Reparations can be defined as payments made in compensation for past wrongs or injuries.  The most famous contemporary example is probably the reparations paid by Germany to the Jewish people as a result of the Holocaust.  There are many useful web resources for understanding the status of reparation payments to Holocaust survivors and the state of Israel, including the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which provides an excellent summary of the various mechanisms for individuals to make claims. Another example is the compensation paid by the United States to Japenese Americans who were sent to internment camps during WWII.  An excellent description of the campaign on behalf of Japanese Americans is Achieving the Impossible Dream, by Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H. L. Kitano, and S.Megan Berthold.  According to international standards and domestic laws, the United States should compensate Native Americans and African-Americans for the specific campaigns that have been waged against these groups. 

Various types of claims have been made before and are often presented as recognition of treaty rights for Native Americans such as recognition of fishing rights or addressing a broader context. For African Americans, General Sherman's order which granted 40 acres to each African American family along the southeastern coast near the end of the Civil War are often seen as the starting point for reparations claims. The order was not enforced largely due to the efforts of President Andrew Johnson, and despite support of many government officials and formal protests made by African Americans, the rights were revoked in the context of increasing white opposition to Reconstruction and the Freedmen's Bureau Act. General Howard, the top represent of the federal Reconstruction programs, was sent to explain to blacks in the region that the mandate was going to be abandoned, and the land that blacks had already began to settle would be returned to their former owners. In a meeting with Howard, a group of South Carolina blacks expressed their frustration and demanded, "General, we want Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government." As this group argued, these processes did not reflect the outcome of the war, and they questioned why the government "now takes away from them [the freedmen] all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies" (Foner, p. 366).

Government policies in the United States distributed rights and property according to racial categories, away from people of color and toward whites. Land was taken from Native Americans through wars throughout the nineteenth century and ongoing lack of treaty enforcement. Lands were distributed to whites who made up the overwhelming majority of the beneficiaries of policies such as the Homestead Act which was passed in 1862 during the Civil War and had been championed by Andrew Johnson himself. The policies developed under the Homestead Act lasted more than a century, with the last homestead successful claim made in the 1980s. By comparison, the Southern Homestead Act, intended to distribute allotments of land to poor whites and freed slaves in the South was overturned within a decade of its passing. Instead, much of the confiscated land was returned to the pardoned former slave owners and ex-confederates. The weakening of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred land rights from Mexican Americans and to whites.

Addressing these historical and present day injustices requires reversals of the direction of this redistribution.  Despite this brutal history, or perhaps as a result of learning the poorly written history we encounter in grade school, many people hold a common sense belief that black people, American Indians, and other people of color--but not whites--are the loafing recipients of government subsidies taken from the income of the nation's hard workers.  This site provides information that demonstrates the inaccuracy and cruelty of that view and will hopefully help change your mind if you have been previously mislead.

On this site, I provide health, economic, and political data to quantify some aspects of the injuries caused by racial policies, racial wars, and racial practices in the United States of America.  The site also contains a collection of statements on various aspects of the racism and reparations controversies and some suggestions for what we can do to help return true democracy to this land.  Remember that many democratic nations, including the Lakota and the Iroquois which both practice(d) universal male and female suffrage, existed on the North American continent prior to the establishment of a nation based on slavery, racial exclusion, and suffrage for adult white males only.  This site also has links to a variety of organizations that defend the rights of women, minorities, the poor, and all people, as well as the environment in which we live.

By presenting the claims of Native Americans and African Americans together, I am not suggesting that the claims are identical or that programs created for restitution are necessarily following the same paths for each group.  I recognize that some people from each group may not support the other's claims and that some may not agree with using reparations as a framework. I also am not arguing that the claims of other oppressed groups are invalid.  For example, I believe that money and property for compensation can come from reductions in the military budget and other spending programs that function as welfare for the corporations that disproportionately benefit the already rich and not from what little money is used by the United States government to extend services to immigrants.  As has been observed, the United States was founded on "free land," stolen from Native Americans, with "free labor," stolen from African Americans, by "free men," (Bullard).  Repayment is overdue.  We need to work together to recognize these crimes and heal our country and its people.  Materially and spiritually, this movement can and should benefit everyone.

Statistics and Quotations

Please take a moment to look at these Statistics of Racism in the United States: Income, Health, and Rights

and Quotes Related to Reparations

Problems with Reparations

Calls for reparations have not yet received sufficient popular support.  Some have argued that claims for reparations are racist claims, apparently because they single out particular racial groups.  I would argue instead that the institution of a true reparations program is one of the most effective anti-racist steps that can be taken. The policies which have resulted in the need for reparations were based on discrimination against racial groups and the lasting impacts of these policies there are gross imbalances of wealth, income, health, and rights in society. Directly addressing this history, and restoring the balance, can lead to the dissolution of these racialized social and economic differences, and thus decreasing the role of racial categorizations in society.

A Suggested Program

Here is a brief suggestion for how reparations could be provided.

Implementation of any significant reparation programs will require considerable reflection upon the processes which have structured U.S. society.  Effective restitution will be a product of the process to get to, as well as the results of, implementing any programs. 

Process

Reparations should be addressed through an open political processes, including public investigation of past and present documents and policies.  Monitoring or oversight from the United Nations may be necessary to insure a fair and peaceful process and to protect minority groups from violent backlashes.  Through a series of public debates or hearings, featuring political leaders and ordinary citizens, we should be able to heal some of the gaping wounds that have been created in the United States and move substantially towards putting our racial problems behind us. In addition to the domestic political process, both courts and international governing bodies will likely need to be engaged.

Program

As part of the process, people will need to put forward a variety of suggestions for programs. Here are some of my ideas. Reparations programs will need to be of an appropriate scale to address the history and economic impacts of slavery, segragation, discrimination in the legal system, and so on. The economic structures of today are a product of that history, and it is these structures of economic inequality that should be addressed. For African-Americans, compensation should account for the wages and property that have been denied through slavery, segregation, and the exclusion policies that followed.  These policies have resulted in the economic inequalities of today through a complex variety of mechanism.

The simplest way to arrive at figures might be to directly address the existing economic gaps which are largely a result of the harm caused by the slave trade, slavery, segregation, and denial of the basic human rights presented in the first ten ammendments of the constitution.  If we consider that over the course of a forty-five working life the average white family receives the advantage of approximately $650,000 more income than average black family, compensation will have to be large in order to balance that economic equation and give present and future individuals an equitable starting point.  Each black household should receive two groups of payments, each being ten years long, at $25,000 per year. The two payment groups should be seperated by a period of twenty-five years.  In addition, the program should provide each household with property valued at not less than $100,000 and not more than $200,000.  This property could consist of an existing house or houses or acres of land.  With approximately fourteen million black households, the total cost of such a program would be approximately $8 trillion.  To put this in context, $8 trillion is significantly less than the $13.1 trillion that the U.S. government spent from 1948 to 1991, a period approximately the same as an adult's worklife. That money went to wealthy defense contractors who have benefited from their own policies of wealth redistribution. These payments have tended to support executives and stockholders rather than workers or even the soldiers for which they are built.

The structure that I have proposed can provide some financial security to two generations of African-Americans and financial restitution for past and present discrimination and exploitation. The money payments should be made available both by shifting economic priorities in federal and state budgets and by taxing companies and estate holders who have directly benefited from the unpaid labor of generations of African Americans. Property should be made available through a combination of increased taxation and volunteer donation programs focusing on the wealthiest five percent of the U.S. population who have benefited the most from capitalist exploitation.

For Native Americans, reparations could consist of both economic compensation and improved political status of the various Indian nations.  This should be done with recognition that one of the mechanisms that have been used against Native Americans over the years is coerced agreement to monetary compensation in order to undermine existing rights.  Therefore, Indian nations should be able to enter a more equitable relationship with the United States while, in parallel, individual native people and families should be eligible for economic compensation. The U.S. and American Indian nations should negotiate financial redistributions and establlish borders under the supervision of the U.N. 

For both Native American and African-American programs, monitors from other nations will probably have to remain in place throughout the programs' implementation and then during a transition period after program completion.

Suggestions for What You Can Do

My purpose for putting together this page is to help achieve real improvement for people today. Please take a few minutes and reflect upon what we as a society are doing, why, and whether or not we are justified in our actions.  Learn about the history and current struggles of African-American and Native Americans.  Encourage people--family, friends, acquaintances--to discuss and campaign for reparations.  While pressing for state and federal action, we can also work to implement programs on the local level.

Links to Related Websites and Organzations

Here are just a few related organizations.

American Indian / Native American Activism

Caucasians United for Reparations and Emancipation

Representative John Conyers, Jr., Reparations and HR 40

International Indian Treaty Council

Documentary on Japanese American Internment

Jubilee Research for international debt cancellation

National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA)

Vernellia R. Randall's site on Race, Racism, and the Law

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Forgotten Promises

The United States Holocaust Museum

References

Bullard, Robert ed. 1993. Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots

Deloria, Vine Jr. 1988. "Reflections on the Black Hills Claim." Wicazo Sa Review, Vol. 4, No. 1

Eric Foner. 1988. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution

King, Coretta Scott and Jean Highland. 1987. The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Robinson, Randall. 2000. The Debt.

Westley, Robert. 1998. "Many Billions Gone: Is It Time to Consider the Case for Black Reparations", Boston College Law Review, pp. 429-476, 1998.

If you have any suggestions, please send an e-mail to Michael Starkey.