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Reparations for slavery is the application of the concept of reparations to victims of slavery and/or their descendants. There are concepts for reparations in legal philosophy and reparations in transitional justice. In the US, reparations for slavery have been both given by legal ruling in court and/or given voluntarily (without court rulings) by individuals and institutions.

The first recorded case of reparations for slavery in the United States was to former slave Belinda Royall in 1783, in the form of a pension, and since then reparations continue to be proposed and/or given in a variety of forms. '''The 1865 Special Field Orders No. 15 ("Forty acres and a mule") is the most well known attempt to help newly freed slaves integrate into society and accumulate wealth. However, President Andrew Johnson reversed this order, giving the land back to its former Confederate owners.'''

'''Reparations have been a recurring idea in the politics of the United States, most recently in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. The call for reparations has intensified in 2020, amidst the protests against police brutality and the COVID-19 pandemic; which both kill Black Americans disproportionately. Calls for reparations for racism and discrimination in the US are often made by black communities and authors alongside calls for reparations for slavery. The idea of reparations remains highly controversial, due to questions of how they would be given, how much would be given, and who would pay/receive them.'''

Forms of reparations which have been proposed or given in the United State by city, county, state, and national governments or private institutions include: individual monetary payments, settlements, scholarships, waiving of fees, and systemic initiatives to offset injustices, land-based compensation related to independence, apologies and acknowledgements of the injustices, symbolic measures (such as naming a building after someone), and the removal of monuments and streets named to slave owners and defenders of slavery.

Since further injustices and discrimination have continued since slavery was explicitly illegal in the U.S., reparations for non-slavery related injustices have also been called for along-side slavery related reparations by black communities and civil rights organizations. For example, some suggest that the U.S. prison system starting with the convict lease system and continuing through the present-day government-owned corporation Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR), is a modern form of legal slavery that still primarily and disproportionately affects black populations and other minorities via the war on drugs and what has been criticized as a school-to-prison pipeline.

Black Lives Matter
Many groups under the Black Lives Matter organization have laid out a list of demands, some of which include: reparations, for what they say are past and continuing harms to African-Americans, an end to the death penalty, legislation to acknowledge the effects of slavery, a move to defund the police, as well as investments in education initiatives, mental health services and jobs programs. These calls for reparations have been bolstered amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and the high rates of police brutality against Blacks.

Accumulated wealth
Housing discrimination played a big role in creating the racial wealth gap that exists today. After the Great Migration of southern blacks to Chicago in the 1940s, redlining was used to keep former slaves segregated from whites and to prevent black families from getting a mortgage. Thus they were forced to buy houses on contracts from real estate speculators, which were a scam. Not only did this cause thousands of Black Americans to lose their homes and their money, it also created what is known today as ghettos and prevented Blacks from accumulating wealth. Today, the average white family has roughly 10 times the amount of wealth as the average black family, and white college graduates have over seven times more wealth than Black college graduates.

The wealth of the United States was greatly enhanced by the exploitation of African American slave labor: some argue it is the bedrock for the U.S. economy and capitalism. However, former slaves and their descendents are among the poorest demographic in America. According to this view, reparations would be valuable primarily as a way of correcting modern economic imbalances.

In 2008 the American Humanist Association published an article which argued that if emancipated slaves had been allowed to possess and retain the profits of their labor, their descendants might now control a much larger share of American social and monetary wealth. Not only did the freedmen not receive a share of these profits, but they were stripped of the small amounts of compensation paid to some of them during Reconstruction. Therefore, many scholars and activists call for reparations to eliminate "racial disparities in wealth, income, education, health, sentencing and incarceration, political participation, and subsequent opportunities to engage in American political and social life".

Health care
In 2019, VICE magazine published an article that argued racial health disparities, from slavery through Jim Crow until today, have cost Black Americans a significant amount of money in health care expenses and lost wages, and should be paid back. Ray and Perry state in a Brookings article that the lack of a social safety net and the wealth gap are particularly highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. They explain that “disparities in access to health care along with inequities in economic policies combine,” making this inequality a life or death situation for black Americans.

Current discrimination
Many argue that giving reparations for slavery is too complicated, but there is a strong basis for them on the past and current discrimination that blacks in America face. Ta-Nehisi Coates lays it out in “The Case for Reparations” article in The Atlantic as “ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of separate but equal, and thirty-five years of racist housing policy”. The legacy of these policies have kept African Americans from opportunities to build wealth, while slavery “enriched white slave owners and their descendants”. Today, the district of North Lawndale in Chicago, where redlining was the strongest, is the poorest neighborhood in the city with an unemployment rate of 18.6% and 42% of residents living below the poverty line.

The discriminatory practices of 1940 through 1970 still reverberate today, as the average White family has roughly ten times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. As Bittker claims in his book The Case for Black Reparations, “as slavery faded into the background, it was succeeded by a caste system embodying white supremacy”. '''Many argue that while reparations may be a first step towards amending the harms caused by slavery, the systemic racism that exists in many institutions will not be fixed as easily. Malcom X stated: "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made." In this case, reparations would be healing the wound, and addressing ongoing racism in the U.S. is pulling out the knife.'''

Legal argument against reparations
The legal statute of limitations for filing lawsuits has long since passed, which prevents courts from granting relief via a lawsuit. This has been used effectively in several suits, including "In re African American Slave Descendants", which dismissed a high-profile suit against a number of businesses with ties to slavery.

Technical complications
'''The technical side of reparations is very complex, and could be a reason why they have not yet been implemented. Some argue against the idea of putting a monetary value on the traumas that Black Americans have faced, dubbing it “transactionalism”. On the other hand, some dismiss the case for reparations entirely due to practical concerns, such as who would receive these financial payments, why should the current generation pay for wrongs for which they are not responsible, and how much should be paid.'''

The estimates of the monetary value of stolen slave labor and subsequent discrimination vary “from an outrageously low $3.2 million to $4.7 billion,” and to as much as $12 trillion. '''This also begs the question of who is responsible for paying. Generally, three actors are agreed upon: federal and state governments, who supported and protected the institution of slavery; private companies that benefited from it; and “rich families that owe a good portion of their wealth to slavery”.'''

Some claim that closing the wealth gap involves paying descendants of slaves “individual cash payments in the amount that will close the Black-white racial wealth divide”. Another suggestion is for reparations to “come in the form of wealth-building opportunities that address racial disparities in education, housing, and business ownership”. For example, in the city Asheville, North Carolina, reparations have been implemented in the form of “investments in areas where Black residents face disparities”. However, the complications that surround this are significant, and others argue that putting the money into communities is not efficient, due to people moving and gentrification.

Bittker (2003) lays out some of the practical and constitutional problems that would likely arise in an attempt to execute a program of reparations to Blacks. '''Would it be the same payment to every person? Would they have to prove ancestry to an African slave, or would it be any black person who was subject to racism? There are no real answers to these questions, as this is an unprecedented case. Other cases of reparations, such as to the Jewish people who survived the Holocaust or the Native Americans in the United States, are very different in the way that it is much easier to identify the group who should receive them, and the reparations were paid more quickly than in the case of reparations for slavery.'''

Additional arguments and opinions
Steven Greenhut, the western region director for the R Street Institute, has suggested that reparations would make racism worse.

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, while acknowledging that slavery was an "original sin" of the United States, opposes providing reparations because "none of us currently living are responsible." Legal philosophers have forcefully argued that this fact is irrelevant.

One publication against reparations is David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery (2002). Other works that discuss problems with reparations include John Torpey's Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (2006), Alfred Brophy's Reparations Pro and Con (2006), and Nahshon Perez's Freedom from Past Injustices (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

Reparations in the U.S. have never gained widespread public support. Often in these conversations, the White reaction is to claim that this is a form of unjustifiable “reverse racism”, or that demands for reparations are just an example of the “Black refusal to move beyond the memory of slavery”. A 2020 poll from The Washington Post showed that “63% of Americans don't think the U.S. should pay reparations to the descendants of slaves”. Notably, 82% of Black Americans support reparations, while 75% of White Americans do not. Some arguments also highlight the complications behind reparations, such as “not all Black Americans are descendents of slaves” or that the people alive today are not responsible for the harms of slavery. Others still argue that reparations will do nothing in the face of racism, and that structural and policy changes would be more effective. In the midst of America’s current racial reckoning in 2020, these tensions are particularly exposed.

Reparations and COVID-19
The call for reparations has amplified due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has exposed the underbelly of American inequality in many ways, with people of color disproportionately likely to be laid off, to struggle financially, and to die from the virus. For example, 40% of black owned businesses have closed permanently since March due to the pandemic, compared to 17% of white-owned businesses during the same period. This relates back to the fact that white families have roughly ten times the wealth of black families. This limits black-owned businesses' access to credit and loans, and they do not have the safety net in times of crises that many white-owned businesses do.

In addition, African Americans continue to get infected and die from COVID-19 at rates more than 1.5 times their share of the population. '''On August 18, the CDC released data showing that Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians are experiencing hospitalizations at rates 4.5 to 5.5 times higher than non-Hispanic whites. And African Americans are dying at 2.4 times the white rate.'''

'''The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic show the clear legacy of slavery and racism in the US. Effectively, the black family in America has been left without a safety net, meaning that when crisis strikes—such as a pandemic— “the fall is precipitous”.'''

Federal government
On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws.

During the summer of 2020, after widespread protests of police brutality and racial injustices, Congress is looking to pass legislation that would establish a commission to study the impacts of slavery and make recommendations for reparations. Though the idea of reparations is not new to Congress, the current civil rights movement could sway policymakers to pass legislation surrounding reparations.

Cities

 * Chicago, Illinois: "In 2015, Chicago enacted a reparations ordinance covering hundreds of African Americans tortured by police from the 1970s to the 1990s. The law calls for $5.5 million in financial compensation, as well as hundreds of thousands more for a public memorial, and a range of assistance related to health, education and emotional well-being."
 * Evanston, Illinois: "The City Council of Evanston, Illinois, voted to allocate the first $10 million in tax revenue from the sale of recreational marijuana (which became legal in the state on January 1, 2020) to fund reparations initiatives that address the gaps in wealth and opportunity of black residents."
 * Asheville, North Carolina: The city council approved reparations on a 7-0 vote on July 14, 2020. "[B]udgetary and programmatic priorities may include but not be limited to increasing minority home ownership and access to other affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities, strategies to grow equity and generational wealth, closing the gaps in health care, education, employment and pay, neighborhood safety and fairness within criminal justice," the resolution reads. The resolution establishes the Community Reparations Commission which will make make concrete recommendations for programs and resources allocations to ultimately carry out the reparations. The Asheville City Council also voted unanimously on June 9, 2020 to remove two confederate monuments as a result of demands made by a group called "Black Asheville Demands"  and the work of the Racial Justice Coalition with led the push for the effort. The City Council meeting had so much community engagement public comment was extended for an extra hour beyond the normal meeting time.

Organizations and institutions

 * Georgetown University: "In 2016 [the university agreed] to give admissions preference to descendants of the 272 slaves[,] formally apologized for its role in slavery [and] [renamed] two buildings on its campus to acknowledge the lives of enslaved people". In April, 2019 students at Georgetown University voted to increase their tuition by $27.20 to benefit the descendants of the 272 slaves sold by the Jesuits who ran the school in 1838. The student led referendum was non-binding. Later that year, after further pressure and follow up from the Georgetown University Student Association  the university eventually moved forward with a similar proposal without the student's covering the cost with a tuition increase.
 * Princeton Theological Seminary: In 2019 the Seminary announced a $27 million commitment for various initiatives to recognize how it benefited from black slavery. This is the largest monetary commitment by an educational institution.
 * Virginia Theological Seminary: Set aside $1.7 million to pay reparations to descendants of African Americans who were enslaved to work on their campus.
 * Wachovia: Apologized for its connection to slavery in 2005.
 * JP Morgan Chase: Apologized for its connection to slavery in 2005.