Clayton E. Cramer: Slavery Reparations: A Dead Issue, and Well-Deserved
[Clayton E. Cramer is a software engineer and historian. His sixth book, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nelson Current, 2006), is available in bookstores. His web site is www.claytoncramer.com.]
When whites say that slavery reparations is a dead issue, that’s not news. When conservative blacks say it, it isn’t news. But when Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says it, you can put a fork in it.
In a remarkably courageous New York Times opinion piece, Gates points out what historians have long known:
The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Prof. Gates points out that there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the Atlantic. West Africans bear significant moral responsibility since they participated and enjoyed the financial rewards that came from it, as some West African political leaders have actually admitted in recent years. (Gates gives some examples which you won’t find mentioned anywhere else in the mainstream media.)...
As much as both Lincoln and modern Confederacy apologists try to say otherwise, the Civil War was ultimately about the suppression of slavery. Should Massachusetts pay as much as Alabama? Should Britain pay reparations? Spain? West African nations? True, none of the current governments of West Africa existed when slavery was ongoing, but the populations of those nations certainly benefited in a material sense. (Then there is a strong case that many of these populations suffered in a cultural sense from becoming focused on wars to take slaves, but how do you quantify that in dollars?)
Who deserves those reparations? Let me throw out one maddeningly complex example: Charles Langston, grandfather of poet Langston Hughes, was the son of a Virginia planter and a slave woman. Charles and his brother were given their freedom, and sent off to college. Would Langston’s descendants have a claim for reparations? Or would you say that they benefited from the system of slavery?...
There’s plenty of shame and horror to go around. Slavery has been the norm for most of human civilization, and while the horrors of the Middle Passage and the cane fields of the Western Hemisphere are remarkable, there is no shortage of horrors across the centuries. At a certain point we need to inform and educate, while recognizing that seeking reparations for crimes committed by persons now dead, against persons also now dead, will lead us to reparations claims against Italy for Caesar’s crimes in Gaul.