I’m going to be honest. There is something a bit odd about the comparison between #reparations for slavery and reparations for Holocaust victims.
Besides the fact that almost every German reparation to Jewish victims were only to those who had survived the Holocaust, one has to look to the specificities of the Reparations Agreement between West Germany and Israel and how the reparations were calculated in the 1950s.
The primary reparation was not for the slave labor of Jewish Holocaust victims, but for the cost of resettlement of over 500,000 survivors in Israel. The Israeli government, which at the time was in a deep economic crisis following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, calculated that absorption of at least 500,000 survivors had cost 3,000 dollars per person ($28,958 in today dollars), so they were owed 1.5 billion dollars ($14,500,000,000 in today’s dollars) by (then-West) Germany. The question of a potential 6 billion dollars of property stolen from Jewish citizens of Germany and other states was placed on the backburner. The negotiation was carried out between Israel, West Germany and the Claims Conference, a non-profit which has worked for decades to secure property stolen from Jewish victims by Nazis.
Reparations have since been secured by the Claims Conference for actual slave labor victims: the Article 2 Fund, which is an income-limited lifetime pension to survivors of Nazi slave camps or those who fled into hiding from Nazi persecution; and the Program for Former Slave and Forced Laborers, which is a one-time payment whose application deadline has since expired.
But I wonder which reparations method we are talking about when German reparations to Jewish Holocaust victims are invoked for reparations for American slavery.
Because if we’re comparing to the Israel-West Germany Reparations Agreement of 1951, this would be almost equivalent to the United States having deported all African-American formerly-enslaved people to Liberia after 1865, and decades (or over a century?) later agreeing to pay reimbursement to Liberia of $3,000 for every person deported. Reasonably, Liberia, like Israel, would have successfully righted its economy (and maybe did better by Native Liberian citizens rather than treating them as second-class citizens prior to the 1980 coup).
By comparison, our ancestors who survived slavery lost their chance for “40 acres and a mule” as recompense when General Sherman’s order was overruled.
Even Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Case for Reparations” rests more on compensating the survivors of Jim Crow and redlining rather than slavery.
So even after reading NCOBRA.org, I feel that if we’re going to specify the expanse of reparations for slavery, we will have to collect the family-tree receipts of those blood ancestors who were imported to this continent and their children who lived for 249 years under this regime (numbering over 4 million emancipated by 1865), and specify a price tag for their lifelong labor and for their familial losses.
Thanks to DNA and the few extant historical records we can obtain about historic plantation and slave market records, we may be closer to that goal, but as of this moment very few of us, like Aamir “Questlove” Jones’ family from the Clotilde in Alabama, the Quander family of Virginia-Maryland and the South Carolina descendants of Scipio Vaughn, can claim to know the name of an ancestor who was imported to this continent through a port of call like Charleston, Savannah, Baltimore or New Orleans, who may be the first to possess indelible receipts for reparations from this government.
But we definitely have millions of living, named ancestors who were victimized by white mob violence, Jim Crow, redlining and general American segregation in the last century, and reparations must happen for them.
If I’m in error, I’m open to comments.
