), and since 80 percent of family wealth derives from parent-to-child transfers (Shapiro, 2004), the current generation of White people has inherited much more wealth from their ancestors than their Black counterparts. Much of the aforementioned wealth disparities between Whites and Blacks undoubtedly stem from our country’s history of oppressing Blacks and unfairly elevating Whites.
What Can Be Done About This?
As we have seen, Black Americans suffer from an ongoing legacy of racial oppression whereas Whites benefit from racial privileges. To correct this unjust inequality, a reparations program for the suffering African-Americans have endured must be initiated.
Reparations for disadvantaged groups have been paid before. For example, Japanese Americans who were interred during World War II received $1.6 billion from the US government in 1999. A similar program must be done for Black Americans in order to address the wealth disparities they suffer from, although exactly how much money they must receive needs to be calculated as of this writing. It is important to emphasize that this payment will not be simply to redress slavery in particular. As said earlier, slavery was merely the beginning of Black Americans’ long history of troubles. Rather, the agenda is to heal the scars of institutional racism as a whole. To combat contemporary racial discrimination, affirmative action programs must be installed. For instance, companies should be encouraged to hire as many qualified Blacks and other people of color as possible to counter the general trend of rejecting them.
Obviously, such efforts will enrage many Whites, in part because Americans are notoriously stingy about their tax dollars, but also because of a misconception widely propagated by conservative propagandists that such programs are racist. It is true that these programs take race into account, but the intention is not to elevate Blacks about Whites and create a Black supremacist society, but rather to end the White supremacist society that puts Whites above Blacks. People do not understand that the default trend in American society is to put Black people down. Race-based programs such as reparations and affirmative action will become obsolete only when we have more racial equality.
A more valid complaint against reparations is that the United States government cannot afford them right now. Given the purportedly massive size of American debt, this reaction is understandable, but it must be considered that raising the position of Blacks will benefit all Americans in the end. If Blacks have more collective wealth, they can better afford to get educated and start their own businesses, therefore stimulating the national economy. More businesses thriving mean more money for the government to tax. Exactly how much a boom in Black businesses would heal the American debt has not been calculated yet, but it should at least help part of the problem.
Finally and most importantly, fighting racial inequality is our moral obligation as Americans. We cannot profess to be a land of the free and equal if race continues to have such a salient effect on our life chances. True liberty for everyone requires social equality, because liberty by definition requires that everyone has an equal chance at prosperity and happiness instead of some individuals having greater chances and greater power than others.
Reparations for African-Americans are long overdue. By refusing to pay them, White Americans not only continue a legacy of racism they claim to have ended, but they impair their own country’s economy. Racial oppression will only drag us all down in the end.
Works Cited
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