How are slavery reparations fair?
How are slavery reparations fair?
This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states "the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries".
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That's 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I've paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn't this just a country that isn't doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying "oh there's this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling"?
Shouldn't payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don't flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don't know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
Nations that were the source of slaves remain on the whole impoverished and underdeveloped.
Nations that were slavers still remain on the whole wealthy and highly developed.
This is not a coincidence, and there is a reasonable case to be made for reparations on these grounds.
The UKs position today is arguably due more to leading the Industrial Revolution and that was the main factor in the decay of slavery, so you need to balance historic grievances with development i.e. "what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Exactly. If anything, this amount of money is way too small.
Occasionally we read a news story about someone who escaped a maniac that kept them locked up for years, forcing them to work and do depraved things for little or no pay. We rightfully think this is terrible and the criminal is inhuman.
Slavery was millions of people in that situation for their entire lives. Whole economies were based on this genocide. We put Nazis to death for genocide. We put other leader on trial for similar crimes. Paying this tiny fine is the least the British (and other European governments) can do. The amount they really owe would bankrupt them.
What amount of money would you exchange for measurably worse lives (education, health, jobs) for you, your family, and everyone who looks like you for generations?
Is it possible that other factors led to the countries being wealthy or impoverished, and this allowed the wealthy to colonise or take the impoverished as slaves?
Here's a way to think of it:
If I steal all of your money and invest it to grow over time then I'll end up with even more money while you don't benefit from the growth that should have been yours. Now we have children and pass on our wealth. You pass on less because it was stolen, and I pass on more because of what I stole. This multiplies over the generations and a disparity is maintained. My offspring will have better educations and better opportunities because of the wealth they had access to, and yours will have fewer opportunities because you don't have the money to spend on them.
The goal of reparations is to attempt to correct some of this disparity. It tries to provide opportunities for people who don't have it but would have if something in the past weren't stolen.
For an example that's easy to see: In the US, black people are less likely to know how to swim. This has nothing to do with them being black, but what opportunities they had access to. This is for many reasons. One part of it is that most places had community pools, but they had restrictions for people of color. When this was outlawed, they instead just closed the pools or added memberships that required payment.
People also built up wealth over time through property, but black people were prevented from getting loans to buy property except in redlined places. This prevented them from building up generational wealth like white people were allowed to do. (This is ignoring the whole slavery thing...) It causes ripples through time where their children have less opportunities, which then causes their children to have fewer, and so on.
The problem I have with this viewpoint is this.
Where does it start and where does it end?
World history is full of atrocities, crimes, war etc.
Additionally, many of the things which we now consider atrocity or crime might not even have been one in the past.
Fabricating such artificial claims is the same as Putin is doing by using the history book for creating claims on Ucraine.
This has always been an issue I get stuck on. If we hold current people liable for the crimes of their ancestors, how far back do we go?
The trans-atlantic slave trade was abhorrent, but slavery didn't begin or end with it.
Do Egyptians owe Jews reperations due to how they were treated? Should the Italians compensate half of Europe and North Africa for what the Romans did? Should Arab nations pay the UK and Ireland for the people kidnapped by the Barbary Pirates?
The Ottomans were still keeping slaves until the early 1900s, long after the western European powers had ended the practice, why aren't we seeing calls for reperations from Turkey to Slavic nations?
this is why the slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy
"if we punish people for murder, what about self defense?"
or
"if we arrest people for selling meth, it'll end up making the state arrest people who drink coffee"
you can legislate for a specific instance and not have it spiral out of control into insanity.
Maybe some people would try to seek reparations for ridiculous stuff. It's exactly the purview of the law, politics and diplomacy to navigate that.
Well considering the last slave (coerced labor) was freed in the 1940s, it's still extremely recent. These are people's grandparents and great-grandparents. The velocity of money is very real.
This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.
This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.
The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.
Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.
For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.
This is how I tend to view it too. We should be raising all poor people up and target wealth equality for everyone, regardless how they got there. I suppose reparations to POC would be a step in that direction but it by nature excludes people who might need help now. Idk, it's a hard subject for me to form a solid opinion on too but I think social safety nets need to be prioritized for all.
There were families that made Bezos-class money at the height of slavery, and those families' descendants are still rich today.
At the very least, these families shouldn't be anonymously rich, they should be infamously rich, notoriously so. Even if a truth-and-reconciliation process is 'too much', let us at least have the truth out, and loud.
That's not a reparations issue, it's an unfuck the cities that were fucked by Robert Moses and his buddies as well as funding public schools better, making hospitals public instead of privately owned, and changing the punitive justice system to a proper rehabilitation justice system.
Otherwise you'll just see short term happiness and provide arguments for "we're equal now, we paid reparations! What else do you want?"
I'd say both are required, and also reparations should never end. The rich should be taxed for their advantages and exploitation and money should be used to help raise poor people up. The problem can never be fixed. There will always be advantaged and disadvantaged people and exploiters and exploited people. Implying it should be a one time payment for a one time thing I think is missing what is trying to be solved.
I don't know. Plenty if other groups arrived much later in western countries, often with little or nothing to their names and feeling persecution, and have done much much better.
I'll give you that the specter of discrimination still haunted western institutions until quite recently. But blacks were not the only group that faced discrimination.
I am not black or white. I can offer a perspective of an immigrant who isn’t white. Looking at how blacks were targeted for arrests and the disproportionate amount of arrests while being brought up in economically challenging environments, it is very hard to “move up”.
I immigrated to a western country with qualifications and with a good sum in my bank account and still it was challenging. I cannot imagine how generational oppression will do to a persons psyche and their worldview.
I used black people as an example, not to say they're the only group, because it's obvious to see. Literally everyone has been exploited by the rich.
This is also why affirmative hiring and admission isn't "racist against white people" as people see it as. It's actually leveling the playing field.
Before implementing things like affirmative action or reparations, do any of us have any idea in mind for when reparations will be done making things "fair"? Or is the intent to have it go on forever? I've never heard this argument before and I've never heard of anyone having a set date for the end of affirmative action and the like, so it sounds like a slippery slope to future discrimination. This is probably what at least some of the "racist against white people" (and asian people) crowd are complaining about. I know I would be miffed if I lost an academic or career position to an objectively lower quality candidate due to something like government mandated diversity, regardless of how much I support civil rights. Obviously, ideally, everyone should have equal access to these opportunities and no one should be unable to get the education they want but that isn't the kind of world we live in (at least in the USA).
Also, why can't there be other ways to level the playing field in terms of environment, such as funding better schooling or housing for disparaged individuals, regardless of race? Despite black people having to fight an uphill battle in life, these things that uplift across the board without racial or ethnic discrimination would naturally end up helping them out more than others before leveling out as equality is achieved. The only problem, as always, is the bureaucracy involved.
A program that white people are excluded from isn't racist?
The argument goes, as a British citizen, you have and continue to benefit from policies that your government made a long time ago. Reparations are not a tax on you, but an expense the government should have paid at the time of the work, but instead it did things like kidnap people from their homes, transport them to where labor was necessary, and force them into work. Now, the people who are the descendents of the kidnapped folks are requesting that the bills their great great grandparents were never paid. To extend that, after slavery ended, many of those who had been enslaved were left disenfranchised, and impoverished to the point that there is almost no possibility of building generational wealth.
As for if this will open the floodgates or not, who knows. An argument could be made in both directions, it's not as though governments paying one time sums to places is rare, and reparations for wars used to be pretty run of the mill.
I like this answer a lot. Objective, doesn’t answer what it doesn’t know for certain and gives context.
The "floodgates" component of the question is the "slippery slope" logical fallacy.
Consider the present claim in isolation, not its relevance to other claims.
It is not a fallacy to consider it might encourage other claims. If I am in a classroom and I accept to give someone candy publicly, do you think everyone nearby will not be MORE tempted to ask too, compared to whether if I said no?
In both cases, asking costs almost nothing compared to the potential gains.
Imagine you're running a very long relay race. Just after the race starts, members of the other team jump out of the bushes, beat up your runner and tie them up. This happens for several laps until someone decides that this is probably bad so they stop beating and restraining you. But the race doesn't stop and the positions aren't reset, but the other team is like 20 laps ahead and allowed to finish. Is that fair?
Reparations would theoretically allow your team to catch up but former slaves and their descendants have never been allowed that. What's more, in the UK, former slave owners were paid for the inconvenience of no longer owning slaves (edit: up until 2015!!!) while the former slaves got to continue living as second-class citizens for a while.
Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn't work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth, advanced infrastructure and old laws that specifically aim to disadvantage black people (whether they were abolished or still on the books the effects are still felt). Imagine your great-granddad was able to build up a fortune, how likely would it be that your family would still be rich? Imagine your great-granddad lost every cent, how likely would it be that your family would be still poor? Sure, it's possible that situations drastically over time but that's the exception and not the rule. There are reasons why things are the way they are.
I believe that reparations should not be any lump sum of money but in the form of education, investment opportunities, resources and infrastructure. That way all persons living in former slave countries can benefit and pass those benefits down to their descendants.
Edit: I believe that up to last year Barbados went after Richard Drax for reparations due to his family's direct involvement in slavery in that country. I don't know how successful that was, but I support it.
Your analogy and argument is very well organized so I wonder how you think universal basic income could mitigate the negative impacts of generational wealth/poverty? In my mind, it is part of a solution to many social issues but I'm still learning. I know there are arguments that capitalism will just buffer against any implementation but I'm still forming my opinions.
Thanks, it's something I've been thinking about for a long time since it was a big discussion topic in my circle for a while.
I haven't given the same level of thought to universal basic income, but I guess it would be a start. What people really need is a way to not only survive but to build wealth and pass that wealth on to their descendants. Like I said in my previous comment, education, investment opportunities, infrastructure upgrades, etc. will go a long way towards that goal. In my mind, a universal income could be a part of that but not the whole solution. And yes capitalism will find a way to ruin it but we can always hope.
I think UBI could help with the problem. It won't be solved without other things though. If we pay for UBI by increase estate and inheritance taxes, that could go a long way. Basically make it so generational wealth slowly decreases over time. Obviously it'll never be zero, because education, social connections, and things are also generational wealth, but it'd be an improvement to the way things are.
Basically, it's not fair that someone is rich because their parents were rich and someone is poor because their parents were poor. The rich person should be less rich and the poor person should be less poor (on average).
Hell, this is the best and most comprehensive argument for the generational debt we as the global north and winners of colonialism owe the global south I've ever read.
I'll definitely use this analogy whenever this issue comes up in my peer group.
Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn’t work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth
In addition to that, slavery was never 'abolished'. Just go take a quick look into the mining or cocoa industry.
So, can the Slavic countries claim payments of reparations from the formerly known ottoman empire? Perhaps Jewish people from Asia? Surely the Christians from the Arabs, and the Arabs from the Christians? Not to mention Vietnam from China, or entire Europe from the decendants of the Roman empire.
Or are all of those instances somehow different?
History is full of misery and trying to pay to make amends for somebody else's actions, today, feels ridiculous. Just as OP, I don't get it.
I can't wait for my cheques from Scandinavian countries for the Viking invasions, Italy for the Roman occupation, France for the Normandy conquerers, etc!
Also your caveman ancestor punched my caveman ancestor so I'm expecting a payment from you too
Slaveholders got to build wealth off the free labor of slaves. When they died, that wealth didn't disappear. It was passed down to the next generation. The descendants of slave holders are better off financially than the descendants of slaves because of that accumulated wealth. The descendants of slave holders should pay back the wealth they now own to the people it was stolen from.
EDIT: I knew this would trigger white people.
Aka tax the rich, were all slaves on a spectrum
Lmao as if I am seeing any of that wealth.
There was substantial indentured labour and serfdom in England too. Surely simple redistributive tax based on wealth is fairer?
Anyway how do you determine whos ancestors had slaves, or weren't involved, or were slaves? You want to start tracing bloodlines?! Should the English pay the Irish?
You're welcome to look at my bank statements. If you can find £569,000 that I can pay someone without going bankrupt then I'd be most surprised.
Group A was wronged by entity B. Group A goes to court to seek restitution from entity B. Courts rule that entity B did in fact cause damages to group A and must be held liable.
That's all reparations are. Entity B is your government. It's the same legal entity as it was 190 years ago, regardless of the composition of the population it represents. If a group was wronged by their government, this is their only means to legal restitution. Unfortunately since the primary form of income for some governments is taxation, it means people complain about paying for things when that's not exactly what's happening.
The alternative is to say that if a government "runs out the clock" and is able to avoid responsibility until the population turns over, then they can no longer be held liable for anything they did prior to that point. That's not a very good position, in my opinion.
If entity A is the UK and entity B is those hunted and sold to slavery by entity C, why does A have to pay C for stealing labour from B? Compensate B for stolen work and damages.
Because of supply and demand. The transatlantic slave trade created demand for slaves much higher than what existed before that point. That creates an environment where being a slaver is rewarded, and therefore not being a slaver was punished. If, for example, a republican billionaire says "I'll give 10000$ to anyone who kills a democrat" they can't just claim they're innocent when democrat death rates go through the roof.
I understand what Britain did was wrong and requires corrective measures, but personally I just think financial reparation is not a very bright idea. For
- How do you ensure the money actually goes to victims in foreign countries
- If its given to their govts, what assurances UK has it'll be used to improvement of victim's life
- It can very well be used to fill the pockets of rich politician
- Even if ignoring all three, UK gets money in hand of ech victim personally, still doesn't help the fundamental problem of marginalised community, money will run out so far in their hands, they'll have no real impact.
I my opinion a 100 fully paid scholarships to university specifically for victims is a way better way to help them then just handing cash.
It's not intended to be punitive. The idea is that slavery generated a massive amount of wealth for slave owning economies that left us richer and the descendants of slaves poorer. Think of it as being the child of a crime boss. You haven't committed any crimes but the hosue you live in and the school that gave you the education to get ahead were paid for with dirty money. The idea is fair, but just not likely to ever happen. I think the point is more so to make people recognize the problem so that more is done to catch up the people on the wrong end of the generational wealth spectrum
This.
OP is correct in the statement that any person alive has not been alive to either own slaves or be slaves. But that's not the point of reparations.
The point is that you have and continue to benefit from the times when slaves were legally permitted. It might not seem like it, and maybe someone along the line blew a bunch of that money on booze and gambling... But someone you are related to, and by proxy you are benefiting from the proceeds of slavery.
By extension, all of those proceeds from the work that slaves performed was robbed from them by their masters. Making most of the slaves insanely poor while the former masters were able to keep the money those slaves earned for them. So they started from nothing. Sure, they were "free" to some variation of free (not sure all the racism made it feel like much of a change)... Fact is, they started at zero, at a time when most established families were sitting pretty.
After all this time.... There's interest.
I don't know where they got these numbers and I haven't looked into it all that closely, but it doesn't seem too unreasonable given all of that.
That kids or later generations are liable for past crimes or wrong doings (by todays standards!!!) is not fair and it is no justice.
In German it is called Sippenhaftung and was even used by the Nazis.
I think you missed my point. This is not about punishing white people, it's about getting the victims caught up.
by your logic, if someone stole something, have it to his brother and then got caught, having the brother give back the stolen goods is something Nazis would have done.
But this isn't Sippenhaftung, also known as gilt by association in English, this is a societal thing, you, even if your great great gandpappy didn't himself own slaves, the society is still at fault and needs to right the wrongs done to a whole ethnic group
Some countries ended slavery by buying off the slave-owners — paying them for the property that they were being deprived of.
It's kinda weird that they didn't pay the enslaved people, who had been deprived of their own work and work-product and life and freedom.
As an American whose ancestors came from Europe around the same time that slavery was abolished here, I can be sure that none of my ancestors benefited directly from slavery; but also that they joined a society that had profited immensely from slavery. The whole reparations concept is complicated.
but also that they joined a society that had profited immensely from slavery.
The same is true for the descendants of slaves. They benefit from the same society that their enslaved ancestors participated in creating. They receive the same benefits of that society that you and your non-slave-owning ancestors receive, so for you, that issue is a wash.
Further, I would say that the descendants of Union soldiers who fought and died during the Civil War are owed at least similar reparations. When the deacendants of slavers get done paying the descendants of slaves, the descendants of slaves can turn around and pay the descendants of abolitionists for their sacrifices.
What of the descendants of the daughter of a former slaver and the son of a freed slave? Wouldn't they, as descendants of slavers, owe as much in reparations as they are owed as descendants of slaves?
I mean if they didn't buy the slaves to set them free, there'd have been a massive war, killing a bunch of the slaves and others, and likely costing more money. Imagine the American civil war but worldwide.
It was a necessary evil.
There's a couple of things to consider when thinking about this.
Firstly, dividing the total by the number of tax payers and concluding that everyone should pay £569 is misleading. Wealthy people pay far more tax than most people (still not enough IMHO!) and as such the per-person cost is wildly different for everyone too.
Secondly, consider your position - your chances of success, and the possible range of success, depends hugely on your parents' circumstances and those of other close people in your life.
So we have this clear chain of success breeding success - wealthy people can afford to give their children the kind of start in life that us poor spuds can only dream of.
A huge number of wealthy families used slavery to amass and increase their wealth massively. These families are still wealthy, still benefitting from the leg-up they were given on the backs of slaves.
These families are the ones who, ultimately through tax, would end up contributing the most. Us plebs would be paying relatively little.
Even if your family didn't own slaves, or exploit them directly, they'll almost certainly have benefited from their existence. I live in a mill town north of Manchester - the very reason for this town's existence is cotton, ultimately picked by slaves abroad. The money came from businesses and trade that relied on slavery.
Let's say that 5 generations ago, your great-great-great grandfather had a farm. It was highly productive and had a great location.
Let's say that my great-great-great grandfather went to the local government and paid bribes and maybe did some light killing and stole that farm. No matter who your g-g-g grandfather talked to, they all pointed to the new deed and told him to suck eggs. Your g-g-g grandfather fell into despair and poverty. His children grew up poor but also worked hard and climbed up the wealth ladder a little. So too did their children, and so on, until your generation. Let's say you're lower middle class or so. No generational wealth to speak of but not in poverty.
Meanwhile my family has developed that farmland, partitioned it and sold or leased pieces of it for business and industry. We have phenomenal generational wealth all built on that initial theft of land.
But hey, you never had land stolen directly from you, and I never directly stole the land. Everyone in the area knows exactly what happened. Everyone in the area knows that my generational wealth is built on theft. Nowadays everyone talks openly about it, including me.
Now, from the outside looking in, I say that the absolutely morally right thing to do is restore the ownership of the land to the descendants of the person who owned it. But from the inside, the living descendants of the thief say hey, WE didn't steal the land. We just benefit every day from the original theft. Why should we do anything to make amends for that theft, which we don't dispute but don't want to be accountable for either.
Okay, and how about the millions of other people whose ancestors never did or had any of that? Of the families that benefitted, some of them are still rich and powerful, those are the ones that should be looked at, not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.
I do genealogy and so I know that my g-g-g-grandfather had to give up farm labouring during the first decades of the British Empire and move to the Bermondsey slums, where he worked as a tanner. If you know anything about historical tanning, you know that this sucked. He was screwed over by the infiux of cheap food from the Empire and our family is part of the underclass to this day.
The thing is, we still live in a rich country because of that. My parents and grandparents and their parents did. We've still had access to education and free healthcare and all that shit. We still had access to all that cheap shit that we robbed the rest of the world for.
So yeah, we owe those people's descendents like it or not. Plus, considering that yes, we were repaying the descendants of slaveowners until just a few years ago, and paying off our Marshall Plan debts etc until very recently, I'm not too fussed if the government of my country pays its debts.
not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.
The corresponding Joe Blow from the group that got screwed over is going to be comparatively much worse off. Right? Or you can look at it from the other angle: if normal Joe Blow had ancestors who benefited from seriously screwing over people but made bad decisions, squandered their wealth and advantages so Joe Blow is just a Joe Blow then how much worse off would Joe Blow be? Possibly quite a bit.
But anyway, looking at it from the perspective of ancestors, who screwed over who, who's responsible for what is overcomplicating things. Are there people who are suffering from unfair disadvantages, are their people who are enjoying unfair advantages at the expense of others? If you're a decent person, that status quo shouldn't be acceptable: it's something that needs to be fixed. Maybe through reparations, maybe through affirmative action, maybe through some other approach. We should determine what the most effective use of resources is and do it.
I mean, if you agree that descendants of people who benefitted from enslaving others owe the descendants of those enslaved people compensation of some sort, then I think we agree. The remaining questions are how to identify members of each group and how to accomplish the transfers. That's law and policy. Not simple, but achievable.
This is a good analogy for the reparation argument, nice work.
Only partially. Those two gggf's had their spat; I'm the descendent of neither, yet it's me who has to pay the bill.
This is a decent analogy, but ignores the practicality of the situation.
How exactly do you get the UK electorate to support this, there really isn’t any benefit to them, it’s just like throwing money into a bonfire. Besides it’s not like the UK economy is currently doing that well, and given that, it’s unrealistic for anyone to support the government just taking more money away intentionally. You’re basically begging for a far-right populist to come in just because they say this is a terrible idea, which is in and of itself the primary reason why it’s a terrible idea.
So, American here. My family immigrated from Germany, Poland, England, and Italy (the nationalities of my four grandparents). My family never owned slaves, never owned farmland, never profited from any of that. Why should my tax dollars go towards paying reparations for something my family had no part in?
That’s the part that I struggle with. Should the families who directly profited off of slavery pay reparations? Perhaps. Should the families and individuals who had nothing to do with slavery? Absolutely not.
Why should my tax dollars go towards paying reparations for something my family had no part in?
Nobody is suggesting that your taxes should increase to exactly match the amount you'd have to personally pay. It's the responsibility of the government to do it, and while the government does ultimately use your tax dollars it's not like you'll personally feel the effect.
This is a fact of life for all people around the world. I promise you’ll go circles paying retribution if you look for these links of “who stole what”.
I'm a white guy in the Northeast US. My family came from Canada in the early 20th century. None of my grandparents ever owned land. They all were either homemakers or menial laborers. My family didn't own anything until the 70s. Should I pay reparations?
If people flame you, it's not because it's a SQ, but because the people typically framing the issue like you are framing it are racist right wingers.
Nobody is going to take £569,000 out of the white man's pocket tomorrow and give it to a black person because of slavery.
If you actually take some time to read up on what is actually being discussed, the state of the debate is more like
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The fair market value of what was stolen from slaves is £18T. We are mostly discussing what the most accurate figure is at this stage in history.
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The slaves were never compensated in their life and that money ultimately benefited Western societies.
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Justice has never been served, so we need to figure out how to make things right.
Absolutely no one has ever transferred a single cent as compensation to slaves or their descendants and it's not going to happen today or tomorrow either. But it is totally right that we are discussing the issue to see how we can make it right.
A more likely outcome would be to give a small token payment to descendants of slaves for the next 200 years and to provide the poor descendants of slaves with educational opportunities and perhaps help to finance things like a small business or home. Those richer descendents could also choose to donate their cash payment into the find for the poorer descendants.
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If you are genuinely curious, theres a collection of articles published by the Atlantic. It deals with the US but seems relevant to your question.
Thanks,I’ll take a look. I had the same question, plus none of my ancestors were in the US when this happened and I have no idea what participation the country we came from may have had. At the risk of sounding like “all lives matter”, is it not our ethical duty to fight inequity, injustice, any loss of human rights? Slavery and all that went within it might be one of the causes, but that can’t be undo me nor does it directly affect anyone alive today. what people today are affected by is inequity and injustice. Shouldn’t we focus on what our society is responsible for, what we can change, what directly affects or is caused by people alive today?
At that point we should still be funding development in those nations, like for infrastructure and education, etc
It effects tons of people, yourself included, in ways you have apparently never stopped to consider. I don't say this to be shitty, but I'll be direct about it.
Your ancestors came here, as a privileged class, and built generation wealth in their family because others were denied it. Go ahead and accept that. It doesn't make you a shitty person, mine did too, mine never amounted to anything but poor, white trash, but even they had benefits from becoming established in this country, at that time. So did yours.
The government hugely benefited from it and should be held responsible for that. Taxes come from us, the circle continues.
If you're going to take issue with it, and not be a shitty person, realistically we can't pay enough to replace what was denied them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't find some nominal amount, but your right, we should also look for ways to try and fix what we can't be replaced.
18,000,000,000,000/31,600,000 = 569,620
Don't want to be that guy, but it definitely changes the picture somewhat.
Britain paid reparations to the slaveowners and their descendants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837
The last check went out in 2015. So yes, people alive today benefited from this. directly.
If they want to make it fair, they should pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved people and/or take back the money they gave to slaveowners.Wait, Britain was compensating the descents of slave owners for the loss of their slaves less than ten years ago? Wtf?
Yup. From the article:
Payments of the bonds to the descendants of creditors was only finalised in 2015 when the British Government decided to modernise the gilt portfolio by redeeming all remaining undated gilts.
Since 2018, numerous Freedom of Information Act requests have been sent to the British government and Bank of England for the names of those who were paid with the bonds, of which all were denied.
We (the UK) have to be honest about how it is we come to be a member of a G7 country. It didn't come about in the last 20 years, it came about because we were the leading world power between the Napoleonic Wars and the start of the 2nd world war. During that time slavery was legal, then made illegal but at the same time we colonised other countries, keeping their populations in conditions not much better than slavery.
When you include the Industrial Revolution and what some people say was our own 'internal' psuedo-slavery of the working classes, the UK became massively wealthy and it's a foundation and status that we still have today.
This wealth via exploitation and slavery had the effect of not only making us a rich nation but the countries we raided and colonised, very very poor. That's a foundation and status they still have today.
I don't know what the answer is, but we can't pretend it's a simple as 'this happened a long time ago and therefore doesn't count'.
Slavery ended a while ago, but in the US there is still people alive today who suffered through the Jim Crow laws, and there is still a lot of systematic racism. So, racism didnt end with slavery.
For what I understand about reparations, it is for compensating the black communities, because rich white people has many generations of wealth, meanwhile black people only until a few decades ago were legality unable to make it bigger, being confined to poor communities, and being discriminated agaisnt in every aspect of a white dominated society.
Basically black people had so many obstacules for progress until kinda recently, and reparation are a way to level the ground. Reparations would allow more black people to go to college, feed their families, and get out of extreme poverty.
But a windfall would also help poor Native, White, Latino, Asian, immigrant, felons, or anyone else at a disadvantage.
Yeah. Thats a good thing.
They are definately not fair. But fair is not an economic or political quantifyable term. Slavery wasn't fair either.
What is just or not changes with times and societies. If there is political capital to be made by making reparations then they make sense. If the public disagrees they can and will vote out those responsible. For better or for worse that's our system.
But I personally do not feel there's such a thing as Sins of the Fathers. I have nothing to do with the slavers of 300 years ago, the whole concept of owning a human being is repugnant to me. And I genuinly feel that should be enough.
I tend to agree about the Sins of the Fathers, but at the same time, if you don't inherit their sins why do you inherit their stolen boons?
But, ultimately, the time to address these evils was a century ago.
Hell, at this point it's impossible to separate "sinner" and victim in many cases. What do you do for the descendants of both slave and slave owner?
Instead, in the now, as a society we should indeed strive to lift up the impoverished. All of the impoverished.
Reparation payments sound nice sometimes, but I truly think it's just a distraction designed to promote infighting among the economically enslaved. Tax the rich, provide for all in need, and we will have made more of a repair than payment ever could.
You get a reparations payout,
You spend the reparations payout , The money flows straight out of the community into the pockets of the likes of the Waltons.
Or
You tax the likes of the Waltons,
You invest in infrastructure and social programs
The money stays in the community and provides long-term benefit, and greater social mobility to lift people out of the after-effects of slavery.
Yes. I wish I could vote this up more than once
I wouldn't worry.
We won't even give back the stuff in the British Museum, and we've still got that, unlike some fantasy amount of money made up by an attention seeking judge.
Your number is a bit off. It's more around 569000 per person.
Who downvoted this? It's correct.
£18.8 trillion divided by 67.7 million people is £278,000 per person.
That's just not possible as a sum. 18.8 trillion is more money than the entire nation has. I'm all for reparations btw. But I can't see how that much is realistic?
Correct. I put too few 0's in. I have no chance of paying anyone half a million. Those aren't reparations, that's a kind of reverse slavery. Also I divided by the number of taxpayers (31.6m), not the total population, because it's going to be the taxpayer muggins who has to foot the bill.
I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay.
Weird way to view the situation. Then again, I bet a lot of slaves genuinely thought they shouldn’t have to be slaves.
I don't know exactly how to answer you, but the effects of colonization and slavery are still felt today in many former colonies. For instance, a lot of countries were created on a map with a pencil and a ruler without any regards for ethnic groups or culture, which is why there are so many straight lined borders all around the world, this created instabilities and conflicts within the countries. Many of them were also decolonized, pretty much overnight (the colonizers left, without organising elections or handing over the country to newly formed local authorities), which left them completely disorganised. I don't have an opinion specifically on reparation, but colonization and slavery left durable scars in countless countries around the world, and they are still felt to this day, with very little chance of ever healing.
Poor white people whose peasant ancestors were left jobless and homeless due to being unable to compete with free slave labor should pay reparations to the descendants of the people who were forced to work for free, while the rich descendants of the slave owners who dislodged one group while exploiting the other put their blood money in offshore accounts and laugh as the poor people squabble over crumbs.
Is "tn" not short for trillion (1,000,000,000,000)?
If that's the case then the actual number is 569,000 per person.
Putting aside the fact that slavery is still legal in the US thanks to the 13th amendment, and the fact that US orgs are outsourcing it to developing countries, the long-term effects and inequity of slavery continue to this day and should be addressed.
That said, I'm of the opinion we shouldn't give cash payouts - while it'll provide benefit to the community, it'll be spent in such a way that the benefits will flow out of the community almost immediately. It also gets into mucky territory judging how affected people were, and will be the basis for the stoking of massive racial animosity.
Instead, I think we should use the funds to invest massively in infrastructure and programs that will provide long-term benefits to the community. Transport, education, social services and the like that will all help maximise people's quality of life, opportunities, social mobility, and enfranchisement. If some low-income families that weren't affected by slavery benefit too, all the better.
I don’t know about the UK but in the USA slavery was abolished in the 1865, but equal rights weren’t granted until 1965. All the states were not in full compliance until the early 1970s. You could easily argue there are people still alive today directly affected by slavery.
Making slavery illegal doesn’t mean everyone suddenly starts hugging in the streets and bigotry is abolished. I’m sure these same sentiments persisted in UK but hopefully not as long as it did in the USA.
Slavery was never lawful in England, though it existed. Obviously it was allowed in the colonies. (Before anyone bites my head off, yes England did benefit massively from the trade, and its legacy persists in eg placenames in Bristol etc - I'm just answering parent's query)
There are a few mistakes worth pointing out here. I'll try not to "flame you" and just get to the mistakes or misconceptions. First, just because time has passed does not mean the impact of slavery is gone, not for the countries that were sources of slaves nor the families descended from slaves nor the states that benefitted from slavery. Think of the way wealth and influence get passed down between generations. In a similar way the King and the house of Windsor accumulates intergenerational wealth on the backs of slavery, the decendents of slaves accrued an intergenerational debt that is still weighing on many of them. The whole idea that historical wrongs "impacts nobody today" is, frankly, just false.
Another issue is this idea that slavery doesn't continue to impact these countries seeking or reccomended for reparations. There areany lingering impacts, but let's just look at population impacts. Conservatively,1833 was 8 generations ago. Take just 2 people out of a slave source country 8 generations ago, and assume they would have stayed behind to have children, assume 3 kids per pair, that's 3281 people just missing from that country. 3281 people that would have worked, farmed, conducted trade, produced art and conducted academics for every 2 slaves taken in 1833. How many slaves were taken? Just based on the population math how can anyone deny the impact.
Another mistake is to conflate you, personally, with the state. The state is permanent, its human members ephemeral. You may not personally be responsible for slavery, you may not benefit in any way, but the state did and the state is still responsible today for its historical wrongs and the continuing damage. You're worried about your £569, but a bigger concern is that the state can freely commit attrocity, then avoid culpability by just waiting out the directly impacted. Honestly, you should be focused not on denying the damage of slavery, historical and current, and focus more on which rich asshole the state should tap to make pay. Got any old money arristocratic families hanging around the UK that could use lighter wallets?
This is a good answer. I had to put it into a more modern context, if somebody tortures and kills your parents, why should you have the right to sue them?
You weren't the one tortured and murdered, it was your parents, and they are dead now so it's not like suing the people that killed them would do anything to bring them back.
If you think that you should have the right to sue the murderers of your parents then it makes sense that the descendants of slaves living the life they are currently living as a consequence of the long-lasting effects of slavery should also have the right to sue their ancestors slavers.
Ending slavery doesn't reset everything back to zero. Imagine if you're running a race against someone else. The person officiating the race (no clue what this kind of person is called 😅) lets your opponent start running the race and keeps you back at the start line. Then, they have a moment of clarity and say to themselves, "Wait a second… This isn't fair!" So, they stop that person where they are, apologize to you, say they promise never to do it again, and blow the whistle so that you can both start the race.
But wait! That person still ended up starting way ahead! But we already ended head starts before the race started so it's OK, right? Well, no, because the person who got the head start still got to start from their advantaged position.
But this isn't quite the same because your issue crosses generations. So, a better analogy might be a relay race. Maybe the head start is stopped just as the second person on the opposing team receives the… thing you pass in a relay race. (Why am I making an analogy to a thing I know nothing about? 😅) They didn't personally get the head start. So, it's OK to go ahead and start the race now with one relay team already on their second runner while the other is on their first, right? It wouldn't be fair to punish that person who didn't directly gain the advantage of the head start.
Well, no, because that team still got an advantage and the other team still started at a disadvantage. Reparations are less about punishing an individual and more about leveling a playing field.
I like to think of online gaming. 2 teams against each other. One side uses cheats for part of the match and runs the score way up. Midway through, they turn the cheats off and apologize, but the score is still lopsided.
Old players might drop out and new players might join in, perhaps to the point where most players in the match were never around when the cheating occurred. You might even argue that some of the score gap might be attributable to differences in skill between the two teams. But it's undeniable that one team is benefiting from an unfair advantage, and doing nothing to adjust for that perpetuates the unfairness.
Now, imagine that the game also has a mechanism that makes it easier to stay in the lead once you get there.
For my taste your analogy is faulty.
You put it like it was a game of Civ.
The history and development of nations and cultures on Earth was/is much more complex.
I absolutely love Atlanta Season 3 Episode 4. It’s a very fictionalized take on this.
Looking at the distribution of wealth, it seems like the 1% should owe a bit more reps than the 99%. Personally, I think the fairest path forward is the implementation of a universal basic income. We have the ability to feed and house everyone and eventually, we could mostly automate that process.
If you were guarantees to have the first few levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs covered, do you think you would have an easier time building wealth, or a harder time. Personally, I feel like this would free me up to pursue things that actually benefit myself and society and do so in a meaningful way. Let's get our brothers and sisters out of the month to month (and out of poverty globally) so we can benefit from all their knowledge, skills, insights, and talents as they are no longer on the brink of despair. Let's open up the door to self-actualized progress for the 99%. No one should live like a peasant when we can easily have an abundance. If we ensure that no one gets a bonus until we've covered everyone's basics the world will be a better place. Reps paid by regular people and not multinationals and the global financial elite, to me, are just another way of pitting the poors against each other while the rich count their money and flaunt their power.
Having said that, there's a lot of racist, selfish, classist assholes at every level in the wealth pyramid.
I don't think they are. Since the Late 1960's the US has had a war on poverty. Almost trillion dollars has been poured into disadvantaged house holds. According to it's standards, poverty has been reduced from 19.5% to 2.3%. The numbers via ethnicity are not giving with certainty, the fact is total poverty has been greatly reduced. I would argue that is significant reparations.
Isn't most of this due to India and China?
China's poverty rate fell from like 88% in 1981 to basically nothing today.
The poverty rate in the US fell because of China and India? Damn that was nice of them.
They're not.
As far as I know, lot of these aids are wired through NGOs and many of them are more related to the Church who often end up using the money for its Crusade (Conversion & stuff).
I was thinking the same thing in my country. My grandparents immigrated. They had more to do with the French Revolution than the slave trade.
It is moral blackmailing.