Hannah Lee
August 5, 2021
GOVT S-1045 Justice: Ethics in an Age of Pandemic and Racial Reckoning
Prof. Sergio Imparato, Ph.D.
Words: 1901
Moral grounds that give rise to an obligation to atone for historical injustices vis-à-vis reparations, independent of showing that those who owe the reparations benefited from the injustice, arise from a communitarian understanding, as opposed to the moral individualist thinking, of what it means to be responsible for the acts of our forebears. Despite many people’s insistence on their innocence, who argue their separation from the history of enslavement that precedes them, to declare oneself a citizen of the United States is to inherit its history and thereby its pride and shame. The culpability of the founding fathers is a part of our identity. Moreover, the repercussions from generations of rape, torture, murder, enslavement, and later, segregation and discrimination reverberate to this day. We cannot dare to un-do or truly recompense what has been done to Africa, particularly West Africa1, but there is honor in the process of trying2.
In lecture 12, Dr. Imparato enumerated on Kant’s idea of moral individualist thinking, wherein consent goes beyond merely saying “I do.” For Kant, consent indicates “autonomy, reason, freedom,” and making choices through a “universal will” (Imparato). Since we do not consent to which family we are born, and it is completely random, it is morally arbitrary (Gustafson). Thus, we make decisions for “humanity as a whole” (Imparato). Sandel explains that in moral individualism, consent is required, whether “tacit” or “explicit” (Sandel 213). Both Kant’s “autonomous will” and Rawls’s conception of the hypothetical veil of ignorance conceive of the self as a “moral agent” divorced from his particular “aims, conditions, desires, ends, and attachments” (Imparato). In other words, self comes before community, before family, or before future desires developed in life.
Imparato states that communitarianism rejects moral individualism, which springs from the Aristotelian conception of the good which stems from political community. Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Janna Thompson all espouse the communitarian edict which precludes the idea that life occurs in a vacuum, championed by Bentham, Mill, Nozick, Rawls, and Kant (Gustafson). MacIntyre says the self is an open-ended project, has a history, and is constitutive of what is and what could be (Gustafson). According to MacIntyre, the conception of morality depends upon the community from which we come: our historical identity and social identity “coincide” (MacIntyre 326). He is not a moral relativist: he believes in universal truths, but that the particularities differ according to each society (Gustafson).
A communitarian would argue that to truly call oneself an American, one must bear the responsibility of slavery, as it is bound up with the “constitution, laws, criminal system, and philosophical foundation” (Imparato). Thus the American citizen carries with him the “moral special obligation” to correct the injustice of slavery (Imparato). As Sandel says, “for MacIntyre (as for Aristotle) the narrative, or teleological, aspect of moral reflection is bound up with membership and belonging” (Sandel 222).
Communitarian thinking contrasts with the philosophy of liberalism, which springs from the Enlightenment, and does not “even consider the possibility that we might have duties to the dead” (Thompson 197). In what she calls “liberal ahistoricism,” the justification of principles, institutions, and ideals are divorced from a historical past, and citizens cannot make any claims due to suffering of predecessors: “no obligations arise from the historical past” (Thompson 197). However, she states that people whose ancestors have been persecuted generation after generation understand that current-day disadvantages are intertwined with “injustices committed against their forebears” (Thompson 202). She stresses intergenerational relationships must give rise to an obligation to remember injustice implemented by their predecessors (Thompson 208).
In contrasting liberalism versus communitarianism, it is worth noting that it is the definition of white privilege to experience the forgetfulness and erasure of history or to think that the past is irrelevant. The position and experience of a moral individualist is plausible only for the average white person. They have the privilege of forgetting. Black Americans, Native Americans, and other oppressed minorities are not allowed to forget, for they must face the repercussions of injustice to the present day. Moreover, why would they want to forget their struggles, “just because” it makes a white person feel uncomfortable? The pain of the past reverberates to dismal economic and social realities for minorities today.
The typical black household today is poorer than 80 percent of white households (Hannah-Jones). Black households are generally believed to “hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10” (Hannah-Jones 6). “Wealth begets wealth,” and white Americans have had generations of governmental assistance in the accumulation of wealth: 20% of White Americans today can trace back their wealth and land to one single instance of an entitlement program; thus, it is clear that black poverty is a direct result of national policy (Hannah-Jones 8, 2). This example is merely one instance of an entitlement program. The entire state of Oregon was created for the losing side of the Civil War, exclusively for white people. An entire state was dedicated to the white losing side before a state was creating for the Black victors of the Civil War. Blacks requested “40 acres and a mule” and repudiated governance by white people: this desire was emblematic of the larger issue of white dominance and white supremacy. The promises made to instate a haven for Black Americans were never kept, and Black Americans started out their newfound freedom with nothing: no land, no economic opportunity. Many returned to their plantations to be oppressed by sharecropping in what is essentially indentured servitude. If Black did find success, they were also met with racism and violent resistance. Many Blacks were forced to flee the rural South into overcrowded Northern cities which became the inner-city ghettos we see today. Black Wall Street and redlining are just the tip of the iceberg of what Black Americans faced in recent history.
The race riots, the bussing era, and miscegenation were racist phenomena that were even more recent occurrences that happened within our lifetime or barely one generation ago. To dispel the myth of the separation of time, incidences of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement it begat, and today’s proliferation of the prison-industrial complex that targets black men; the existence of overcrowded, underfunded, and dismal public school system in the inner-city filled with black children and much other evidence illustrating ongoing discriminatory practices are proof of the injustice Black Americans faced and currently face to this day. Injustice is not so historical and the assertion that it is much more contemporary than we would like to think is evidenced by, for example, lynchings that happen in the modern-day.
A plausible objection to the case of reparations is: what if it instigates animosities between or amongst races? What if it “puts a target” on the backs of Black Americans who are recipients of reparations? Will the beneficiaries of such socio-economic programs become the object of ire for white conservatives/ morally liberal who do not believe that Blacks should be the recipients of reparations?
If one boils reparations down to a financial transaction it becomes much more reasonable: white people will not feel victimized and targeted. And yet there are authors like Richard Epstein who uses inciteful words such as “insistent” when referring to the desire for Black reparations, and “claim” when quoting Nikole Hannah-Jones saying that “reparations are not about punishing white Americans, and white Americans are not the ones who would pay for them” (Epstein). In utilizing such verbiage Epstein is in essence suggesting the opposite to be true. By using such predatory dog-whistle tactics, he instigates racial tensions between Whites and Blacks. One only must look at the comments on the conservative think tank, the Hoover Institute’s article to see how Epstein’s article resonates with politically conservative, philosophically liberal crowd.
Reparations are not the forum to attack the concept of whiteness. The solution is to make reparations strictly about financial transactions, and not about White vs. Black. As long as we are debating the concept of white privilege, the problem will never be solved. Many white conservatives like Richard Epstein use argumentative tactics that involve lying, trolling, evading the original argument, and in general skirting around the issue at hand in order to repudiate the racist and bigoted practices of the past four centuries. For example, in Epstein’s article, he begins discussing minimum wage. In order to refute the articles written by Darity, Mullens, and Hannah-Jones espousing reparations and the myriad of reasons to support it, he discusses a tangentially related topic of minimum wage, as if those were the same topic. This is the practice of many white conservatives, and this is the enemy of the truth: to take the topic of reparations as a personal attack on white identity instead of looking at the cold, harsh economic realities that Black Americans face as a result of generations of injustices.
Reparations has nothing to do with white privilege, as only 3% of whites owned slaves. Hannah-Jones is quoted by Epstein, saying “it does not matter if your ancestors engaged in slavery or if you just immigrated here two weeks ago” (Epstein). The case for reparations does not depend on showing that those who owe the reparations benefitted from the injustice. It does not matter whether or not one directly profited from slavery, to use the example of slavery in America. It is worth noting, however, that the very foundations of the United States were built by free labor and that any immigrant benefits from the very existence of a country developed by those who did not get the reap the rewards of
As one potential solution in the road to reparations: to this day there are corporations that have benefitted from slavery. A reasonable way of distributing reparations is the redistribution of stock to the descendants of those they exploited for free labor. It is backpay for unpaid labor that was never compensated (Hitchens). Moreover, Martin Luther King stated that “we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor,” so he was “compelled to see war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such” (King). Today we spend trillions of dollars on military contracts and even today, bombing poor brown children in the Middle East. If we have money for war, there are funds for reparations. As Hitchens says, if we can, we should do it. America can definitely afford to attempt to redress slavery. No amount of money or mortgage programs can un-do what has been done to Black Americans, but Americans can begin the process of compensation. To quote Malcolm X, “if you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that’s not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress comes from healing the wound that the blow made. They haven’t even begun to pull the knife out…They won’t even admit the knife is there” (Darity, Mullen 239).
1 Hitchens, Christopher, “Christopher Hitchens About Reparations for Slavery (2001),” Youtube Video, 10:15, September 13, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MNu2GNx-kQ.
2Gustafson, Sarah “Discussion.” Section, GOVT S-1045 Harvard University, Cambridge, August 4, 2021.
Works Cited
Darity, William A; Mullen, Kirsten. “From Here to Equality,” Project Muse, The University of North Carolina Press, 2020, https://muse-jhu-edu.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/chapter/2529589/pdf.
Epstein, Richard A. “Black Reparations Parsed,” Defining Ideas, Hoover Institute, July 6, 2020, https://www.hoover.org/research/black-reparations-parsed.
Gustafson, Sarah. “Discussion.” Section, GOVT S-1045 Harvard University, Cambridge, August 4, 2021.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “What is Owed,” The New York Times Magazine. PDF File. June 30, 2020. https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/87708/files/12448747/download?wrap=1.
Hitchens, Christopher, “Christopher Hitchens About Reparations for Slavery (2001),” Youtube Video, 10:15, September 13, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MNu2GNx-kQ.
King, Martin Luther. “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” Riverside Church, New York, January 16, 2017. https://original.antiwar.com/martin_luther_king/2017/01/15/why-i-am-opposed-to-the-war-in-vietnam/.
Imparato, Sergio. “Lecture 12.” Lecture 12, GOVT S-1045 Harvard University, Cambridge, July 29, 2021.
Sandel, Michael. “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?”, Dilemmas of Loyalty. PDF File. August 3, 2021. https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/87708/files/12448756/download?wrap=1.
Thompson, Janna, “Apology, Historical Obligations, and the Ethics of Memory,” Memory Studies, La Trobe University, Australia, August 3, 2021, https://journals-sagepub-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/doi/pdf/10.1177/1750698008102052.