From the point of view of some black and other liberal activists, the case for reparations flowing to black Americans seems compelling. Early in US history, many blacks were brought to North America, and other places such as Brazil, and the Caribbean through the Atlantic Slave Trade. Like all slavery, which has been practiced almost everywhere on Earth at one time or another, the “Atlantic Slave Trade” was, of course, despicable and horrific. But US intellectuals and activists, mostly white liberals, have done black Americans a great disservice by pretending that the African Transatlantic slave experience was unique and indescribably worse than the slave experiences of many other peoples over time and even of blacks in other places.
First, the Arab slave trade of blacks went on much longer than the Atlantic slave trade and involved far more black victims. Mohammed’s original mosque was actually built with black slave labor. The Arabic word for slave is “abeed,” which is also the Arabic word for black people. Mohammed himself had black slaves, and for centuries the holy city of Mecca was a central hub for trading African slaves. Well-healed Arab merchants would travel to Mecca to meet their obligation of the Haj (traveling to Mecca) and would often buy and sell African slaves while there. Iran did not even abolish slavery until 1929. Some Arabic and African countries continue to practice slavery until this day, and Muslim Arabs in Sudan have been hunting down and shooting black Africans for many years.
Mohammed era Arab scholars had a deplorable and dehumanizing view of black people. I am not even comfortable repeating all the characterizations – they are so extreme. To give just one mild illustration, Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980–1037), the most famous and influential philosopher/scientist in Islam, described Blacks as “people who are by their very nature slaves.” He wrote: “All African women are prostitutes, and the whole race of African men are abeed (slave) stock.” So, the first question in even considering reparations for blacks is whether the liberal apparent hunger for social justice extends to Muslim Arabs, who continue to enslave and shoot black people even today or is limited to wealth redistribution schemes aimed only at white people in the US.
For the sake of historical completion, it is important to note that slavery was practiced almost everywhere on Earth at one time or another. Lacking historical context many Americans do not know how common slavery was throughout the world not so long ago. The ancient Greeks took slaves. Indeed a significant percentage of the population of classical Athens, well over 10%, consisted of slaves. Alexander the Great took slaves. The Egyptian pharaohs used slaves to build the pyramids. Everyone knows of the enslavement of the Jews by the Egyptians, recounted in the Old Testament. This was the story of Moses. The Romans took many slaves – often of German or Germanic ethnicity. Few people know that one of the reasons Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March in 44 BC, is that Caesar had been so brutal and rapacious in slaughtering, oppressing, and enslaving the Celts and the Germans that the Roman Senate effectively viewed him almost as a war criminal (to use a modern concept). In point of historical fact, the US and the UK were amongst the first countries to outlaw and ban slavery as an international crime and ten times more white Americans than black Americans fought to end slavery during the civil war. Again, some Arab and African countries are still practicing slavery today. Sadly, some would argue that the US is currently participating in a giant slave trade, facilitated by Mexican drug cartels involving Hispanic women and children who come to the US in the hope of finding the American dream only to end up the play things of pedophiles and other depraved elites. We are currently engaged in a kind of slave trade, but it does not involve black Americans.
In light of the near universality of slavery, it does not make logical sense to have a reparations program that addresses only a thin slice of historical slavery, even as to blacks. If you are going to seek reparations for the horrors of slavery against black people, Muslims and Arabs, who were so much slower to abolish slavery than whites, should be amongst your first priority. Yet, most American leftists appear not even to be aware of centuries of Arabic slave trading of black Africans. They never mention it.
Second, any program for reparations would have an almost impossible time identifying which person should pay and which person should receive payments. Many black Americans came to the US after slavery was abolished. For example, all the Haitians trying to come to the US now have no historical claim to be paid reparations by white Americans. The Haitians have had their own independence from white people since 1804, after murdering all the white Frenchmen, not Americans, on the island. Blacks have thus run Haiti as a free and independent country since before the American Civil War. It would make no sense at all to have modern Haitian refugees receive reparation payments: they never suffered a particular injury at the hands of the US, unless they are going to completely reverse themselves now and claim – like Puerto Rico does – that they might have blossomed under white American rule. The entire concept becomes incoherent quickly. Same for more recent African immigrants. Although whites discovered and developed oil exploration in Nigeria, it makes no sense for rich Nigerians who came to America in recent times to receive reparations because they happen to have dark skin. That would be both racist and completely disconnected from any historical wrongdoing.
What about Spaniards and Portuguese who engaged in the black slave trade, bringing their black slaves to Central and South America, where many of them were wiped out. Modern Hispanics are generally a mix between White Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and adventurers and various native American stock, such as Incas and Aztecs. Are Hispanic Americans going to pay reparations to black Americans because their ancestors were part white, and they engaged in slavery?
Third, now let’s talk about the whites. At the time of the Civil War, only 6% of Southerners owned slaves. If you include the whole country only about 1.4% of the entire country owned slaves. So, 98.6 % of whites did not own slaves and never profited from slave labor. Should the descendants of all the whites who did not own slaves pay reparations to black Americans, many of whom are not even descendants of slaves in the US? Moreover, most white countries did not participate in the African slave trade at all. For example, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Baltic states, Poland, Germany (with very limited exceptions), Serbia, Croatia and so on, had no involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Millions of people from these countries came to the US after the Civil War. Their ancestors had no role whatsoever in the African slave trade. Why should they pay reparations – just because their skin is lighter? To paraphrase Justice Scalia, the fact that someone who looked vaguely like me long ago did something wrong to someone who looked vaguely like you is not a basis for you having any claim against me.
It also bears emphasizing that many white people came to the US under conditions of bondage. Indeed, the number of white indentured servants, who came from prisons, debtor prisons, or had to work off the cost of their passage, exceeded the number of black slaves in the original American colonies in the 18th century. Of course, indentured servitude is not as bad as chattel slavery, because the indentured servant could eventually work his way out of servitude, whereas slaves had to wait until Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Other whites came to America to escape persecution and even execution, such as the Scots fleeing from the English and still other groups of whites came to America to escape a kind of feudal serfdom, which made them something akin to slaves on the lands of their masters. This would be true of some Russians and Prussian Germans. Many of these white immigrants were anti-slavery and helped bring an end to the deplorable institution in America. White marines, both American and British, also fought to end slavery in North Africa when they battled the Barbery pirates – Muslim pirates engaged in slavery along the Northern coast of Africa. The term leather-neck for US marines actually arises from the battles between the US Navy and Muslim pirates operating out of Libya. The marines wore high thick leather neck guards to protect their throats from being slit in battle. Do descendants of these brave marines owe reparations to descendants of slaves they rescued, because the marines were white?
By now, many Americans are also of mixed race or ethnicity. It is estimated that about 60% of blacks have white blood in them. An objective analysis quickly shows that such a reparation scheme would be – as constitutional scholars put it — both under inclusive and over inclusive. It would fail to pay some persons who might have claims, punish and tax other people whose ancestors never participated in slavery, and overpay persons with no just historic claim for having suffered wrong by or in the US. The scheme would also be completely incoherent. Would lighter skinned blacks have to pay reparations to darker skinned blacks? What happens with mixed race families: do white or Hispanic members pay reparations to their own black relatives? Does a poor Appalachian white pay reparations to a Nigerian studying engineering at MIT? The concept simply cannot work.
Fourth, the notion of black reparations is based on an economic fallacy – namely that nations that engaged in the black “Atlantic Slave Trade” ended up richer and better off as a result of the legacy of slavery. Some falsely claim that the slaves somehow enriched the society making it more prosperous. But that is simply false as a matter of historical record. The per capita income of countries that had no involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade, such as Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland is just as high as the per capita income of the US. Also, the US did not become rich off of slavery. The abomination of slavery and the Civil War to end it, devastated the US, killing as many as 1.5 million Americans – far more than died in all the wars since then. In truth, one can convincingly argue that the South lost the Civil War, despite having the better generals and fighters, because their economic system – based on feudal plantation slavery – could not meet the needs of one of the first modern wars. The South simply could not keep up with the industrialized North’s production of cannons, rifles, and other implements of war. Far from enriching the South, slavery impoverished the South and destroyed it for generations, giving rise to Democratic Party monstrosities such as the KKK, Jim Crow South, segregated schools, and many other anti-black institutions championed by the Democrat Party for generations.
Fifth, and finally, anyone honestly assessing the pros and cons – not of slavery for Gods sakes – but of black people being brought to the US, must look at both sides of the so called balance sheet. That the Transatlantic Slave Trade was vile and horrific needs no more attestation. But how have black people done in America? Quite simply, they are the richest and most successful black group on Earth. The median income for black American households is approximately $47,000 per year. The median income for sub-Saharan Africans is about $900 a year. In Haiti the median income is about $1,100 a year, even though Haitians have run their run country for more than 200 years. Again, for American blacks it is about $47,000 per year.
Many Sub-Saharan African tribes did not have a written language or metal working until Muslim Arabs migrated to the South from North Africa. An example of how one group the Bushmen lived in Africa can be seen in the movie, “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” In that movie, a charismatic and energetic Bushman is intrigued by a glass coke bottle that fell from the sky (airplane), because his isolated tribe never invented glassblowing. In contrast black Americans have achieved every success. We have had a half-black President elected twice with significant white support. We have had two black Secretaries of State. We have had three black Supreme Court Justices. We currently have a part black Vice President, and a black woman was just nominated to be a Supreme Court Justice. We have had a black HUD Secretary. Black Americans are increasingly distinguishing themselves in every walk of life from economics to political commentary, to literature and music, to sports and entertainment, to political decision making, and beyond. At this point, most black Americans agree that it is fair to say they have equal access to the meritocratic system that is freedom loving, capitalist, and constitutionally based America. Black America finally has the full banquet table of American opportunity open to it, so long as we do not destroy the American Republic by copying bankrupt and immoral socialist redistribution schemes. A reparation regime that taxes and punishes the wrong people to give money to the wrong people cannot be viewed as a form of social justice. It would be a form of social injustice, and it has no place in modern America.
Copyright 2002 By Paul H. Beattie. All rights reserved.
Notes from the Secular Right 