The Big Payback
By: Weapons Of Reason
Tags: Reparations, Black Lives Mater, Inequality, Economics, Racism

I started my career in one of the poorest zip codes in the US. As a teacher in an urban school in Southwest Philadelphia, I spent hundreds of dollars of my own money decorating my classroom. For the back wall I chose an old photograph of a segregated classroom just after World War II, made up of exclusively Black students from poor families.

In tougher moments, I would scan the class — exclusively Black students from poor families — then look up at that world-weary teacher from 1945. I’d wonder if, 62 years in the future, some young, Black teacher in yet another segregated classroom might look up at a photo of my tired figure standing in front of a chalkboard and wonder why nothing had changed.

My great grandfather was born in Alabama in 1862, seventy-odd days before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln. He was a college graduate. Later he became a Presbyterian minister, running a social mission for the formerly incarcerated in the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania. But he began his life as an enslaved African in America — just a small part of countless generations who gave the United States an involuntary, interest-free loan towards the development of the world’s largest economy. In that English classroom with its missing ceiling tiles and rodent infestation, I knew that despite my best efforts to improve literacy scores and instil a love of reading in my students, the indelible historic wrong experienced by my great grandfather was still alive and well for them — and me.

I left the classroom just as our first Black president was settling into his first term. Watching the election through my students’ eyes was heartening, but the realities they were facing in 2009 were less than rosy. At the time, a quarter of African American men and one in three African American women aged 18–24 were out of work and those that were employed were making 25% less than their white peers. 1 in 9 African American men aged 25–29 were incarcerated compared to 1 in 28 latino men and 1 in 60 white men, and only 39% of African American bachelors candidates completed their degrees. Over a decade later, these statistics haven’t changed much at all. Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, 41% of white, 30% of Hispanic, and 32% of Asian people in America do not believe slavery has affected African Americans “much or at all”.

There exists no consensus in the US on the lasting impact and ongoing effects of one of the greatest crimes in human history; the atrocity that built the world’s first superpower. Nevertheless, the numbers don’t lie. This historic damage is still having a profound impact. How to right this injustice is a subject requiring urgent address.

It’s not just the US that needs to come to terms with its exploitative past. As Frantz Fanon explains in his book The Wretched Earth:

“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialised in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: ‘It’s a just reparation which will be paid to us.’”

There is already a fledgling global movement attempting to make amends for the modern world’s unequal past. It is diffuse, disconnected, even disparate in its claims. Taken together, though, the vision is a shared one: a global project focused on the restoration of land, wealth, and broad civil, economic, and environmental rights for the historically disempowered, for reparations to be paid to the ancestors of the victims of historic wrongs. Their aims are not without precedent.

In 1988, President Reagan issued a public apology to tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans citizens who were tossed into internment camps during WWII. John Tateishi, one of the civil rights leaders who led the fight to establish a commission to address the issue, remembers that moment well. “That letter of apology was an important thing,” he says. “If you walk into many Nisei [second-generation Japanese-American] homes, you’ll see that letter framed in the living room. It was so meaningful. It was vindication. It was the government saying ‘We are sorry. This was unjust. It was wrong.’”

Between the ages of three and six, Tateishi and his family were interned at Manzanar concentration camp in California along with 120,000 other Japanese-Americans whose government would not trust them while it was at war with Japan. “We returned with a sense of real shame,” says Tateishi. “We were prisoners during wartime. We were considered traitors and were not to be trusted. This was tantamount to being not as good as an American.”

For decades after the war, those released from their internment would not speak of it due to a deep cultural shame. But as their children and grandchildren began to discover what had happened, a move for reparative justice was swift. Public hearings were held around the country, which resulted in significant psychological relief for a community that had bottled up its shame. The hearings also had the effect of drawing a larger audience to the cause of the Japanese Americans and made American democracy the issue at stake — a cause bigger and more broadly appealing to those not impacted by internment.

Advocacy organisations like the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) sprang up in order to lobby Congress. “The work evolved through JACL because the kinds of people who join civil rights organisations are not your run-of-the-mill citizens,” says Tateishi, who previously served as JACL’s national redress director. “You join a civil rights organisation to make changes, to change the way things are. That’s very culturally different from the traditional Japanese philosophy of ‘Shikata ga nai’ which means ‘you can’t change the past.’”

The JACL may not have been able to change the past, but they were able to make a difference to their present. Rather than seek legislation in Congress for monetary compensation, they decided to call for a federal commission to study the Japanese internment and to have the commission issue a report with its own recommendations for compensatory measures. Eventually, alongside Reagan’s public apology, by 1998 the US government had paid out a total of $1.6 billion to survivors and their families at the recommendation of the federal commission. Each family received roughly $20,000 to establish trust funds and community organisations.

On the other side of the globe, more historic injustices have been successfully addressed using similar measures. New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975 to hear reparations claims dating as far back as 1840. It has spent considerable time using public hearings to build credibility with a wider audience, prioritising innovative power-sharing agreements over one-time payments and integrating indigenous approaches like legal status for the environment.

“The treaty settlements have often been about building up an institution that can then partner with the government,” says Dr. Carwyn Jones, a Maori scholar and one of the founding members of the Waitangi Tribunal. “This has increased acceptance of co-design and delivery of policy and services. Quite innovative proposals around the environmental management space have come out of treaty settlements. Things like recognition that a river has legal personality and people who are responsible for being the human face of the river and can speak on behalf of the river. These are ways of radically changing the relationships between people and power.”

While historical apologies and commercial redress are standard fare in the world of reparations, cultural redress is new territory, and the Waitangi Tribunal’s success has opened up new doors. Just across the Tasman Sea in Australia, a new legal framework around aboriginal reparations claims has recently been developed that makes it possible to quantify and compensate for cultural losses and “spiritual harm.”

“It’s unprecedented in English common law,” explains Megan Brayne, a legal expert on native title, the legal recognition that aboriginal communities have historic rights and interests to their land. Native title claims in Australia are just beginning to pick up steam, but they have the potential to deliver considerable economic and cultural compensation for the loss of land and heritage among indigenous communities in the Antipodes and across the globe. They are already setting strong international legal precedent.

There are currently over a dozen reparations claims at play in varying forms on virtually every continent. They are multiplying and diversifying as the warts of our colonial past and neo-colonial present come into full view, drawing on their successful antecedents in the 20th century. Advocates like John Tateishi and Dr. Carwyn Jones have drawn a blueprint that communities seeking redress around the globe could do well to follow. What’s more, they offer a potential solution to another pressing global problem: climate change and its outsize effects on the world’s most precarious communities.

The United Nations has already predicted that Africa, the continent hardest hit by colonialism, will see some of the earliest and deepest impacts from climate change. As such, it’s been suggested that carbon taxes for high-polluting nations should be paired with migration taxes on wealthy countries that reaped the benefits of past colonial exploits. Linking reparations cases and those of climate and economic justice makes good political and strategic sense. Doing so could offer a path to a more just collective future, but that future depends on facing up to our chequered past.