Tsvi Bisk – Doable Reparations: THE REALITIES OF REPARATIONS
THE REALITIES OF REPARATIONS
Since German reparations to the Jewish People have long served as an analogue to possible American reparations to African Americans, it might be useful to address some misconceptions regarding the history, nature and controversies surrounding German reparations and their implications for a possible doable and optimally effective reparations policy in the United States.
First some facts:
- When reparations discussions began (in 1951) a majority of Jews were vehemently against the very idea, considering it blood money, a kind of greenback-washing assuaging of German guilt; something which would dishonor the Jewish people to consent to. Because of his militant advocacy for reparations Ben Gurion’s public support and popularity plummeted to the lowest point of his career.
- 70% of the German people were against reparations (the same percentage of Americans presently against). The German government did not pay reparations willingly in ordr to satisfy a great moral debt or express a sincere collective Mea Culpa. They were under overwhelming pressure by the Allied powers as a condition for rejoining the family of nations. If not for this external pressure from the victors, reparations might never have come to pass.
- The preponderance of German reparations was given to Jewish institutions (the State of Israel, The Claims Conference, and others), not individuals. The Claims Conference was an umbrella organization of 23 Jewish organizations representing the Diaspora (a useful precedent for Black America as we shall see).
- Only individuals who had suffered personally received direct compensation (in the form of monthly remainders) – not their descendants. The very second a survivor died the payments stopped.
- Germany benefited politically from reparations. In order to reenter the family of nations Germany had to reconcile with the West European countries it had subjugated and with the Jewish people. It reconciled with West European countries by way of the European Coal and Steel Community (forerunner to the Common Market and the European Union), and with the Jews by way of reparations.
- Germany benefited economically as well. Over 70% of the reparations were provided in the form of credits, obliging Israel to purchase German industrial goods, thus helping Germany’s devastated economy recover. The goods included German produced ferrous and non-ferrous metals, steel, chemicals, railroad equipment, building equipment, buses, trucks, and automobiles. Germany wisely leveraged the fact that the Jewish state had German cars on the road and goods in the stores to partially neutralize American and European reluctance to buy anything German after the war. Reparations turned out to be an excellent marketing tool for German industry.
- This is how Adenauer, by implication, sold the agreement to the German public. ‘You may not feel it is a moral obligation, but it is politically and economically advantageous for Germany.’ This kind of practical marketing of a profound moral obligation might be distasteful to many readers but it provides some worthwhile lessons for those who want to use reparations to substantially advance the African American community in the future rather than receive a “tearful”, collective Mea Culpa for the past from white Americans, many of whose ancestors were not even contemporary to the slave period.
Jewish Opposition
Fierce opposition to reparations came from both the right (Begin) and the left (Marxist Mapam ). Even many members of Ben Gurion’s own Mapai party were disgusted by the very idea but went along with the ‘old man’ out of personal loyalty and party discipline. Both rightwing and leftwing opponents argued that accepting reparations was the equivalent of pardoning the Nazis for their crimes. Many found the very word reparations offensive – repairing? Really? The Germans are going to “repair” the Holocaust? (America is going to “repair” slavery? Really?). When the Knesset debated the issues, violent riots ensued. Anticipating these riots, roadblocks and wire fences were set up around the Knesset and the army prepared to suppress an insurrection. A protest of 15,000 was led by Menachem Begin who carried a sign reading “Our honor shall not be sold for money; Our blood shall not be atoned for by goods. We shall wipe out this disgrace!” The riots would be the most significant attempt in Israel’s history to overturn a democratically passed Knesset decision. The agreement was approved by a narrow 61–50 margin, following which protesters began throwing stones at the building’s windows. After five hours of rioting, the police gained control using hoses, truncheons and tear gas Hundreds were arrested and about 200 protesters and 140 policemen were injured. Several months later, future Speaker of the Knesset in a Likud government, Dov Shilansky (himself a holocaust survivor), was arrested near the Foreign Ministry building, carrying a suitcase of dynamite . He was accused of being a member of an underground organization against the Reparations Agreement and was sentenced to 21 months in prison. Several parcel bombs were sent to Adenauer and other targets, one of which killed a policeman.
Given this violent opposition, and the understandable moral indignation driving it, one may reasonably ask why Ben Gurion spent all his political capital on something that might have resulted in a civil war which would have destroyed the infant state in its very crib. To answer this one must remember the terrible social conditions of the time. By 1951, three years after the creation of the state, 700,000 Israeli Jews had “absorbed” over one million refugees (including 500,000 Holocaust survivors) who were living in squalid refugee camps, housed in tents and tin shacks with no running water or proper sewage systems or prospects of employment. The nascent Jewish state was almost devoid of foreign currency with which to absorb them. Given this reality. Ben Gurion felt that his primary task, as de facto leader of the Jewish people, was to try to provide a dignified life for these wretched of the earth and not shout slogans that exemplified his own moral purity; an early example of virtue signaling on steroids. BG always thought that his primary job was to provide positive alternative future possibilities for the Jewish people rather than weeping about past crimes against the Jewish people about which he could do nothing. His thinking was transgenerational and always focused on the future. He certainly would have agreed with Sir Arthur Lewis, the African American Nobel Prize winner in Economics who wrote that “…only decadent peoples, on the way down, feel an urgent need to mythologize and live in their past. A vigorous people, on the way up, is more concerned with visions of its future…”.
German Tightfistedness
The sums of money eventually compensated by the Germans were nowhere as substantial as often assumed. The Germans were begrudging in their negotiations, arguing over every dollar. Israel had initially demanded restitution of 1.5 billion dollars to finance the immediate needs of the 500,000 Nazi victims it was trying to absorb ($3,000 per victim – a real bargain). This sum had nothing to do with actually paying for their slave labor or reimbursing them for their stolen property. Israel later limited its claim to West Germany alone, reserving the right to claim the balance from East Germany – which neither attended the negotiations nor ever provided compensation. The Claims Conference was put in charge, primarily. of individual claims for indemnification. In the end Germany agreed to pay a total of $845 million dollars — $100 million to the Claims Conference and $745 million to Israel (less than half of what was originally requested).
Most of the reparations’ money went into purchasing German equipment and raw materials for companies that were owned by the government, the Jewish Agency , and the Histadrut Labor Federation (the three dominant institutions of the state at the time). Much of the manufacturing equipment was given to 36 factories, most Histadrut owned. Hundreds of private sector plants received minimal reparations. From 1953 to 1963 reparations helped Israel’s electrical system triple its capacity and constituted nearly half the total investment in Israel Railways, which obtained German-made rolling stock, tracks, and signaling equipment. Reparations were also used to purchase German-made machinery for developing the water supply, oil drilling, mining equipment for use in extracting copper from the Timna Valley mines, as well as for heavy equipment for agriculture and construction such as combines, tractors, and trucks. Reparations were used to purchase German built ships for the Israeli merchant fleet, which by 1961 constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant marine. The Haifa Port was able to obtain new cranes, including a floating crane. The Bank of Israel credited the reparations for about 15% of Israel’s economic growth and the creation of 45,000 jobs during the 12-year period they had been in effect. I go into such detail simply to demonstrate that these monies were transgenerational, focused on creating a better future, rather than repairing a past that never could be repaired. In 1988, under pressure, the German government allocated another $125 million for reparations, enabling remaining individual survivors to receive the grand sum of $295 a month for the rest of their lives.
Institutional Reparations
In 1999, in response to the filing of numerous class action lawsuits in American courts, the German government and German companies agreed to compensate Jews and non-Jews for slave labor they performed for German companies during the war. Among these companies were Deutsche Bank, Siemens, BMW, Volkswagen, Opal, and others. This precedent also has significant implications for the cause of American reparations; targeting specific entities for specific offenses is a much more saleable strategy than calling for some kind of governmental blanket payment to every Black individual in the country. In return for the dismissal of all such lawsuits and guaranteeing German industry legal peace from further litigation, the German government created a foundation – Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future – with assets of approximately $5 billion. Slave laborers, Jews and non-Jews, still alive at the time of the settlement could apply to receive a onetime lump sum payment of between $2500 and $7500 from the foundation. In all 140,000 Jewish survivors from 25 countries received these “gigantic” payments for their years as slaves. Final payments from the foundation were made in September 2006. In 1992, following the unification of Germany, the Claims Conference called for the German Ministry of Finance to return previously owned Jewish property in East Germany. The Germans refused.
Similar demands were being made against Banks and Insurance companies that had profited greatly by not having to return unclaimed deposits or honor claims, thus enriching themselves. This, again, has relevance as a precedent for Black reparations. In the late 1990s, discussions about compensation were held with insurance companies that had insured Jews who were later murdered by the Nazis. In 1998 the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims was established, headed by former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. With information provided by Yad Vashem, the commission tried to unearth the names of those who had been insured and were murdered in the Holocaust. The World Jewish Restitution Organization was created to assist in these efforts. These three institutional frameworks, Israel, The Claims Conference, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization were fundamental for funneling reparations monies towards the creation of a better Jewish future.
American Collaborators
American companies such as IBM, Ford, Kodak, Dupont, and others were not included in this reckoning. Nazi Germany was IBM’s second largest customer, after the United States. They supplied Nazi Germany with the punch cards and sorting systems to detect Jews and other “undesirables” easily and efficiently, as well as the technology necessary to track their transport to extermination camps. Their subsidiary Dehomag conducted a census to identify populations of Jews, Gypsies, and other groups deemed undesirable by the regime, to be marked for extermination. With IBM’s assistance, the Nazis repeated the process in countries they invaded. The Nazis tattooed concentration camp prisoners with identification numbers so that administrators could track that prisoner’s punch card throughout the system. IBM has never apologized for their complicity in the Holocaust or reimbursed survivors.
The question is do I, as a Jew whose mother lost her entire European family in the Holocaust, want an apology from a corporation? What would that even mean? Unlike the American legal system, I do not view a corporation as a person – a sentient being with moral volition. Therefore, an apology from this ‘thing’ would be worse than absurd, it would be a worthless insult. And why would I even expect an apology from the current managers or board members? They were not even born at the time. What moral responsibility do they have? The whole thing is ridiculous. What is important, to me as a Jew, is that IBM established a major R&D facility in Israel in 1972. Today it is the company’s second largest R&D facility, after the United States, employing 2,000 Israelis. What is important is that this facility has served as one of the foundations for Israel eventually emerging as Silicon Wadi, with over one half of its exports deriving from High Tech. Today there are over 400 R&D such centers in Israel owned by multinational companies, contributing to the future survival and wellbeing of the Jewish People.
The German affiliate of Hitler’s hero, Henry Ford, used slave labor (as did Kodak). Ford engines powered the trucks that conquered Poland and France. Coca Cola’s affiliate was a full-blown supporter of the Nazis, sponsoring Hitler Youth and other pro-Nazi events (Fanta was developed by Coke’s Nazi affiliate to bypass American sanctions). Dupont was an active ally of IG Farben, which developed the Zyklon B gas, used to exterminate Jews and Roma. Their factory, near Auschwitz, used prisoners as slaves. Their incentives were “If you don’t work faster, you’ll be gassed”. Fritz Meer, director of operations at the Farben Auschwitz plant, became president of Bayer (a Farben subsidiary) after the war. The anti-Semitic hiring practices of the Dupont corporation even before the Nazis is a notorious historical fact. None of these companies apologized in any sincere way or compensated any of their still alive former slaves in any significant way. although Coca Cola opened a bottling plant in Israel in 1968, defying the Arab Boycott and paving the way for other transnational companies to do the same. And William Ford, the great grandson of Hitler’s favorite American anti-Semite, was in Israel in 2019 to open Ford’s Israel Innovation and Research Center to promote Israeli startups in the automotive industry. One takes what one can get and doesn’t waste energy consumed by resentment.
Implications for Black Reparations
What follows might be described as diffident hutzpah. Hutzpah because I am not Black and diffident because I am not Black. But since I think there are lessons to be learned from the Jewish experience, and since German reparations have served as an analogue to the Black demand for reparations it might be beneficial to also use the Jewish institutional response as an analogue to possible strategies for the Black community. For example:
- The need for robust institutions exacting specific amounts for specific purposes, which advance the community in a transgenerational way. For both tactical and practical reasons these institutions should be headed by the new classes of Black professionals, entrepreneurs, and executives rather than career activists constantly in the news. The pragmatic, tactical wisdom of this is, I believe, self-evident.
- The benefits of targeting specific private, public, and governmental institutions and entities (universities, churches, NGOs, states, and cities) that profited from slavery as well as subsequent discriminations. This would be a more efficacious strategy than general calls for reparations for slavery. Ellis Island Americans cannot be made to feel accountable for slavery and can easily be ginned into resentment by the dark forces of collective denial for being called to do so. But Jim Crow, the various massacres (Tulsa, Wilmington, Rosewood etc.), the built in discrimination of the GI Bill, urban renewal as a weapon to destroy strong Black communities, the real estate and banking industries redlining housing areas, using eminent domain to deprive Black communities of valuable property, and so on and so on, offer almost endless opportunities for a Black Claims Conference to get transgenerational recompense from specific entities. The state of Florida, for example, has already provided the descendants of Rosewood with comprehensive scholarships to the state university system. Valuable property, confiscated from middle class Black families, by way of eminent domain and other means, has already been returned to descendants in California and other states. Universities, and other institutions that profited from slavery and subsequent discriminations are now under tremendous pressure to make amends with substantive not declaratory means – the motto should be “we don’t need apologies, we need notarized checks (or in-kind equivalents such as scholarships)”.
- Projects that if implemented also benefit non-Blacks as well: enlarge the tax base, lower welfare costs, lower crime rates, improve property values etc. As with Adenauer’s strategy it really doesn’t pay to be too morally fastidious regarding the motivations for reparations – what counts is the transgenerational consequences for African Americans. Demanding a collective mea culpa from a guilt-ridden white America might make some people feel better but it won’t get a lot of results – certainly not in today’s political climate. Once again: “we don’t need white people beating their chests, with tears in their eyes saying, ‘I’m sorry’ – we need notarized checks”.
Possible Reparations Appropriate Institutions
It is difficult for me to define a clear distinction between organizations and institutions. Suffice it to say I know an institution when I see one. A Catholic Church is an organization; the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities are institutions. A synagogue is an organization; the Jewish Federations is an institution. Most colleges are organizations; Ivy League universities have evolved into institutions. Most banks are organizations; some banks have evolved into institutions. The Black community is rife with numerous organizations doing good things, but I have difficulty discerning great Black national institutions on the lines of Catholic Charities or Jewish Federations; institutions around which there is some sort of communal consensus which would be capable of lobbying for, receiving and distributing reparations. Individual organizations, as prestigious and efficiently run as they may be, are not capable of fulfilling this task. Moreover, it would be a sociological inevitability that this plethora of organizations would result in bickering and infighting. Given this I hesitantly suggest some possible institutional frameworks that would be capable of performing these tasks for the Black community. Each one has an existing Black organizational infrastructure upon which it would be constructed – an infrastructure nowhere near being optimally exploited.
Institution One: Frederick Douglas Savings and Loan Association. (FDS)
Initially established by the existing 32 plus Black-owned banks and credit unions (the Black 32) in the United States. It would have branches nationwide, dedicated to keeping billions of dollars in Black neighborhoods and communities by eliminating payday check cashing services and other exploitive frameworks constructed to bilk impoverished Blacks. Unlike existing retail banks, individuals would be able to open accounts with minimal initial deposits and no minimum monthly balance requirements. The FDS might initially prioritize loans to potential Black community businesspeople (loans that would include managerial training). But the real long-term goal would be to eventually produce a powerful Black owned financial entity (on the same scale as Bank of America) offering comprehensive retail and commercial banking services catering to the community at large (not only Blacks). The growing class of Black millionaires in entertainment, sports and business should be encouraged to do most of their banking and financial serves by way of the FDS. Concentrating power is important. In America, all power (including Black Power) is always ultimately determined by ‘Greenback Power’. The initiative might take inspiration (and lessons learned) from the history of the Bank of America, which was founded by an Italian American to service the banking needs of Italian immigrants, whom traditional banks refused to serve, and has since grown to be one of the largest banks in the world.
In addition to the human resources existing in the Black 32, the FDS’s managerial staff and Board of Directors could also be drawn from professional Black organizations such as: National Association of Black Accountants, he National Economic Association ((the Caucus of Black Economists), National Black Business Council, Association of Black Business Coaches and Consultants, National Conference of Black Lawyers in addition to Black personalities and athletes who have also proven their success in business (Magic Johnson and Oprah Winfrey would be some examples). Bank of America’s Black Executive Leadership Team (and similar initiatives in the financial sector) would be an excellent source of headhunting for managerial roles at the national and local branch levels. Established Black Executive Power, in on Wall Street should be involved at the outset. See, 75 Most Powerful Blacks on Wall Street – Black Enterprise.
Link to Transgenerational Reparations
Municipalities, such as New York city, applied eminent domain and urban renewal to destroy Black communities (whether intentionally or unintentionally is not an issue to waste one’s energy on). This resulted in huge material, cultural, and psychological damage to the community at large. The city also discriminated regarding certain business licensing and in hiring for the civil service, seriously impeding the growth of a Black middle class. Reparations demanded might be that the city conduct at least 50% of its banking/financial services by way of the FDS. This model could be applied to dozens of other cities around the country. The same principle could be applied to the Federal government and civil service. I refer specifically to Woodrow Wilson introducing Jim Crow into the national civil service, to the discriminatory housing policies of the GI bill, and to the Interstate Highway program interfacing with urban renewal to help destroy organic Black communities. Reparations demanded might be that the Federal government conduct 25% of its banking services by way of the FDS. Even if eventually cities conducted only 20% and the Federal government only10% of their banking business with the FDS we are talking about huge amounts of capital that could rocket the bank into the higher levels of banking much faster than the Bank of America.
Institutions that profited from slavery, such as universities, schools, churches, and certain companies should also be pressured to conduct some of their business by way of FDS. Companies include Aetna, JPMorgan, Chase, New York Life, Wachovia Corporation, N M Rothschild & Sons Bank in London, Norfolk Southern, E.W. Scripps and Gannett, FleetBoston, CSX, Canadian National Railway Company, Brown Brothers, Harriman, Brooks Brothers, Barclays, AIG (and many, many more). Banks involved in slavery or in redlining neighborhoods and making it difficult to get mortgages should be pressured to buy large chunks of non-voting shares. This must be in addition to some of the mitigating programs they are already conducting – performative benevolence, no matter how genuine, is no substitute for real financial power. This would be another steroid shot in the arm for the rapid growth of the FDS.
No part of this initiative should excite opposition from non-Blacks. It implies no general accusation against white people as a group. It costs the taxpayer nothing. It targets organizations which arouse little general sympathy. It really doesn’t hurt the bottom line of the companies, as they are not giving their money away, just depositing it in alternative framework. Moreover, it earns them great PR. Most importantly it potentially transforms impoverished slum areas and welfare recipients into middle class communities and taxpaying citizens, which even the most dyed in the wool racist would have difficulty objecting to.
Institution Two: Create a National Black Claims Conference
This would be an umbrella organization of the various Black organizations (similar to the Jewish claims conference). It would make claims for individuals cheated by banks, insurance companies and city governments over the years, as well as for communities that suffered the ruthlessness of official and unofficial Jim Crow: for example, the purposeful flooding of Black neighborhoods in New Orleans in order to save white neighborhoods. It would also make claims for discrimination for the entire African American community at large. I would recommend someone of the ilk of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be chairperson of this institution, not a media activist. The pragmatic, tactical wisdom of this is, I believe, also self-evident.
Black organizations comprising this umbrella organization might include those already referred to above, as well as historic organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League. The various Black women’s organizations should have pride of place in the Conference. These include the National Coalition of 100 Black Women (with 60 chapters in 28 states), National Council of Negro Women (with 200 community-based sections in 32 states and 38 national organizational affiliates focusing on science, technology, engineering, and math while encouraging entrepreneurship, financial literacy and economic stability), National Congress of Black Women, Black Career Women’s Network and so on. (The Jewish experience shows that if you really want to do things rather than just talking about doing things, then involve women’s organizations [e.g., Hadassah, WIZO and American Women’s ORT] – I suspect the case is not much different in the Black community).
An Urban Black Homestead Project would be an excellent community reparations’ goal for the claims conference. Blacks were never part of the 19th century Homestead initiatives that eventually established America’s white rural middle class, nor of the 20th century urban homestead initiatives that gentrified large areas of various inner cities (often by displacing Blacks). This in league with the various discriminations already mentioned requires a more updated version of the never implemented “40 acres and a mule”. Asserting rights to abandoned land and buildings in American cities as one aspect of reparations and building decent housing at reasonable prices with all the spin-off Black owned businesses that would result (restaurants, taxi services, dry-cleaning, barbershops, supermarkets, office space for professionals etc.), would greatly increase the tax base, lower crime and welfare costs and thus benefit every citizen, regardless of race.
Institution Three: The African American Educational Initiative
This comes under the rubric of saving future generations of Black kids rather than recompense for transgressions against past generations. Transgenerational educational discriminations, by way of formal and informal Jim Crow, have been so numerous it would be impossible to list all of them here. Despite the tremendous strides American Blacks have made in recent decades the inertia of these educational discriminations is still the biggest stumbling block to a majority of the African American community moving solidly into the middle class. Moreover, it is still destroying the lives of entire generations of young Blacks. It is time that Black America stopped depending on Federal “Programs” (head start, no child left behind, etc. etc.) to remedy the situation and engaged is a campaign of educational self-emancipation. Federal programs have been great in creating civil service jobs, sinecures for loud “activists”, as well as endless research projects for academe to feed off of but have done little to benefit the inner-city Black kid exposed to the glories of inner-city public education.
The Failure of Foster Care
Foster care was meant to replace the Dickensian gloom and neglect of orphanages. Its noble intent was to place orphans, abandoned and abused kids in the warm embrace of loving families. What it actually created, with noteworthy exceptions, was a welfare racket characterized by exploitation and abuse towards the most defenseless in society –especially for minority kids. Foster care as a system has failed. According to a study entitled The Unseen Costs of Foster Care[1] cited on the website Foster America [2] the United States spends $30 billion on foster care annually, yet:
- 50% of foster youth will not graduate from high school on time.
- 48% of girls in foster care become pregnant by age 19.
- 60% of child trafficking victims have histories in foster care.
- 33% of homeless young adults were previously in foster care.
- Kids in foster care are 4x more likely than other children to attempt suicide.
- one-fifth of the prison population in the US is comprised of former foster children and about 70% of youth who exit foster care as legal adults are arrested at least once by age 26.
Not much value for money in these results. Consider also that 1 in 8 American children are abused or neglected by age 18, and 1 in 17 enter foster care (increasing to 1 in 9 for Black children). This societal malfunction is central to every social pathology now blighting the entire country: homelessness, drugs, unemployables, crime, human trafficking and so on. The situation begs for imaginative alternatives. Given the disproportionate impact of this situation on Black communities, it is incumbent on them to be the pioneer in creating alternative solutions. What might be done?
A Nationwide Chain of Black Preparatory Schools
Black preparatory schools, to include boarding schools and neighborhood charter schools could be established nationwide. It would be under the aegis of an umbrella organization composed of Historically Black Universities and Colleges (HBUC). Both iterations (boarding and charter) would call for a significant portion of the 30 billion dollars (perhaps a fourth, $7.5 billion) now wasted on the failed foster care system as part of reparations, in addition to the several billions allocated for Charter Schools. Consider this: $7.5 billon is already more than Catholic Charities and Jewish Federations together administer. Additionally, the great universities and elite preparatory schools that benefited directly or indirectly from slavery or other discriminations would be dunned, not only to contribute money (as reparations) but also expertise and experience (as reparations) to enable this initiative to gain elite educational status. It is no disgrace to take advantage of the expertise of other people. HBUC has already done so. In the 30s and 40s various Black colleges hired some 50 German Jewish professors who had fled the Nazi regime and had trouble finding employment in American universities that had a numerus clausus for Jews.
Conclusion
There are two ways to look at reparations, the individual and the institutional. Individual would be every Black person in the United States gets a onetime check of let’s say $25,000 dollars from the Federal Government. This is something that doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell happening for several reasons. First, would this include the two million Black Africans that have immigrated to the United States since 1980? After all, it could be that their ancestors were the Black slavers that sold American Black ancestors to white slavers. Would it include the descendants of freed Blacks that themselves owned or bought and sold slaves? Moreover, what percentage of Black DNA would you have to have to receive the check? Would people with the complexion of Patrick Mahomes or Meghan Markle qualify? The snarky arguments against the very principle of this kind of reparations would be endless.
But let’s say it is possible. What would it accomplish historically, transgenerationally? Would it improve the collective financial clout of the Black community over time? After all, money spread out is just money, money concentrated is capital. Would individual reparations improve the educational profile of poor Blacks? Would it rejuvenate Black communities? Would it in any way create an alternative future for the Black community at large? It would only salve the soul of white America, to the point where they would be hostile to any future claims – “we gave you the money now shut up and leave us alone already”. So, whether one agrees or not with the particular institutional suggestions made here, which I offered as examples of what can be done based on existing human resources and infrastructures in the Black community, it seems to me that it is self-evident that the institutional route is both possible and doable.
[1] https://www.thetcj.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Alia-unseen-costs-of-FC.pdf
[2] https://www.foster-america.org/the-problem
Originally posted on https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/6/2151417/-The-Realities-of-Reparations
