Tag: slavery

No Math Behind San Francisco’s $5M-per-Person Reparations Proposal

No mathematical calculations justify a San Francisco committee’s recent proposal to provide $5 million in reparations to long-term black residents of the city, according to a report by the Washington Post.

As Breitbart News reported last month, the committee, formed in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter movement, “proposed that each long-term black resident of the city receive $5 million, though California entered the Union as a free state in 1850.”

The proposal came despite the fact that the city is facing a staggering budget deficit as businesses and residents have fled.

Now, the Washington Post reports, “conservatives” (among others) are questioning the price tag, which was largely invented out of thin air:

“There wasn’t a math formula,” said Eric McDonnell, chair of the reparations committee and the principal of Peacock Partnerships, a San Francisco-based consulting firm. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”

…

San Francisco’s $5 million proposal, magnitudes larger than amounts being discussed in other communities, has drawn intense backlash from conservatives who lambaste the idea as financially ruinous for a city with an annual budget of $14 billion that is still recovering economically from the pandemic. The proposal doesn’t explain who would qualify, but if even a fraction of the city’s 50,000 Black residents met the criteria, it would consume a huge amount of the city’s annual budget.

Separately, the State of California has its own reparations committee, which recently considered a more modest proposal to pay each black descendant of slavery up to $233,000 in reparations.

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The first legally recognized slaveholder in American History was a black man

When you hear or read the term ‘slavery’, the first thing that would readily pop into your mind is a black man being abused and used by white man. After all, this is the battle cry of the black community whenever they likened racism to slavery. While this may be true of most slave cases, do you know that the first legally recognized slaveholder in America was not a white but a black man?

A servant who became the master

Anthony Johnson was one of the first indentured servants who came to Virginia in 1619. The concept of ‘indentured servants’ was a concept introduced by the administrators of Virginia so that those without money can enter the New World by providing free labor to their benefactor who paid for their entry. Indentured servants will only work for a set period of time and they will be free afterward.

Anthony worked out his indenture period and together with his wife Mary, bought their way out of bondage. Anthony was fortunate enough to eventually acquire his own land. A former indentured servant having his own land was practically non-existent during that time. Since he and his wife were no strangers to hard work they were able to successfully grow their livestock and livelihood. By the 1650s their property had grown to 250 acres, a rare feat for an ex-servant.

Considering that Anthony owned his own plantation, he employed five Africans as indentured servants and one of them was John Casor. John completed his servant-period by laboring for seven years without pay. However, when John asked Anthony for his freedom, the ex-servant-turned-freeman (and then owner himself) refused.

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The History of Slavery You Probably Weren’t Taught in School

In “Recognizing Hard Truths About America’s History With Slavery,” published by FEE on February 11, 2023, I urged an assessment of slavery that includes its full “historical and cultural contexts” and that does not neglect “uncomfortable facts that too often are swept under the rug.”

The central notion of both that previous essay and this follow-up is that slavery was a global norm for centuries, not a peculiar American institution. America is not exceptional because of slavery in our past; we may, however, be exceptional because of the lengths to which we went to get rid of it. In any event, it is an age-old tragedy abolished in most places only recently (in the past two centuries or so). As British historian Dan Jones notes in Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages,

Slavery was a fact of life throughout the ancient world. Slaves—people defined as property, forced to work, stripped of their rights, and socially ‘dead,’ could be found in every significant realm of the age. In China, the Qin, Han, and Xin dynasties enforced various forms of slavery; so too did ancient rulers of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and India.

Milton Meltzer’s Slavery: A World History is both comprehensive and riveting in its presentation. He too recognizes the ubiquity of human bondage:

The institution of slavery was universal throughout much of history. It was a tradition everyone grew up with. It seemed essential to the social and economic life of the community, and man’s conscience was seldom troubled by it. Both master and slave looked upon it as inevitable…A slave might be of any color—white, black, brown, yellow. The physical differences did not matter. Warriors, pirates, and slave dealers were not concerned with the color of a man’s skin or the shape of his nose.

The indigenous populations of both North and South America, pre-European settlement, also practiced slavery. Meltzer writes,

The Aztecs also made certain crimes punishable by enslavement. An offender against the state—a traitor, say—was auctioned off into slavery, with the proceeds going into the state treasury…Among the Mayans, a man could sell himself or his children into slavery…The comparatively rich Nootkas of Cape Flattery (in what is now northwestern Washington state) were notorious promoters of slaving. They spurred Vancouver tribes to attack one another so that they could buy the survivors.

Perhaps because it conflicts with race-based political agendas, slavery of Africans by fellow Africans is one of those uncomfortable truths that often flies under the radar. Likewise, industrial-scale slavery of Africans by nearby Arabs as well as Arab slavery of Europeans are historical facts that are frequently ignored. Both subjects are explored in The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam by Simon Webb and Slavery and Slaving in African History by Sean Stilwell.

Slavery cannot be justified or excused by enlightened people, but it can be studied, explained, put in context, and understood—if all the facts of it are in the equation. It’s a painful topic, to be sure, which is even more reason to leave nothing out and to prevent political agendas from getting in the way.

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Black Reparations Inspiring a Multicolored Pandora’s Box of Intersectional Demands

Until a few years ago, the idea of paying financial reparations to descendants of African slaves was dismissed as a fringe idea.   

Now a notion that President Barack Obama once rejected as impractical is becoming public policy. California offers a dramatic example as officials there review a proposal that could pay in excess of $1 million each to some black residents, while more than a dozen U.S. municipalities are moving ahead with their own race-based programs to redress the legacies of slavery.  

But the reparations movement is bigger and wider than that. Its rise in the United States has inspired a global movement committed to redressing perceived historical injustices to all manner of aggrieved groups. The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations – and Roman Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning colonization, slavery, and genocide in the New World. Scholars, activists and legislators across the United States and Europe and in former colonies are drawing on the logic and language of the black reparations movement and international human rights law to make the claim that their causes also deserve atonement and compensation for past wrongs.   

Some warn that reparations open a controversial and bottomless Pandora’s Box, given history’s long catalogue of official policies that criminalized or discriminated against sex workers, polygamists, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, and the Roma, among a vast array of potential claimants.  

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Boston Mayor Formally Announces Reparations Task Force

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced the members of the city’s Reparations Task Force at the Museum of African American History during a press conference on Tuesday. The task force will study the impact of slavery on Boston and eventually come out with a plan to pay cash reparations to black citizens. Other leftist states and cities — including California — have advanced plans to pay reparations after forming similar task forces.

Mayor Wu, a Democrat, said the program will help to build a better Boston for everyone. “This conversation has been generations in the making, and we are appointing a multigenerational task force to reflect the full breadth of that history and struggle,” Wu said. “We will be another step closer to reconciling our complicated history with our vision for a more connected, more inclusive, more equitable Boston for all of us.”

Boston’s task force will propose reparation payments for those who can document that they are descendants of slaves. Other municipalities have debated on paying reparations to all black citizens regardless of whether they descend from slaves, though Boston has laid out that requirement.

The announcement comes two months after the Boston City Council unanimously agreed to create the reparations committee, The Boston Globe reported. Boston’s reparations task force will study “Boston’s participation in slavery,” and asses “the city’s attempts to repair the harm done by this practice; and then making recommendations on what forms repair could take.”

Five commission members were required to be “descendants of American freedmen, or Africans enslaved in the United States.”

The task force is hoping to complete its work and come up with a payment plan by 2024.

“We want to make sure that we’re grounded in the community,” Joseph D. Feaster Jr., a former Boston NAACP president and member of the commission. “We want to be transparent, we want to be inclusive, and we want to be thorough, and we want to be intentional.”

In announcing the task force last June, Boston — which was the epicenter of the abolition movement prior to the American Civil War — issued a formal apology for slavery and “the death, misery, and deprivation that this practice caused.”

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Disney+ Cartoon Demands Reparations And More With ‘Slaves Built This Country’ Song

Disney has gone for woke yet again with a recent episode of the cartoon series “Proud Family” — which featured kids singing a song about reparations that America “owes” to black Americans and about how “slaves built this country.”

The recent episode that aired on Disney+, titled “Louder and Prouder,” reviews the history of Juneteenth when the kids discover their town’s founder was a slave-owner. The song opens with the line, “This country was built on slavery — which means slaves built this country” — and that line was repeated over and over throughout.

“We the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering,” the song continued. “And continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in a systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.”

In the cartoon, that last line was punctuated by four black students glaring while the only white student on the stage with them held a sign that read “still has not atoned for.”

“Slaves built this country,” they shouted again, claiming, “We made your families rich,” as they listed plantation owners, northern bankers, New England ship-owners, the Founding Fathers, and current senators among those who had profited on the backs of slaves.

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University Removes Slave-Owning Benefactor’s Name, His Family Demands Their $51 Million Back

If your name isn’t good enough for a college, is your money? Such a question has been raised over a now-deleted donator in Virginia.

The situation dates back to 1846, when a man named Thomas C. Williams attended Richmond College. In the 1880s, he served as a trustee.

More from the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

After his death, his family made a gift to [the college] that helped establish the law school. When Richmond College became the University of Richmond in 1920, it began referring to the law school as the T.C. Williams School of Law.

That was then, this is now. In September of 2022, the University of Richmond board voted unanimously to change the name to the University of Richmond School of Law.

At the time, President Kevin Hallock and the board issued a letter:

We recognize that some may be disappointed or disagree with this decision. We also recognize the role the Williams family has played here and respect the full and complete history of the institution.

He may have played an important part, but according to tax records, T.C.’s successful tobacco business owned 25 to 40 slaves.

Six months before T.C.’s booting, half a dozen campus buildings were re-labeled. Gone were references to those who’d possessed slaves — including Robert Ryland, the school’s first president in 1840.

On March 26th, a new policy was instated:

No building, program, professorship, or other entity at the University should be named for a person who directly engaged in the trafficking and/or enslavement of others or openly advocated for the enslavement of people.

Out with the old, in with the new. But T.C.’s family wants their man’s old money back: If he’s unworthy of recognition for his efforts, they figure, his cash should be no good as well.

T.C.’s great-great-grandson explained in a letter to the president.

If suddenly his name is not good enough for the University, then isn’t the proper ethical and, indeed, virtuous action to return the benefactor’s money with interest? … [I]s it not a form of fraud to induce money from a benefactor, and then discredit the benefactor after he is long dead? Surely the Williams family would not have given a penny to the University knowing that the University would later dishonor the family.

It was a might more than a penny; Rob has done the math:

At a six-percent compounded interest over 132 years, [T.C.’s] gift to the law school alone is now valued at over $51 million, and this does not include many other substantial gifts from my family to the University.

Bottom line:

The ethical and virtuous decision is clear. Return the money.

Rob told The College Fix his family has sent President Kevin “20 (unreturned) emails asking for the evidence” regarding their ancestor’s slavery connection.

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Chair of California’s Reparations Task Force Says Black People are Really Owed $1 Million Each

A few weeks ago, I reported that a nine-member California Reparations Task Force has estimated that black state residents could receive more than $223,000 each in reparations for the enduring economic effects of racism and slavery.

To put that amount in perspective, it has been estimated that it would cost around $569 billion to compensate the 2.5 million black Californians. That total is more than California’s $512.8billion expenditure in 2021 – which included funding for schools, hospitals, universities, and other civilization-essential services.

Now, the chair of California’s Reparations Task Force has said that black people are really owed $1 million each for “harms.”

Speaking with the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Kamilah Moore said her task force found that California’s redlining housing practices targeting black Americans between 1933 and 1977 has had a direct effect on today’s homeless community.

Dubbing housing discrimination as one of the ‘five state sanction atrocities’ against black people, the panel initially recommended to California lawmakers that the state pay up $223,200 to each black resident.

Moore previously said economists on the panel estimated that black Californians descended from slaves were owed $1 million per person in reparations.

. . . . Prior to the task force’s first public meeting last month, Moore discussed the group’s work with economists on how to put a value on the ‘atrocities’ that impacted the black community.

‘They came up with $127,000 per year of the life expectancy gap between Black and white Californians,’ Moore said during a panel at Harvard. ‘That comes to just under $1 million for each Black Californian descended from slaves.’

Moore noted that ‘California can’t pay all that,’ so the task force will be spending the next six months hammering out an adequate value and payment method to recommend to state lawmakers.’

So, I guess the $223,000 each is a compromise we should be grateful for.

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Reckless Reparations Reckoning

The last time racial reparations made the major news was on the eve of September 11, 2001 attacks. The loss of 3,000 Americans, which for a time fueled a new national unity, quickly dispelled the absurdities of the reparation movement, and turned our attention toward more existential issues. 

Now the idea is back in vogue again. Here are 10 reasons why the nation’s—and especially California’s—discussions of reparatory payouts are dangerous in a multiracial state, and why reparations are not viable either in an insolvent state or a bankrupt nation at large.

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Black activists hold armed rally to demand reparations in Virginia

Multiple BLM-affiliated groups held an armed rally in Richmond, Virginia demanding reparations for descendants of former slaves.

Video showed BLM757, BLMRVA, and the Fred Hampton Gun Club participating in the rally on Monday, armed with rifles in the gun-free zone of the State Capitol.

Police did not enforce the gun-free zone. However, the group complied when police told the armed activists to move back toward a sidewalk because they did not have a protest permit. 

According to independent journalist and documentarian Ford Fischer, the group was advocating for reparations as well as the passage of HR40, a congressional bill to study the subject.

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