Whites and reparations
A call ‘to do our first works over’
by Jennifer Harvey

Movements for reparations for the enslavement of people of African descent in the U.S. have acquired a strength and visibility in recent years such that New York City Councilman Charles Baron has been emboldened to state, "Reparations is the defining issue of the twenty-first century."

These movements are not new. Calls for reparations have rung since the abolition of slavery. (It was in 1865 that the idea of "40 acres and a mule," a reparative concept more a part of national mythology and rhetoric than an actual measure in history, began to circulate.) Yet, while they are not new, the increasing prominence of reparations campaigns brings to the forefront of national racial consciousness the urgency of the relationship of white people to notions of race, repentance, repair and reconciliation.

While many legal steps have been taken since abolition to address persistent racial injustice in the U.S., none of these have manifested in reparations. Equal in length to the history of struggle for reparations has been the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of getting the U.S. government, or white Americans, to hear and respond to such demands.

Surveys suggest that up to 67 percent of whites acknowledge that discrimination against blacks continues, but an August 2002 Village Voice poll of New Yorkers showed that 62 percent of those polled say that not even an apology for slavery is due. Meanwhile, 62 percent of African Americans continue to believe that blacks are owed reparations. How can whites agree there is a problem and so easily dismiss solutions? And, how can white Christians, many of whom desire racial reconciliation, hope to achieve it when such disparate understanding of the legacy of slavery exists among racial groups?

Amidst this social landscape, movements to repair the damage of slavery’s legacy persist and they continue to gain the kind of momentum that suggests they may well be one of the most significant political struggles of this millennium. There is much at stake here in how white folks understand repentance, repair and reconciliation – all notions contained in the concept of reparations. I believe that there is, in fact, nothing less at stake than our humanity. The issue of reparations asks us – and asks those of us who are Christians most pointedly: Are we willing to be human, and to seek wholeness and healing, rather than remaining complicit in a massive social evil, the vestiges of which are alive and well among oppressed and benefactor alike?

Answering this question may involve us in a process of moral and spiritual transformation.

What is race?

Race in U.S.—American life is at once so self-evident and so complex that the starting place for engaging reparations may be to be as clear as possible about what "race" is. When we recognize race we typically do so by noticing a person’s skin "color." We might notice other bodily features that seem to indicate race. From there we might assume cultural traditions, geographical origins, economic status or any number of other things. Whether our assumptions are correct or not, these various indicators come together loosely to suggest racial identity.

Because we can, or think we can, recognize race by such visible indications, we might assume that race just is: that it exists on its own, an autonomous, self-obvious category. Common wisdom has long held that race is a fact of nature, a scientific or biological category that distinguishes among groups of people. But for years now science has been clear that race has no biological basis. A scientist will not find between one white person and every other white person any biological similarity that is greater than the similarity between that white person and an African-American person.

The truth is, race is not something that just is. It is not a fact of nature nor a scientific reality; race is a social reality. It is something that came to be, and comes to be over and over again, through laws, economic practices, the education and criminal justice systems, and an infinite number of other social phenomena. It is created through corporate and individual human activity.

Say a person walks down the street very late one night. If that person has physical features generally recognized as "white," a passing police officer might slow down to make sure that person is not lost. Another person walking down that same street, whose features are recognized as "black,"might find this same police officer slows down and asks him for identification, or interrogates her based on the assumption that, out alone at night, she must be engaged in illicit activity.

Race is very real. It is just that the bodily characteristics by which we tend to recognize it are not significant in and of themselves. They become significant only as they are given some kind of meaning in the social realm – as this happens race becomes a (social) reality. In the above example, race exists at the juncture between certain bodily features and the activity of racial profiling; profiling one person for protection, the other for harassment.

As we begin to recognize that race is not a fixed and static fact of nature, but is a contested, changing social reality, the meanings that it has been given through the kinds of human activities that have gone into (and go into) creating it can come into view as well. This recognition is crucial to understanding the relationship between white folks and reparations.

Race and meaning

Throughout U.S. history the meanings of race have varied. Communities of color have given race meaning in the process of creating unique and rich cultural traditions, and forging communities of resistance. But this meaning-creation has taken place amidst significant oppressive forces which also make race real and give it meaning. As social institutions in the U.S. have historically engaged in biased practices, race has been given oppressive material content and meanings. Race means, for example, that you are more than twice as likely to be in prison if you are a black man than if you are white and eight times more likely if you are a black woman than white [www.epinet.org]. If you are a white drug user you are, generally, more likely to be in a drug treatment facility than in prison.

That material realities have given meaning to race is precisely why calls for reparations for an evil that legally ended 137 years ago continue to have currency in our national racial landscape. How human features – skin color, especially – were given meaning from 1619 to 1865 and what those meanings were is the crux of the matter in thinking about reparations.

Among those of us who are white, to think about race in this way enables us to view, concretely, what it has meant and means to be white. It pushes us to ask how legal, economic and education systems and institutions have given whiteness meaning. Answers to these questions have implications that are both economic-material and moral-spiritual.

James Baldwin famously wrote in Essence magazine in 1984: "America became white – the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white – because of the necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation. … White men – from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians – became white by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women."

Baldwin’s words are not to be taken figuratively. His charge is not merely that white people have committed atrocious crimes in U.S.—American history. His charge is that, quite literally, people who arrived in this land, nationalities intact, became white colonists and, later, became white U.S.—Americans through engagement in particular kinds of behavior and practices.

Race did not exist when those who colonized this land now known as the United States encountered the indigenous peoples who lived here. Whatever visible differences may have been noted – whether in dress, bodily attributes, skin pigmentation or cultural expression – these were given religious meaning. The primary category of difference was Christian or heathen: Christian meant "entitled beneficiaries of this pristine land and resources," heathen meant "evil and worthy of genocide."

Race: an economic institution

When Africans were first wrenched from their homelands and brought here to be slaves, race still did not exist (the first permanent African settlers arrived in 1619). The primary difference was that distinguishing owner and servant. This was a status defined strictly in legal terms and might invoke the difference between a European owner and either an African or a European servant. Pre-race, persons from different geographic regions, with different skin tones, might occupy the same servant category (and at that time servitude was not lifelong).

By the mid-1600s, however, race had begun to emerge and its creation was inextricably bound with the legalization of lifelong chattel slavery as an institution. In 1640 for the first time the word "Negro" was used in a court document; specifically, to demarcate the difference in status between a person of African descent, who had dark skin and was made a slave for life, and two Europeans, who had light skin and were to be held as indentured servants for three years each.

From that point forward, lifelong enslavement quickly came to be the norm for people of African descent. Indentured servitude phased out in the face of the obvious economic benefit of holding a lifelong (African) slave versus a temporary (European) servant. Freedom became the norm for people of European descent. The difference between owner/servant became the difference between free/slave – now a legal definition that relied upon and referenced bodies. The definition named skin color –white/black – as the line demarcating the difference between these two "kinds" of people. Race, thus, came to be. (A similar process took place in relationship to Native Americans, by which "red" became a racial category – in this case the meaning given race was not "slave" but involved other kinds of violence and dehumanization.)

The color line became more deeply entrenched as chattel slavery became more institutionalized – first officially so in Massachusetts in 1641. The colonies’ and, eventually, the U.S.’ economic system was built through and entirely dependent upon this institution for the next 224 years. Slavery did not involve only the large southern cotton plantation. Even after northern states abolished slavery, it was the basis of the national economy. The labor of four million Africans and their descendents generated wealth in the South as it fueled the shipping yards and factories of the North.

The unpaid labor poured into this nation’s economy through slavery is only one piece of what was a vast and horrific historical experience. Still, that figure alone is staggering in its estimation: Sam Anderson, co-chair of the N.Y. Metro Chapter of the Black Radical Congress, puts a low estimate of these wages at $97.1 trillion.

In addition to being granted freedom at the price of others being kept in shackles, being (becoming) white in this racial system meant benefiting from the enslavement of those who were (became) black. Not all benefited in the same way and an important part of this history is how race has been used to prevent impoverished and working-class whites from allying with impoverished blacks. But all those who became white received some direct benefit. For some this came through owning slaves, for others it was a stake in corporations that insured slaves or earned interest on slave owners’ assets. For some it was the freedom to access a job as a paid laborer. For all it was insulation from the systemic terrors legally inflicted and enforced upon black people.

A multitude of concrete legal and economic benefits were acquired by those who became white through these historic and social processes. These benefits included not only the legacy of wealth, but also education, health, housing and virtually any other aspect of life in which social institutions impact human well-being. To the significant extent that the color line has remained an organizing principle of U.S.—American life, even as its functions have changed (i.e., slavery became "separate but equal"), those benefits have been passed down from generation to generation. They continue to accrue to those of us who occupy the social category "white."

Whites and the redressing of ‘unjust enrichment’

Reparations activists call this phenomena "unjust enrichment." Legal scholar Cheryl Harris calls it "whiteness as property." (By recounting the poignant story of how her African-American grandmother "passed" as white in order to gain employment at a "whites only" workplace in the 1930s, Harris makes clear that the economic access that a particular skin hue provided demonstrates there is a property value in whiteness.)

To the extent that unjust material realities have remained unredressed, the legacies of slavery remain with us in the present. While the mass horror that was slavery can never be undone, attempts at true racial justice must take place through the same means by which race came to be in the first place.

This discussion pulls in a particular way on those of us who have been and who are white in this landscape. Writing specifically about white responses to calls for reparations in 1969, theologian William Stringfellow was insistent about the brokenness in which we remain if we fail to take this history seriously. He wrote, "[I]t does not take a psychiatrist to discern that the denial of inherited, corporate guilt is a symptom of it. That, of course, points further still to the fact that corporate guilt is a pathological state, a condition of profound disorientation, and even a kind of moral insanity."

Stringfellow’s words touch the deeply moral and spiritual call to white folks that reparations embodies. Any benefits that have come to us through the history of race have led to our dehumanization and moral malformation. The ethical realities that constituted the genesis of race will continue to bear down on our lives spiritually and morally until we make a choice to turn and face that history. This state might tempt us to the paralysis of despair, but movements for reparations offer us a different option.

So, what might happen if we each undertook an examination of our family’s economic and social origins and history in this nation? What if we chose to explore, in concrete terms, the past role of our church or denomination in issues of race, unjust enrichment, white supremacy? Might it be that the moral and spiritual impact of such activities would open possibilities for concrete response and redress that we could not even begin to imagine from the place in which we now sit? Might a first step of opening ourselves to understanding more deeply the history of race be an act of justice seeking hope that could help us to locate a new path – one that moves toward true racial justice – a path so many of us agree that we need?

Metanoia – to repent – means to change direction, to turn from the brokenness of sin and evil and to choose a radically different life way – a way of life. It is in the context of the life-giving call of repentance that movements for reparations invite those of us who are white to journey into moral sanity and re-formation. Reparations calls us to choose to be human and to be made whole: first, by issuing the challenge to stalwartly face the history we have inherited and in which our lives are embedded; then, by offering tools with which to refuse the malforming ease of perpetuating those legacies which have come to us from the past. They invite us, instead, to change direction by repairing the harm that has been done, and in the process create a different present and future. The challenge of reparations is the hard journey of moral and spiritual transformation: a call to white people – as Baldwin would put it – "to do our first works over."