Hutton weighs in on reparations

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

Slaves to the past

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, says Will Hutton. But
however well intentioned, the plans for massive reparations to US
blacks will only deepen the racial divide

Special report: George Bush's America

Sunday August 26, 2001
The Observer

Slavery is America's incubus. It made racist hypocrites of the
founding fathers who drafted a Constitution and Bill of Rights that
proclaimed individual liberties for all as long as they were white,
knowing exactly what they were doing. It disfigured American society
for 250 years while it was practised, and for another 100 years after
it was banned because North and South alike turned a blind eye to the
idea of 'separate development' in the old Confederacy -the suffocating
discrimination of the Jim Crow laws that denied southern blacks civil
and social rights.

Its legacy hangs over every American inner city and every exchange
between black and white. With the Democrats now agreeing they will
champion up to $440 billion of reparations, and President Bush
threatening to boycott this week's UN conference in South Africa on
racism if reparations are on the agenda, slavery and its fall-out
promises to become the hottest, most contentious issue in American
politics -a debate that will poison not just US race relations but
whose backwash will affect us too.

It's not as though America has not already paid some dues. The Civil
War cost half a million lives -more than any other conflict the US has
been involved in. Then for 12 years the states of the old Confederacy
were militarily occupied by the North; the longest and most extensive
military occupation of one part of a Western country by another in
modern times. At the turn of the century various senators put up
reparations bills to offer every black some land on the same scale as
the early white settlers - 40 acres, $50 and a mule - but the bills
were all blocked by southern votes. The 1960s civil rights movement
brought the curtain down on the world of Jim Crow, and 30 years of
affirmative action has tried to redress the position. Bill Clinton
apologised - but still the issue has lost none of its sting.

The Democrats' last-minute conversion 10 days ago was acutely judged.
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations America (N'COBRA) has
been lobbying for an investigation into slavery and then legislation
for reparations for years, and has launched a suit against the
government. But the UN Conference was the catalyst. The Bush
administration's threatened boycott is easy to portray as racist, but
there is also hard cash at issue. Any US government signature on an
international declaration even remotely agreeing to reparations in
principle will damage its defence to N'COBRA's suit in court -maybe
make it impossible. But the politics are deadly; the Democrats can
confirm their black support, and the Republicans emerge as the
racists.

The sums at stake are enormous. If every American black got $50,000
the gross bill would be around £300bn. In the context of a 10-year tax
cut of $1.4 trillion this is affordable - just -but it would be the
largest reparations payment in history. But reparations on this scale
are not without precedent. Half a dozen Indian tribes have won
reparations from the government over the past 20 years; and the
tobacco industry has had to accept a $206bn liability after a
protracted law suit.

Jewish organisations, after their success in winning compensation from
German industry for slave labour during the Holocaust, are now suing
American companies who traded with the Hitler government. In this
compensation culture, with individual smokers winning $2bn damages
from US courts, N'COBRA's claim looks almost mild. And such is the
gathering moral and political force behind the movement -especially
now with Democrat support -and such the proven willingness of American
courts to accept the principle, it seems difficult to imagine that
N'COBRA is not going ultimately to win.

Your first instinct, probably like mine, is to side with the
reparations movement. There is even a conservative argument in favour,
neatly put by Charles Krauthammer in this month's Prospect, that the
quid pro quo for a generous reparations deal would be the end of white
guilt and black reproach - America could start dismantling the whole
apparatus of affirmative action in a Grand Compromise. It is a
seductive argument - but wrong. The response to the fall-out from
slavery cannot be a one-off payment as a result of one group in
society holding the rest to ransom. The correct response is surely to
make sure that the entire society sustains over time what the
political philosopher John Rawls calls an infrastructure of
justice -and invests in the educational, political and social
structures that give every member of society, black and white alike,
an equal chance to participate.

The paradox of reparations payments is that it will validate the
Balkanisation of America into minority groups whose membership becomes
at least as significant - arguably more significant - than membership
of the whole. Universal principles of association become decried. To
be black is to be more important than to be an American citizen.

The black reply is instantaneous; we were denied citizens' rights for
centuries, and racist abuse continues daily. Moreover the knowledge
that your ancestors were slaves is a kind of psychological torture.
White efforts in the Civil War or in the Civil Rights movement count
for nothing. We are owed; our debt should be discharged in cash.

The injustice is obvious, but allowing America to collapse into the
politics of competing minority groups scrambling for advantage at the
expense of each other lays the foundations of further injustice in
future for everyone. The fuck-you society succours and is succoured by
the same culture that legitimises reparations.

Nor is this just an American dilemma. There are plenty of
multiculturalists in Britain insisting that we should also conceive of
ourselves as a community of communities, conceding religious schools
to ethnic and racial minorities and all the other social instruments
that Balkanise and destroy a common civic culture. This is declared
New Labour policy.

But as Brian Barry argues in his powerful book, Culture and
Equality -probably the best egalitarian argument since Richard
Tawney - you can't create a fair society without a common civic
culture committed to some notion of liberal egalitarianism. Lose that,
and we are on the road to perdition - legitimising alike the noxious
politics of the British National Party and separatist Asian groups
protesting the universal validity of their own sub-culture.

As the clamour for compensation, reparations and minority group
'separate development' with their own religious schools grows, we have
to be clear-headed. A society can only hold together if it stands by
universal egalitarian values and an universal infrastructure of
justice -and it is within those we design our response to racism. The
road to hell is paved with good intentions.