Since 1951, Germany has paid an estimated $25 billion in reparations to Israeli Holocaust survivors. The issue of reparations for slavery is a divisive one in America. A 2002 opinion poll yielded that 67% of Blacks supported the idea of monetary reparations, yet only 4 percent of whites agreed. If America were to compensate African-Americans for their centuries of unpaid servitude, it would cost over $100 trillion dollars, based on 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, with a compounded interest of 6%. African Americans are owed reparations for over two centuries of forced, unpaid labor, in terrible conditions.
Look at life like the game of Monopoly. Blacks weren’t even allowed to play until 1865, when slavery ended, and then for the next hundred years, until the civil rights movement, whites let them roll the dice but not collect their full $200 for passing Go or inherit the money in the middle for landing on Free Parking. Today African-Americans are no longer enslaved and have civil rights, but the damaging effects of slavery have not gone away, as much of white America presumes. If anything they’ve been heightened; whites have had a 400 year head start, so it is unfair and unreasonable to expect Blacks to have the same reading/writing proficiencies, cultural development, or social/economic knowledge or successes.
The effects of slavery and Jim Crow can be seen today in the vast disparity between white and black wealth. According to the Consumer Federation of America, median household wealth among blacks is less than a quarter of that of whites and eighty percent of African-American children begin their adult lives with no assets whatsoever. But according to Melvin Oliver, co-author of Black Wealth/White Wealth, "That's not the case for white kids. If they don't have financial resources in hand, they have access to them through their families. Most black kids don't have that available to them."
If we can afford to spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out predominantly white bankers whose greed forced us into a recession, then we can spend another trillion to pay back the people who helped build this country through the blood and sweat of their unacknowledged labor.
To those who oppose the paying out of reparations because “it is too complicated” or “it will cost too much” I offer up the Germans, who figured out a way to do it. If the United States of America can put a man on the moon, we can surely figure out a fair way to divvy up reparations.
Citation:
"Do African-Americans Deserve Reparations for Slavery? - Travis D'arby - Open Salon." (n.d.): n. pag. Do African-Americans Deserve Reparations for Slavery? - Travis D'arby - Open Salon. Web. 26 Jan. 2015.