The Crystal Ball of Reparations
By W. F. Twyman, Jr.
If we could run a social experiment and award unearned assets to a large group of adult men, what would we discover? Would we discover that a wealth gap had been closed over generations? Or, would we discover something more…disappointing? Join me this evening as we step into my history laboratory and run a reparations simulation.
Imagine that a group of people has been removed from 18,000 160-acre parcels of land in Reparations County, Virginia. Now that the land has been emptied, the assets are ready for redistribution to the lucky few. The social engineers at the state capitol decide upon a lottery. All adult males resident in the state for at least three years are eligible to draw in this lottery. To no one’s surprise, 100% of eligible men enter the lottery. One-fifth of the adult male population is instantly enriched with newly bestowed parcels of land. (Virginia is 20% black for the curious.) There are no strings attached to the parcels. One can move upon the land, rent out the land or sell the land. Your call as a lottery recipient. In today’s dollars, a $150,000 cash transfer to a random cross-section of adult men.
In my simulation, I am able to track the life stories and experiences of these lucky guys. Let’s call them reparations recipients. The land was distributed in the year 1832. What happened to the fortunes of the reparations recipients by 1850, 1870, and 1880? Was the utopia of a closed wealth gap ushered in? Were the children and grandchildren of the lucky reparations recipients now living high status lives in Reparations County?
Although the reparations recipients were richer than those four-fifths of the population denied reparations by 1850, move the dial further out to 1870 and 1880. What does one see through the microscope in my lab? There is no evidence that the lives of the children have improved. The kids are just as illiterate as the kids of the four-fifths who did not receive reparations. There is no difference in occupational status between the children of the reparations recipients and those who did not receive reparations handouts in 1832. No difference, no change.
And how about the grandchildren in 1880? The grand children of the reparations beneficiaries are no more literate than the grand children of those who did not receive reparations of land. In fact, the grandchildren of reparations recipients are less likely to be enrolled in school than the grand children of those did not receive reparations.
My lab experiment is based upon a real account of what happened in Cherokee County, Georgia in 1832. Land was distributed out to the eligible 20% by lottery. And the substantial infusion of $150,000 in today’s dollars did nothing to change the social status of families in Georgia by 1880. It was as if the 1832 great lottery was for naught. See The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, p. 270.
Conclusion: Some will argue that we must award reparations for American slavery. Remedy the lingering effects of slavery and all that, you know. History suggests that, once the champagne bottles have been popped and the money has been well spent, nothing will have changed for the children and grandchildren of reparations recipients in fifty year’s time. There is no reason to believe the descendants of American slavery today are immune from the human failings of adult male residents in Cherokee County, Georgia from 1832 to 1880.
Reparations for American slavery…some ideas are bad.
This is very interesting. Most of the pushback from reparations is about political feasibility; how do you build a coalition to support giving what would be trillions of dollars to ADOS (American Descendents of Slaves) Blacks over other groups? But also, if you believe that white people are so racist that they'll vote against their own interest, why would they then support a massive raparations project? Particularly on the basis of past white racism/slavery when most white people today are descended from immigrants in the 19th and 20th century and not slave owners in the south?
And even if some white people in Georgia were descended from slave owners, why would you think they'd be billionaires 400 years later just because their ancestors owned slaves?
The fixation on reparations is based on this false idea that we would have all this money TODAY instead of a sizable majority of Blacks being working class. In fact, the worse atrocity for freed slaves was being denied work by racist whites and the lack of interest accepting Black people as American citizens as soon as slavery ended.
If descendents of slave owners dont have money, why would descendents of slaves have it 200 years later?
The consistent problem facing the Black poor today is being denied work opportunities! The deindustrialization of the 60s and 70s put a lot of Black families into poverty!
I'd never heard about the GA land lotteries, wow!