Is That Legal?

On the question if slavery has caused the descendants of slaves some financial harm, I am not so certain. Perhaps a more precise question is: Did the continuation of slavery after cessation of the slave trade cause financial harm? I think it clearly did because it delayed the freedom and economc ascent which is inevitable upon emancipation. But one is left with a disturbing, perhaps even unmentionable truth, that no descendant of a slave would be in America if it weren't for slavery. And because of the general mess that is Africa, it is unlikely that the descendants would be better off today had their ancestors never been brought across the ocean as slaves (this is not to say that the slaves themselves were better off of course).

If we dig back far enough, I'm sure we'll find an ancestor of yours that committed some terrible crime against an ancestor of mine. Obviously from the arguments you support, that would mean you would owe me a few million in reparations.

Pico: the "general mess that is Africa" is, at least in part (and there's considerable debate about how much, but "some" is pretty well agreed upon), the result of the depopulation and distortions of the slave trade. Yes, that includes the Arab-directed slave trade, but by the 18c-19c the Atlantic trade was substantially larger and more intense. So if reparations are due, they are due to the victimized families and tribes and societies of Africa as well.

GrahamC: I don't read Eric's comments as endorsing personal liability, but a general social one. Yes, there should be a sort of twilight on social/collective guilt, but only if reasonably proper reparations have been made and the legacies of injustice acknowledged.

Part of the slavery reparations argument is complicated by the fact that many Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants who arrived in America after slavery ended.

The problem with slavery reparations in the eyes of many people is that it is seen as a transfer of money from people who see themselves as innocent to the descendants of victims. Of course, we can achieve many of the same goals by not labelling it as slavery reparations.

No government programs can in a relatively short period of time close the gap between whites and blacks in America. But we can honestly examine what are the problems that black Americans face today and target spending to mitigate the problems as best we can. The problem is not only external, that is white racism, but internal as well. Black Americans need to model themselves on the Jewish immigrant experience. Jewish immigrants valued education and learning and thus were able to become represented in the professions in greater numbers than their share of the population.

Re "the depopulations and distortions of the slave trade." Let us remember the Portuguese only provided the market and transportation. The commodity(slaves) was provided by victorious African chieftains. The slaves were the losers in the endless tribal wars and would either have been killed or enslaved by the victors if not sold.

Volokh later quotes the following (inapt) portion of the article:

"It would be unthinkable to make individuals responsible for the
wrongdoing of their distant ancestors . . . ."

This ignores the fact that the corporate form allows for continuous existence. We're not talking about a distant ancestor of Wachovia, we're talking about Wachovia itself, through its predecessor corporate entitites. Wachovia undoubtedly assumed all obligation of its predecessor entities.

I am not an attorney, but I was just wondering how it could be proven which slaves were owned by which corporation?

In order for this to be something other than a shakedown, wouldn't it have to be proven that your lineage was enslaved by a specific corporation at some point?

To claim that the mess that is Africa is because of the slave trade is, at best, an oversimplification. The slave trade enriched Africa. Slaves were generally sold by Africans to Europeans and Arabs, in exchange for cloth, tools, and guns. (The guns were then used to fight wars to take more slaves.) There's plenty of blame to go around on this, including the Africans who sold their "brothers" into slavery.

The settlements with Japanese and Japanese-Americans for the internment was properly limited to actual injured parties, and it wasn't difficult to figure out who they were, because the records are complete. The time to have paid slavery reparations would have been right after emancipation. "Forty acres and a mule" would have been too low, but it could have been doled out to individual freedmen when everyone knew who they were, not generations later.

There are black Americans with ancestors who were freed at the time of the American Revolution. There are black Americans with ancestors that were never held as slaves in what is now the United States (although not many). There are black Americans whose ancestors include slave owners, and who include whites who were never involved in the slave trade. Does a black American with 25% white ancestors deserve the same reparations as a black American whose ancestors were all Africans?

This is a recordkeeping mess that will lead to not only great injustice, but great racial hatred. When the federal courts orders Hispanics and Asians whose ancestors arrived in 1960 that they, along with those of us whose ancestors died fighting against the Confederacy that we have to pay reparations for slavery--well, I think might finally create the circumstances for widespread violent resistance to the judgeocracy.

Yes, the continuous, and altogether fictitious nature of the corporation makes comparisons to individuals problematic.

But a corporation is owned, operated, and managed by INDIVIDUALS. And it is most certainly true that NO individual owning or operating a current corporation has ever owned a slave, so the analogy holds true where it matters, I think.

Eric:

You are responding to particular arguments, not the reparations issue itself, but I want to raise a couple of problems with that issue.

One problem is who is descended from whom. Merely being a descendant doesn't mean that one has unearned wealth. Except for old white Southern families, the group in the US today most likely to be the descendants of slave owners are African-Americans. So most African-Americans are the descendants of both slaves and slave-owners from the same period.

Similarly, if being descended from whites is the test for having to contribute, then most African-Americans (in the North at least) are descended to a substantial degree from whites.

A second problem is that monetary wealth has little to do with it. Very little monetary wealth was passed from one generation to another in the 19th century. Indeed, most people had to care for their elderly parents. The problem is cultural and social capital. In this, one must take into account, not just slavery, but the lack of a developed European-style business culture in the families that were captured or bought in Africa and compelled to come as slaves to the US.

Now education is the primary key to undoing the lingering effects of slavery, since it is the primary way of improving social class status going forward.

Dear Texian: Because the enslaved were property, it isn't hard to find records of their ownership, sale, use as collateral, etc. in public documents. Wachovia hired the History Factory (a "heritage management" firm; who knew?) to do their research. The results are published. As I've said on my own blog, the fact that reparations for slavery have practical and political difficulties should not get in the way of recognizing, and addressing, the many racial-economic injustices done in the periods after emancipation.

Clayton, the slave trade was harmful to Africa. If a chieftain did no sell Africans to the Europeans for guns in return, then his rivals would do it and thereby gain an advantage over him.

And you make the mistake of conflating a chieftain or king being enriched by the slave trade to the people of Africa in general being enriched.

If an African woman with three children has her husband taken away from her in a slave raid one day, how the hell has she been enriched by that?

The slave trade was like the drug trade of its day, and it had a very damaging effect on African societies that were destabilized as a result of the trade.

Jack writes:

"... the corporate form allows for continuous existence. We're not talking about a distant ancestor of Wachovia, we're talking about Wachovia itself, through its predecessor corporate entitites. Wachovia undoubtedly assumed all obligation of its predecessor entities."

An interesting thought, but inasmuch as such predecessor entities presumably did business at a time when slavery was lawful, under what circumstances would any legal obligation related to slavery have existed for them to pass on? If no such obligation existed, what was there for Wachovia to assume?

It strikes me that this is not a conversation for one nation. As a percentage of the slave trade, the future United States was miniscule compared to the Caribbean and Brazil. One could argue as some above have that slaves brought to North America have generally come out better than any of the fellow Africans who were enslaved in the Middle East or Latin America. However, that is completely beside the point.
Race is the great stain on American history and the American nation, there is no way around it. My sense is a true reparation would be a true national change of heart on the issue of race directed toward true freedom and equality at which point new divisions will spring up but that one would be put to rest.
Where do we go from here then, rather than direct payments, horrid idea. A properly controlled capital fund for African-Americans which would provide low or zero interest loans for even the most basic needs, such as buying a house or going to college. It would probably have to have a limited time horizon and would have draw from the entire nation because to enforce only on those with connections to former slave owners would skew various markets in deeply unfair ways for the present.

Whenever I think about the issue of reparations, I think of the Eastern Enterprises case, of which it might be said that the Court held that the Coal Act could not reach back 30 to 50 years without violating the Constitution.

Opening up the body politic to be used as a tool for racial score settling invites violent Balkanization.

As an African-American, I agree with the theoretical rectitude of reparations, but I think that pragmatically they'd probably do more harm than good. What blacks really need is economic parity, but giving us all $x won't accomplish that because too many of us lack financial discipline. Only a fundamental reassessment of cultural values can help us get where we need to go, and that's got to come from within. I'm hoping that sooner or later a critical mass begins to realize that education, effective parenting, hard work, and integration constitute the bedrock of a secure black future.

Dear DGF:

I come from any number of Slave Holding families in Virginia - whom without, there would be no America today. As far as a fundamental reassessment of Cultural Values - I might have an idea. Children in this country should be educated to believe, with the same veracity as we teach the myth of a less ambitious, more virtuous Lincoln - that Americans of African descent played an equal, if not superior role in our Nation's Birth. They did so by resisting the culture of Slavery at every turn, with their minds, their souls, their language, their art and their undying faith in their own identity. That White became Black in my families in Virgnia, is well known - even if it might only have been a slight, nearly imperceptible move (it was more - much more)- it was enough to give birth to a nation. Fold this teaching in with the horrors of Slavery - and the Slave persona is expanded, humanized, brought to life - and Slave families and their descendents recognized as well, as America's oldest, and finest Founding Families.
The issue of Reparation then, could be cast in plainer light :-)