Compensating those who have experienced harm, financial or otherwise, is something the U.S. federal government does all the time. Need this then be commonly considered so outlandish, atypical, or offensive when it is called “reparations” and is proposed for well-documented, race-based harms? This is the primary question addressed in a recent article by Linda J. Bilmes and Cornell William Brooks titled “Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans.” It should be required reading for anyone considering whether such reparative proposals have merit, and certainly for those advocating for reparations for the effects of slavery and racism in the United States.
Bilmes’ and Brooks’ article accomplishes four main things: 1) it provides a “taxonomy of illustrative harms” that have affected Black people in the United States, 2) it summarizes examples of U.S. government programs that involve “reparative compensation”, 3) it describes the commonly articulated obstacles to providing reparative compensation for the effects of slavery and racism in the United States, and 4) it highlights the ways in which the characteristics of existing programs prove that the traditionally identified obstacles to reparative compensation for Black Americans are in fact no obstacles at all.
One of the most useful components of “Normalizing Reparations” is the concise summary presented of “illustrative harms” to Black Americans that have occurred since the Civil War (pp. 32-39). The harms enumerated specifically are housing related, education related, and wage/employment/labor related. Rather than reiterate the obvious conceit that slavery was wrong and harmed Black Americans, the authors describe the history since the Civil War of these three large categories of injustice against Black Americans. This approach serves not only to show that the racial harms experienced by Black people are significant and interrelated, but that they have compounded over time, proving for the skeptical that the negative after-effects of slavery still reverberate and are being amplified across generations.
The next large section of the paper presents an “audit” of the various historical, and currently operating, U.S. government programs that deal with reparative compensation for harms (pp. 39-51). Though in government parlance these initiatives are typically not termed “reparations,”[1] the programs that enact reparative compensation for harms are very numerous and well-established. Bilmes and Brooks note that such programs include compensation for harms experienced by
coal miners; farmers whose crops have failed; workers whose companies have gone bankrupt; victims of terrorism and natural disasters; people exposed to nuclear radiation; military veterans; individuals wrongfully convicted in the legal system; people denied earnings on tribal lands; fishermen facing depleted fish stocks; individuals harmed by pesticides, toxins, vaccines, or medical devices; workers and businesses affected by U.S. trade agreements; depositors in banks; and numerous other categories. (p. 40).
In essence, it is exceedingly commonplace for the federal government to make reparative compensation. “The U.S. government often decides that society (as a whole) will be better off if it compensates for certain losses or hardships that individuals have experienced while contributing to the nation” (pp. 40-41). Among the examples treated more exhaustively are the robust government programs of reparative agricultural subsidies, nuclear testing exposure compensation, pension insurance, and restitutive compensation for abridgments to native land rights.
Early on in their “taxonomy of illustrative harms,” Bilmes and Brooks enumerate three traditional contentions about the harms that Black Americans have experienced that are commonly “used to argue that reparations are incalculable, impractical, and if not impossible to administer, the [at least] too expensive” (p. 32). These stated obstacles include “the assumed distance between the slavery of the past and the present conditions of Black Americans, the documented breadth of racial harms experienced by Blacks since 1619, and the painful depth of those harms” (p. 32). At the same time, they note polling that suggests that opposition to reparations “is due primarily to doubt over government’s ability to administer reparations, feasibility of valuing slavery’s harms, and the belief that Black Americans are undeserving or are already treated equally” (31). Enumerating these objections clearly enables the very logical rebuttals of these objections which are woven throughout the article.
Though indeed the “illustrative harms” are grievous,[2] they are neither incalculable nor are they too large to address. Government reparative compensation programs have regularly been initiated before knowing the full scope of harms and have allowed for the expansion of compensation when new harms are discovered or documented. Such was the case with the various initiatives that compensated for harms as the result of nuclear testing and research (pp. 43-46). These programs have amounted to compensation in the tens of billions of dollars, but some initiatives have involved far greater sums including hundreds of billions of dollars in agricultural reparative compensation (pp. 41-42), and trillions which were awarded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (p. 40). The government administers hundreds of such programs successfully and is certainly well positioned to administer similar programs addressing harms to Black Americans. Moreover, many of these programs compensate next-of-kin or descendants[3] for harms done to previous generations,[4] and regularly address issues in the far past, not merely those in the immediate present.[5]
In short, “hundreds of federal, state and local programs provide some combination of restitution, compensation, and rehabilitation to victims of harms” and “millions of Americans are eligible for compensation due to personal injury, illness, disease, economic losses, exposure to toxins, disasters, and other reasons” (p. 40). “Given that Black Americans have long been deprived of the ability to accumulate wealth, [the authors] argue that it is consistent with precedent for the country to choose to secure a more… fair society by providing compensation to Black Americans for unpaid contributions to the country and in recognition of the suffering endured” (p. 41). Further, “by acknowledging the precedent for reparative compensation in parallel, but nonracial circumstances, it is easier to imagine and to articulate the case for reparations related to slavery and its aftermath” (p. 41). As the authors state in their conclusion, “the norm, precedent, and federal expertise are all in place to make reparatory compensation a reality for Black Americans—now” (p. 52). Bilmes’ and Brooks’ article is an excellent resource deserving of your time and attention.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
[1] Though there are exceptions, including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission program (p. 41).
[2] The “illustrative harms” section of “Normalizing Reparations” (pp. 32-39) certainly proves that the common argument that “Black Americans are undeserving or are already treated equally” (p. 31) is utterly without merit.
[3] E.g. programs for terrorism related harms (p. 42).
[4] E.g. nuclear weapons testing compensation programs (p. 43, 45), and Native land rights compensation (p. 48).
[5] Though as we see in “Normalizing Reparations,” the harms done to Black Americans are by no means sequestered to the distant past.
