Calaveras Enterprise

Reparations: A logistical nightmare




There has been talk of reparations for victims of slavery. Whether or not you agree, the problem is finding the victims. For something that ended 160 years ago and started a couple hundred years before that, this would be no small feat — a logistical nightmare.

The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 gave reparations to many of the 120,000 Japanese interned during WWII. Many Japanese lost properties, jobs, and their freedom during the three years they were locked up. But in this case, as opposed to slavery, the victims were a small number and easily identified. Many were still alive. The perpetrator of the injustice was easily identified. And it happened over just a few years — not hundreds, like slavery.

So, the test of reparations for slavery would be this: Prove you had descendants who were slaves. The test can’t be just being African American. After all, Barack Obama’s father was from Kenya. His mother was white. Even a genetic test won’t declare that you were a slave — it’s an estimate of your nationalities.

I’ve watched many episodes of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS. What is interesting is the amount of people who had no knowledge that their ancestors were slaves — or even their names. A few appeared white and had no knowledge that they were part Black. Probably all Blacks who were slaves are part white. Part of the problem comes with that because they were property, the owners didn’t have to list the slaves by names, as if they were cattle.

I’ve done my own deep dive on 23andMe and Ancestry. com. A Black lady, one of about 1,500 genetic relatives, contacted me some years ago asking how we were 4th cousins — about five generations separating her and one of my ancestors. The obvious culprit was my great, great, great-grandfather, who owned a farm in Tennessee. I couldn’t find that he owned any slaves. He couldn’t even read. He only had 20 acres of farmable land and another 120 acres of unimproved land — probably for grazing. He owned one horse, one milk cow, and five cattle. He grew corn and oats. His property was worth $400 — not exactly a plantation.

About 20% of households in the South during slavery owned almost 4 million slaves. Plantations grew labor-intensive tobacco and cotton that needed slaves. However, they occasionally rented out their slaves to other farmers. So, what happened? I can’t find that my ancestor even owned slaves. Did he rent them? There are no records.

Slavery is a jumbled-up, messy soup of lost and misspelled names and nationalities. Families were often split up and sold. Finding and giving reparations to a great, great, great-granddaughter of a slave is hard to figure. It would be a logistical nightmare to entangle every story. What if you’re currently only 25% Black and 75% white? Are you entitled to 25% compensation? How much? And where would the money come from?

I can barely get all the facts straight with my ancestors, and I know most of their names. Can you imagine millions of Americans trying to figure out if their ancestors were slaves?

There have been attempts at reparations. Affirmative action, scholarships, waiving fees, apologies, even removing offending monuments or renaming streets. Perhaps better yet is ending the practice of redlining. Redlining is an illegal practice in which “lenders avoid providing credit services to individuals living in certain communities because of their race, color, or national origin.” Although outlawed over 50 years ago by the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, it still exists.

Recently, Park National Bank, headquartered in Newark, Ohio, settled a $9 million lending discrimination suit. From at least 2015 to 2021 the company engaged in redlining practices. They were forced to make many reforms including having four loan officers assigned to majority Black/Hispanic neighborhoods, including at least one who spoke Spanish. First Merchants Bank, an Indiana state-chartered bank, also had to settle a redlining case in 2019 that happened between 2011 to 2017. They had to make similar reforms.

The Justice Department announced the launch of a new Combatting Redlining Initiative representing the department’s most aggressive and coordinated enforcement of redlining. Perhaps this is the most practical thing we can do.

All anyone wants is a fair shake — a level playing field. Getting a good education, buying a car, getting a decent job, owning your own home. Discrimination is real. It’s still with us. Reparations for slavery? Probably not. Just don’t ban the books or erase the history of slavery. Slavery may be gone, but its shadow still hangs over the country.

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