In an April 5, 2019 appearance before the National Action Network, presidential candidate Kamala Harris declared to Al Sharpton that she will sign a “reparations” commission into law. During last week’s interview on CNN, Harris affirmed that “My values have not changed.” That would include the values that deem America paying descendants of slaves monetary compensation a requirement of social justice. Social justice warriors assume it is a noble cause. But the reality is that reparations are not merely impractical but profoundly immoral. Here’s five basic reasons why the moral case is against reparations.
The Legal Problem
First, reparations, to be just, must be based on the legal definition of restitution. In the law, restitution exists to achieve an equitable remedy when the money or property is, first, wrongfully possessed and, second, traceable. Today’s calls for reparations fail to show that any money or property is currently wrongfully in anyone’s hands. Money and property (and the slaves themselves) were, indeed, wrongfully in the hands of slave-holders but not even the law is capable of re-writing history. It can only cure current injustices.
The money and property that could have been restituted after the demise of slavery is no longer traceable. Even if I’ve inherited cash and property from my slave-holding ancestors, which of it is from them? My car? My house? How much of my money? It’s all jointly owned by my wife who has no ancestors who were plantation owners. She’s not even American. Legally, since the reward for stolen labor is long ago untraceable, it’s impossible to claim any of it as belonging to a former slave. To take property from me to redistribute to someone whose ancestors had labor stolen from them would be illegal and immoral.
Further, in the law, restitution is designed to restore injured parties to the position they enjoyed prior to the wrong suffered. Reparationists typically assume that descendants of slaves should be reimbursed as if their ancestors had been American laborers. But that wasn’t their original position. They were originally west Africans, frequently prisoners of tribal wars. Restitution is supposed to, as far as possible, make the victim whole, to return to the state before the damage. Thus, the norm to which current descendants of slaves would be restored would be that of the standard of living of current west Africans. The average life-span of Nigerians is about 53 years with an average annual income of $2,080; for African-Americans, the life-expectancy is about 77 years and annual income $46,400. This doesn’t mitigate the horror of slavery or the evils of racism. However, it does cause us to put quotation marks around “reparations” since they are not really geared to return the (descendants of) victims to their original condition.
The USA’s Enormous Sacrifice
Second, some reparations were already paid in the enormous sacrifice the USA expended to free the slaves, including about 360,222 lives cut short. I’ve yet to see a restorationist tip a hat to the United States’ costly losses in the war that became necessary to end slavery in America. If reparations are to be made for the unrequited labor of the slaves, we would have to subtract from what is due the expenses the USA paid out to end slavery and the estimated wealth those 360,222 men would have made had they been able to live out their lives. Ingratitude is a form of immorality and reckoning reparations without gratitude for the tremendous cost the United States expended to free the slaves is immoral.
The Prohibition of Intergenerational Punishment
Third, the Bible forbids punishing people for the sins of their ancestors. “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son.” (Ezekiel 18:20a.) Since intergenerational reparations necessarily involve punishing people from whom the money is taken, they are prohibited.
My ancestors were slave-holders. They had a large plantation, like out of Gone With the Wind, in Georgia. They got wealthy off the backs of the stolen labor of people they unjustly held prisoner. They lost much of their wealth in the Civil War, as they deserved. Their emancipated slaves deserved reparations. As far as I know, they didn’t get it. But I’m not guilty of my ancestor’s sin and so I don’t owe the descendants of my ancestors’ slaves reparations. To take money from me to repair for a crime my ancestors committed is itself a crime.
Much of the argumentation for reparations today glides over the fact that we’re now talking about intergenerational restitution, removed by about six generations. David Licicum’s 2022 Christianity Today does this. Thabiti Anyabwili deals with inter-generational penalty problem in his 2019 TGC article, “Reparations Are Biblical,” as does a 2021 Sojourners article, Using the Bible to Debunk 10 Myths About Reparations. Sometimes it takes more words to debunk an error than it does to declare it. This is one of those times and I’m up against the word-limit. So, if you want more debunking of their arguments, subscribe to my Substack (see below). For now, suffice it to say that violating the explicit command of Ezekiel 18:20 is immoral.
No Limiting Principle
Fourth, there’s no limiting principle to reparations, as now proposed. This is critical when it comes to slavery. Slavery had existed for all of human history among all cultures and races. The case for reparations is made as if the only kind of slavery was that of the American South, only suffered by African-Americans. But in reality, if we go back far enough, all of us probably are the descendants of slaves and enslavers. If reparations are to be paid for past slavery, why limit it to only African-Americans or American history? Maybe your Viking ancestors pillaged and enslaved my Anglo-Saxon ones? Pay up! Of course, that would be immoral.
Reparations Would Exacerbate Racism
Finally, reparations if actually implemented, would almost certainly inflame racism. Americans who were not descendants of African-American slaves would see their taxes increase — or inflation if the government decided just to issue the money — as a result of the reparations. Some of them — likely many of them — would become resentful. Reparations would almost certainly cause a resurgence of racism. Where will the grievances stop if we try to repair those of generations ago at the expense of people now? It should stop with every generation. Purposefully inspiring racism is immoral.
Debunking the case for reparations doesn’t mean white-washing slavery; we don’t say it wasn’t so bad and so didn’t deserve restitution. It was a horrible atrocity because human beings are not commodities; each is made in the image of God; slaves had inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that were violated. But the secret to past racial injustice is justice now, not a check. Rejecting the cries for reparations for slavery means that we don’t get swept along by a cause garbed in morality that is, rather, profoundly immoral.
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.
image, Pixabay license.
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