Mari Matsuda defends reparations for people of color but opposes reparations for white people who have suffered under government overreach. For example, she excludes the white people who suffered under the Norman Conquest from being due reparations. She says to be due reparations requires “the ability to identify a victim class that continues to suffer a stigmatized position enhanced or promoted by the wrongful act in question. Thus, in a European context, the Norman Conquest would not be compensable because those victims no longer constitute an identifiable and disadvantaged class”[1] (italics added).
If there ever was displayed self-serving reasoning, it is Matsuda’s. Follow her logic. Because the white people who were subjugated and oppressed went on to succeed and, therefore, ceased to be a disadvantaged class of people, they are not due reparations. Let that reasoning sink in. If a group moves from being subjugated to being a typical participant in the culture, they are not due reparations. Future generations do not owe them for what they or past relatives suffered. Here are some of my thoughts about her premise. They are in no particular order.
1. I say, why accept that definition? Why not another based on the duration of the subjugation, how many, where, how long ago, ad infinitum? I am just pointing out that there is room to argue whether or not her definition is the best or even valid.
2. The loss of those in the Norman Conquest was still an actual loss that hurt them as much as subjugation hurts anyone. Would it not be fairer to pay them for their loss compared to the loss of others, maybe on a prorated scale? If the idea of reparations is just and proportioned to the loss incurred, then their status today is irrelevant. In other words, their loss is not diminished by their current status. As it is generally calculated, they would still have less wealth (both material and human capital) and carry emotional scars from their subjugation, like slavery hurts blacks today, even those who knew no slaves or whose relatives were not enslaved.
3. Many races and groups have been oppressed by kings, such as the pilgrims and others who fled from England to Holland and then to America or just fled straight from England to America and founded this country; they lost everything they owned to practice their faith and flee the King’s rule. Does England owe the descendants of the founders for the suffering of the founding generation of Americans? If we are going to be consistent, they should.
4. If white people who never owned slaves were to pay reparations to people who were not slaves, where does it stop and why? And, if we entertain the idea that people can be penalized because a past relative owned slaves, why limit that to whites? Both black people and American Indians owned slaves.
5. The example of those who suffered oppression under the Norman Conquest or endured the emotional legacy of that subjugation and have ended up succeeding demonstrates that the oppressed can overcome if they persevere. Therefore, rather than giving reparations, we should provide the oppressed more time, and those who desire to succeed will succeed. Moreover, to argue that only those who remain in “an identifiable and disadvantaged class,” as Matsuda requires, can disincentivize people from breaking out of the effects of subjugation and incentivize a victim mentality.
6. She does, however, include Japanese, Hawaiians, blacks, and American Indians. But really, the lack of thriving of some in each group seems to be offset by others of the same group who have overcome limitations from their subjugation. That undeniable reality in each group strongly suggests we should look for other reasons why some have not succeeded.
7. What an absurd place to be where we want people who never owned slaves and have always opposed slavery to pay people who were never enslaved or even knew an enslaved person. Imagine, in one hundred years, asking my family to pay reparations for what some people did to legalize, promote, provide for, lobby for, and profit from abortion. This, when my family has always fought against abortion and sought to help women keep their children or put them up for adoption rather than abort them. Is that just? NO!
8. Why would we ask all Americans to pay reparations when, according to Daina Ramey Berry, Associate Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, says, “Roughly 25 percent of all Southerners owned slaves.”[2] Berry also notes, “Africans first arrived in America in the late 16th century not as slaves but as explorers together with Spanish and Portuguese explorers.”[3] It is important to note that Professor Berry is a black person. An accurate count of white slave owners contrasts starkly with the widespread assumption that most whites owned slaves. Are we to seek reparations from people whose ancestors did not own slaves? Is that justice? Thomas Sowell says, “There were thousands of other blacks in the antebellum South who were commercial slaveowners, just like their white counterparts.”[4]
“An estimated one-third of the ‘free persons of color’ in New Orleans were slaveowners, and thousands of these slaveowners volunteered to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War.”[5] I have a copy of an 1830 census taken of “Free Negro Owners of Slaves.” It provides the black slave owners’ names and the states where they resided. Shall we give them reparations? The introduction of the census book says, “About a half million, almost one-seventh of the Negroes of this country, were free prior to the emancipation in 1865. It is hardly believed that a considerable number of Negroes were owners of slaves themselves, and in some cases controlled large plantations.”[6]
Regarding the relationship between Black slave owners and White slave owners, Carter G. Woodson said, “Having economic interests in common with the white slaveholders, the Negro owners of slaves often enjoyed the same social standing. It was not exceptional for them to attend the same church, to educate their children in the same private school, and to frequent the same places of amusement. Under such circumstances, miscegenation easily followed . . . There appeared among the slaveholders free Negroes designated as Jacob of Read and white wife and Syphe of Matthews and white wife. Others reported with white wives were not slaveholders. Practically all of these Negro slaveholders were in the South.”[7] “In the South where almost all of the Negro slaveholders were, moreover, we find some of them competing with the large planters in the number of slaves they owned.”[8]
There was also absentee ownership, where the slave and the master were geographically separate. While sometimes this degraded the slave because of the absence of the patriarchal relationship, at other times, it was beneficial. “Absentee ownership, however, did not always mean that the Negro was thereby inconvenienced or degraded. A master often permitted certain slaves to live by themselves in the discharge of some special duty in which they had shown unusual capacity. Such groups of slaves . . . were usually small, consisting mainly of a man and his family. There are many cases of one Negro slave living by himself. An investigation shows that some of such Negroes were practically free or were working out their freedom on liberal terms.”[9] Woodson does say, “By 1840, the trend toward degrading the free Negro to a lower status had become evident even in apparently benevolent slaveholding States.”[10] Still, this gives a glimpse into some of the variations during the days of slavery.
Sowell states, “Black slaveowners were even more common in the Caribbean.”[11] As you might imagine, these blacks supported the institution of slavery.[12] Should we seek reparations from these black slaveowners for the descendants of their slaves? Add to this that many whites fought to free slaves by utilizing the Underground Railroad and other measures before the Civil War. Many whites supported the emancipation of slaves and died fighting for their freedom. “An estimated one-third of the ‘free persons of color’ in New Orleans were slaveowners, and thousands of these slaveowners volunteered to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War.”[13] Again, does not justice demand that we seek reparations from those who sold the slaves to America and England, which would be the Blacks in Africa?
And what about the American Indians who owned slaves? Speaking of the Oklahoma territory and the American Indians who owned enslaved Black people, John Sibley Butler writes, “Afro-Americans had come to that territory during early expeditions; their settlement really started in the 1830s, not as settlers in the traditional sense, but as slaves–the slaves of Native Americans . . . As eastern tribes moved westward from 1803 to 1830, they took their Afro-American slaves with them. Afro-Americans accompanied Native Americans on what has been called the ‘Trail of Tears’. . . Over the years, these tribes especially had instituted slavery.”[14] These tribes were called “the Five Civilized Tribes–the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles.”[15]
How shall we handle the Native American slave owners and the ones who did not own slaves in reparations? And what shall we say about the Black Americans, who, like the Whites whose ancestors suffered in the Norman Conquest, are successful and participating in the opportunities afforded by America? In the final analysis, Matsuda’s argument is as weighty as a helium balloon. Focusing on the success of others who suffered subjugation, on the opportunities that are available today rather than the wrongs of the past, and on personal development are what give people the best chance at life.
[1] Mari Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,” 73, in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, et. al. (New York: New Press, 1995).
[2] Of course, the percentage nationally would be significantly less. Daina Ramey Berry, “American Slavery: Separating Fact from Fiction,” The Conversation, June 19, 2017, para. 14, https://theconversation.com/american-slavery-separating-fact-from-myth-79620, accessed 8/15/20.
[3] Daina Ramey Berry, “American Slavery: Separating Fact from Fiction,” The Conversation, June 19, 2017, para. 11, https://theconversation.com/american-slavery-separating-fact-from-myth-79620, accessed 8/15/20.
[4] Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter Books, 2005), 127. See also Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol 1 (Glouster, MS: Peter Smith, 1958), 528; Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 380, 385; Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 83; Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 124, 386; Eugene D. Genovese, “The Slave States of North America,” in Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, edited by David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 270; Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” Perspectives in American History, new series, vol 1, 1984, 212; and Bernard E. Powers, Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 48–50, 72.
[5] Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter Books, 2005), 127. See also Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 83; Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 124, 386; and David C. Rankin, “The Impact of the Civil War on the Free Color Community of New Orleans,” Perspectives in American History, vol XI (1977–78), 380, 385.
[6] Carter G. Woodson, ed., Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830: Together with Absentee Ownership of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (Coppell, TX: Historic Publishing, 2021, copyright 1924 by The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., Washington D.C.), v
[7] Carter G. Woodson, ed., Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830: Together with Absentee Ownership of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (Coppell, TX: Historic Publishing, 2021, copyright 1924 by The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., Washington D.C.), vii.
[8] Carter G. Woodson, ed., Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830: Together with Absentee Ownership of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (Coppell, TX: Historic Publishing, 2021, copyright 1924 by The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., Washington D.C.), viii.
[9] Carter G. Woodson, ed., Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830: Together with Absentee Ownership of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (Coppell, TX: Historic Publishing, 2021, copyright 1924 by The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., Washington D.C.), 44.
[10] Carter G. Woodson, ed., Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830: Together with Absentee Ownership of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (Coppell, TX: Historic Publishing, 2021, copyright 1924 by The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., Washington D.C.), viii.
[11] Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter Books, 2005), 127. See Jerome S. Handler and Arnold A. Sio, “Barbados.” in Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, edited by David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 245–46 and Léo Elisabeth, “The French Antilles” in Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World edited by David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 165–66.
[12] Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter Books, 2005), 127.
[13] Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter Books, 2005), 127. See also Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 83; Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 124, 386; and David C. Rankin, “The Impact of the Civil War on the Free Color Community of New Orleans,” Perspectives in American History, vol XI (1977–78), 380, 385.
[14] John Sibley Butler, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics, Revised Edition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 209–10.
[15] John Sibley Butler, Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans: A Reconsideration of Race and Economics, Revised Edition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 209.
