Private: Coming to Terms with Slavery is Not a Game

By Ariela J. Gross is the John B. & Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law & History at the University of Southern California, and author of What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (2008).

The question of reparations for slavery has garnered much attention recently since prominent Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. declared that it is time to "end the slavery blame game."

Professor Gates argues that because American plantation owners share the blame for slavery with "African slavers," African Americans should put aside reparations claims against the U.S. government and institutions that profited from slavery.

I believe this argument is ill-founded.

African Americans' claims against their own government and domestic institutions are not diminished even by proof positive that African traders understood the horrors to which they were dispatching "fellow Africans." Efforts to call the U.S. government to account for the legally sanctioned and supported enslavement of millions of human beings rest on the history of slavery and its aftermath right here on U.S. shores.

Take the slave market itself - the dehumanizing institution that transformed people into commodities, fully supported and regulated by state law. Despite the official end to the international slave trade in 1808, the domestic slave trade flourished in the antebellum era: more than one million slaves were carried from states like Virginia and Maryland to the "Black Belt" of the lower South, two-thirds of them literally "sold down the river," and twice that number were sold locally. That's more than two million human beings bought and sold here in the United States.

But to understand the role of slavery in the U.S. economy, we need to imagine not only buying and selling, but all the ways that human beings became the chief form of capital and credit in the southern economy. For example, slaves were the ideal collateral for debt because they were so easily convertible into cash. When slaveholders defaulted on those debts, their human property was sold at sheriff's auction on the courthouse steps - as many as one-half of all slave sales in antebellum South Carolina were carried out by the state in this way. Tragically, despite many slaveholders' "paternalist" claims that they would never break up families, sheriffs routinely sold slaves "singly," even children.

It is hard to take in to what degree the U.S. economy, North and South, was built on slavery. Cotton produced by slaves fueled the first factories in New England, leading abolitionists to warn of the alliance of "lords of the loom" with "lords of the lash." The coincidence of the closing of the international slave trade with the invention of the cotton gin gave rise to the extraordinary increase in slave prices that continued nearly unabated over the course of the antebellum period. Between 1846 and 1860, the price of a "prime male field hand" in the New Orleans market had more than doubled to upwards of $1,700, or $50,000 in today's dollars. It's not surprising that speculation in slaves was an important driver of the new market economy.

Numerous national and regional institutions, including banks, insurance companies, and even universities, depended on the trade in slaves and slave crops, especially cotton, for their growth. But it was not only the economy that relied on slavery. Slavery was what made "freedom" for whites possible; white democratic institutions and black slavery were politically interdependent.

As Justice Thurgood Marshall reminded us, "The denial of human rights was etched into the American Colonies' first attempts at establishing self-government...The implicit protection of slavery embodied in the Declaration of Independence was made explicit in the Constitution." In a slave society, even white men who did not own slaves exercised dominion over slaves and derived their own claims to citizenship and democratic participation from their whiteness.

Furthermore, slavery did not truly end in 1865. What followed the failed promise of Reconstruction was another hundred years of state-sanctioned exclusion of people of color from political and economic institutions, public accommodations and professional pathways; arbitrary imprisonment ratified by all-white juries, chain gangs, and convict leasing systems in which black life was cheap; lynching and racial cleansing of entire towns and neighborhoods; legally segregated labor markets that kept black farm workers in debt peonage - the entire legal and political edifice known as "Jim Crow."

At the same time, government programs throughout the twentieth century provided "affirmative action for white people," as Ira Katznelson has shown, including the Social Security system, which excluded agricultural and domestic workers; the GI Bill; and the Federal Housing Act, which allowed so many whites to join the middle class, while leaving working blacks paying exorbitant prices for substandard housing in cash or installment contracts.

The principle behind reparations claims is one of unjust enrichment: those institutions and corporations still existing today that benefited from slavery should disgorge their ill-gotten gains. Most advocates of reparations do not argue for checks to be paid to individual descendants of slaves to make up for slavery.

As Robert Hinton argues, "All the money in the world can't make up for slavery. Reparations should not be so much about the past as about the future. Reparations should be a gigantic ‘Marshall Plan' of public and corporate funds, to be invested in housing, education, health care, and nutrition so that the descendants of slaves can become full participants in our post-industrial, global culture and economy."

All Americans, even those like me, whose parents and grandparents immigrated to the United States in the twentieth century, share in the legacy of white privilege and citizenship derived from slavery and Jim Crow. But claims for redress do not require individual culpability or even shared privilege. Certainly there are white people who have not had full access to the privileges elite white men enjoyed in the antebellum era, or today. It is as a citizen of the United States that I owe apology and compensation to the descendants of slaves.

It is the United States that owes a Marshall Plan to the descendants of slaves.

[image via commons.wikimedia.org]

Civil rights, Equality and Liberty