Debate over slave reparations only stirs up controversy, bad feelings - The "Right" Stuff

You may have recently seen the debate over slave reparations surface again in major media sources. Lawyers representing the individuals seeking reparations have made the rounds, stopping by all of the major morning talk shows and most of the news magazines as well. There seems to be plenty of buzz around the issue this time around, however. Despite the fact that I cannot find a single person at Hopkins that thinks families of former slaves should receive compensation - black, white, female, male, conservative or liberal - there seems to be enough of a contingency of people in favor of these reparations to warrant a legitimate response.

Let me take a moment to frame the debate. On one side of the issue are the individuals who filed this absurd lawsuit, represented by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann. These people claim that prominent businesses, such as Fleet Boston and Aetna, profited from slave labor exploited at the time. While the exact contribution is unclear, the lawyers representing the 85 million African-Americans in the U.S. seem to have settled on a preliminary number: $1.4 trillion. They arrive at this by simply taking an estimate of the raw hours of labor and applying a modern wage scale - adjusting for inflation, of course.

On the other side of the debate is everyone with at least half of their brain intact. This select group, including yours truly, cites the fact that it is illegal to retroactively enforce laws on individuals or businesses that acted within the law during their respective periods of operation. Let's, for a moment, forget how ridiculous the argument is on a purely empirical level, and discuss the legal merits, or lack thereof, of the notion of reparations. Lawyers representing the plaintiff rely heavily on the precedent of the Nuremberg trials. In those, prosecutors were successfully able to charge Nazi's with the mistreatment, and indeed, murder of millions of individuals, most being Jewish. They argue that, although it was technically legal for Nazis to act in the manner they did, there is a moral standard of ethics and conduct that legally governs those responsible for the horrific actions of the period. Riding the wave of shock and horror of the events of the holocaust, prosecutors were able to successfully prosecute many Nazi operatives and thus provide some small consolation to the millions of family members left behind.

The only problem with this legitimate argument, which, I must say, has been a novelty in this whole debate, is the fact that the parallel that the pro-reparations side seems to be drawing between the American slaves and the Holocaust Jews doesn't exist. Not even a little bit. However regrettable, and it certainly was that, slave holders by and large did not have killing African-Americans as their sole focus. Slave holders exploited these individuals for labor purposes, but under no circumstances were they interested in the purging of their race from the face of the Earth. It would have been unprofitable for slave holders to rid the property of slaves. By definition, the slave holder needed the slave for a service. Nazis, on the other hand, had no need for Jews. Whereas slavery was not illegal in the times of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (he had seven children with one of his slaves), murder has always been illegal from the days of the 10 Commandments to Hammurabi's Code to English Common Law all the way through to today. There needs to be reparations for millions of victims of ethnic, religious or racial purges. There doesn't need to be reparations for exploitation of labor, that, however horrible, happened hundreds of years ago.

If we were to award families of former slaves reparations, why would we stop there? Surely I should be entitled to some reparations being Catholic. I should probably bring a lawsuit against the modern state of Italy. After all, it was the Romans who exploited my people, forcing them to battle lions in the Colosseum for the entertainment of onlookers. However horrific, this does not compare to the thousands of years the Jews were enslaved in Egypt. Still, I see no pending lawsuits brought on by concerned Judeo-Christians.

I have tried to handle this debate in a mature manner. But for myself, and I venture to say, for most, this issue is not about the advancement of civil rights or the pursuit of equaling the racial playing field - topics I would certainly applaud. Instead of being productive, this mockery of the legal system will effectively set the racial debate back years. I only hope that enough people realize the absurdity of this argument before any more hard feelings are formed on either side.