🔒National conversation on reparations a good one

This summer represents the 400th year since the start of slavery in America.  

This summer also saw the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties convene a Congressional hearing where economists and other social scientists had a serious conversation with the U.S. Congress about the legacy of African slavery on current-day African-Americans. 

Among the topics discussed was reparations, a concept some liberal Congressional Democrats have brought back to life in the form of House Bill 40, which Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler recently said “is intended to begin a national conversation about how to confront the brutal mistreatment of African-Americans during chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the enduring structural racism that remains endemic to our society today.”

Talk of reparations scares the “bejesus” out of most white Americans for practical financial reasons and perhaps more importantly for philosophical reasons. And to be clear, House Bill 40 is not a bill to pay reparations, it is a bill to study this as a solution to the problem of racial disparity in wealth and income. 

The financial implications and the inherent difficulty of estimating harm to a group of people who suffered directly, but who are all dead at this time, is difficult enough. Several economic studies have been conducted over the years to try to estimate the economic value of the multigenerational harm done to African-Americans because of slavery.  

These estimates begin in the hundreds of billions of dollars.   

Some recent estimates by Duke University economist William Darity suggest the total harm at $1 million per African-American household for a total of over $16 trillion, about three quarters of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product. University of Connecticut professor Thomas Craemer estimates the cost to be as low as $16,000 for each current African-American descendant of slavery alive today.   

The varied estimates are based on different assumptions used in the calculation.

During his “March to the Sea” in 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman promised the freed slaves they would be given 40 acres and a mule to start their freedom with, and that the land would be taken from former plantation owners.  Unfortunately, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and replaced by a Trump-like Andrew Johnson who was incidentally impeached partly for his racist language and blatant obstruction of the Civil War amendments.  

Some of the reparation estimates are based on what if all freed slaves had received those promised 40 acres and a mule for 250 years of slavery. 

Another set of reparation estimates are based on the amount slaves would have earned had they been free laborers. After subtracting for their maintenance, the present value of unpaid labor is worth hundreds of billions of dollars today.  

The issue of who should bear the burden of reparations also makes this a difficult philosophical question. 

Currently, the median household wealth for African-Americans is about $16,000 vs. $163,000 for white Americans.

If the federal government pays this “debt” it means every taxpayer is on the hook. But there are potential offsets. One selling point to reluctant conservatives would be an agreement that all “compensatory” programs like Affirmative Action could be curtailed or eliminated if reparations were paid.

I am in favor of Congress studying this complex issue, but I also wanted to add an interesting personal story to this subject.  

I recently started doing my family’s genealogical research. I am finding out more about my personal “Roots” than I thought was possible to know. 

I found out that my paternal grandfather’s great-grandfather Jake McKinney (1825-1893) and his wife, Penny McKinney, were slaves on the David McKinnie plantation in Hickory Valley, Tenn., (population 99 in 2010).  I even was able to find a photograph of William and Mike McKinnie (David’s sons) posing at a 1900 reunion of Confederate soldiers from Hardeman County, Tenn., where the McKinnie plantation was located. 

They and other McKinnie’s served under the infamous General Nathan Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the KKK after the Civil War. 

Knowing who owned my family forces the question: Do the current-day white McKinnie’s owe the current-day black McKinney’s anything?  

What are your thoughts? 

Slavery was not so long ago that we cannot discuss this tough question as a real issue of public policy today. 

Some have called slavery, America’s original sin. Perhaps an airing out of this issue, while difficult and potentially divisive, is a necessary step in solving and healing our toxic racial divide once and for all.  
 

Fred McKinney is the Carlton Highsmith Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Quinnipiac University School of Business.