This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states “the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries”.
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That’s 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I’ve paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn’t this just a country that isn’t doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying “oh there’s this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling”?
Shouldn’t payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don’t flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
Nations that were the source of slaves remain on the whole impoverished and underdeveloped.
Nations that were slavers still remain on the whole wealthy and highly developed.
This is not a coincidence, and there is a reasonable case to be made for reparations on these grounds.
The UKs position today is arguably due more to leading the Industrial Revolution and that was the main factor in the decay of slavery, so you need to balance historic grievances with development i.e. “what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Is it possible that other factors led to the countries being wealthy or impoverished, and this allowed the wealthy to colonise or take the impoverished as slaves?
I recommend the book “Guns, germs, and steel” if you’re interested. I’m not sure it covers this specifically, but it does cover in depth the reasons for different areas of the world being more of less wealthy (it has nothing to do with the people and everything to do with the geographic area, climate, natural resources including flora and fauna, and proximity to other populations).
It’s an interesting read, even if a bit heavy.
Edit: it turns out the book is a bit contentious: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views/#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22
Yes, and even accounting for those, wealthy countries that took slaves still hold an enormous amount of responsibility for what they did
The original OP argument is that those captors or slaves don’t exist anymore. Even the countries barely exist. Is this a matter of descendants being responsible for their ancestors crimes?
I think there’s a strong feedback loop argument here but I’m not sure that’s the point you’re making.
Yes, definitely. But why they had guns is also another question. I recommend the book “Gun, germs, and steel” as a great look into how and why different populations formed as they did.
Edit: it turns out the book is a bit contentious: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views/#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22
Exactly. If anything, this amount of money is way too small.
Occasionally we read a news story about someone who escaped a maniac that kept them locked up for years, forcing them to work and do depraved things for little or no pay. We rightfully think this is terrible and the criminal is inhuman.
Slavery was millions of people in that situation for their entire lives. Whole economies were based on this genocide. We put Nazis to death for genocide. We put other leader on trial for similar crimes. Paying this tiny fine is the least the British (and other European governments) can do. The amount they really owe would bankrupt them.
What amount of money would you exchange for measurably worse lives (education, health, jobs) for you, your family, and everyone who looks like you for generations?
This is so false, slavery was wide practice in Africa already, the “slaving countrys” just bought them for the most part…
Yeah it existed as a practice. The big slave markets and infrastructure was not there until the North American slave trade opened up.
Simply not correct at all. Look up the trans Saharan slave trade. It was absolutely enormous business before the Portuguese sailed down the West Coast of Africa.
Between 1500 and 1865, more than 80% of enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas by European slave traders.
I’ve never seen an exact number ascribed to it, any chance you have a source?
What do you think an enormous demand for slaves, as the colonial nations building plantations and mines in the americas, does to a the supply of slaves? Supply and demand, friend. It’s not as if all the enslaved people exported to the Americas were already in circulation when the europeans came knocking
I’m not sure if you are an ignorant apologist or outright racist but it feels important to comment on this given the number of uovotes this post is receiving. From an article from Slate I will link below:
"But, as historian Marcus Rediker writes, the “ancient and widely accepted institution” of enslavement in Africa was exacerbated by the European presence. Yes, European slave traders entered “preexisting circuits of exchange” when they arrived in the 16th century. But European demand changed the shape of this market, strengthening enslavers and ensuring that more and more people would be carried away. “[European] slave-ship captains wanted to deal with ruling groups and strong leaders, people who could command labor resources and deliver the ‘goods,’ ” Rediker writes, and European money and technology further empowered those who were already dominant, encouraging them to enslave greater numbers. Both the social structures and infrastructure that enabled African systems of enslavement were strengthened by the transatlantic slave trade.
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Bottom line: Why should this matter? This is a classic “two wrongs make a right” ethical proposition. Even if Africans (or Arabs, or Jews) colluded in the slave trade, should white Americans be entitled to do whatever they pleased with the people who were unlucky enough to fall victim?"
Here’s a way to think of it:
If I steal all of your money and invest it to grow over time then I’ll end up with even more money while you don’t benefit from the growth that should have been yours. Now we have children and pass on our wealth. You pass on less because it was stolen, and I pass on more because of what I stole. This multiplies over the generations and a disparity is maintained. My offspring will have better educations and better opportunities because of the wealth they had access to, and yours will have fewer opportunities because you don’t have the money to spend on them.
The goal of reparations is to attempt to correct some of this disparity. It tries to provide opportunities for people who don’t have it but would have if something in the past weren’t stolen.
For an example that’s easy to see: In the US, black people are less likely to know how to swim. This has nothing to do with them being black, but what opportunities they had access to. This is for many reasons. One part of it is that most places had community pools, but they had restrictions for people of color. When this was outlawed, they instead just closed the pools or added memberships that required payment.
People also built up wealth over time through property, but black people were prevented from getting loans to buy property except in redlined places. This prevented them from building up generational wealth like white people were allowed to do. (This is ignoring the whole slavery thing…) It causes ripples through time where their children have less opportunities, which then causes their children to have fewer, and so on.
The problem I have with this viewpoint is this.
Where does it start and where does it end?
World history is full of atrocities, crimes, war etc.
Additionally, many of the things which we now consider atrocity or crime might not even have been one in the past.
Fabricating such artificial claims is the same as Putin is doing by using the history book for creating claims on Ucraine.
This has always been an issue I get stuck on. If we hold current people liable for the crimes of their ancestors, how far back do we go?
The trans-atlantic slave trade was abhorrent, but slavery didn’t begin or end with it.
Do Egyptians owe Jews reperations due to how they were treated? Should the Italians compensate half of Europe and North Africa for what the Romans did? Should Arab nations pay the UK and Ireland for the people kidnapped by the Barbary Pirates?
The Ottomans were still keeping slaves until the early 1900s, long after the western European powers had ended the practice, why aren’t we seeing calls for reperations from Turkey to Slavic nations?
we go as for back as needed to achieve a somewhat just society.
Let’s take your example of the Jews in Egypt (other than the fact that the source for Jewish slavery in Egypt is just religious texts without any archeological evidence ever found): is there some great opportunity divide between an Egyptian and an Israeli? no, so we obviously don’t need to worry about that.
or for the Ottoman-Slavic question: do Slavic peoples have less opportunity than those of modern day Turkey? no, so we don’t need to worry about that.
and yes, Italians (and many other parts of Europe) do send different types of aid to Africa for these reasons
Do Black people in the USA have massive opportunity differences in comparison to the WASP population? yes, they do, thus it is right to conduct these reparations. You may not be the only people to have committed slavery, but you sure still wear it proudly, and you are still a deeply systemically racist nation.
TLDR: it’s not about revenge, but righting wrongs.
Even currently in some rich Middle East countries, there are technically slave workers - construction & household to name 2.
this is why the slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy
“if we punish people for murder, what about self defense?”
or
“if we arrest people for selling meth, it’ll end up making the state arrest people who drink coffee”
you can legislate for a specific instance and not have it spiral out of control into insanity.
Maybe some people would try to seek reparations for ridiculous stuff. It’s exactly the purview of the law, politics and diplomacy to navigate that.
This isn’t a slippery slope fallacy. Nobody’s saying “if we let the gays marry the next thing that will happen is people will want to marry animals!”
What people are saying is, okay if this is being done in the interest of fairness, who else needs considered, and is it practical to consider them? Are we ever actually going to be able to achieve something close to fair?
In the US a great example in this discussion is native Americans. Do they get more or less for having their entire society destroyed, land confiscated, being driven on death marches to far away land, repeated treaty violations, decimated by smallpox, and many of the other tournaments?
I have native American, German, and Scottish ancestors that never owned a slave. I don’t have “African”, Irish, or “Asian” ancestors.
Do I get a check, do I get excluded, or do I pay for the sins of someone else’s forefathers? And then because… despite all the struggles my ancestors endured themselves, I lived in a country that’s trying to reconcile past sins of slavery they had nothing to do with directly (and hopefully were opposed to)?
Fact of the matter is, native americans suffered horribly, they just don’t exist in any kind of numbers to make a stink about it, and many of them bred into the white population.
We’re never going to get to “even” and we seriously need to consider if more unfair government wealth distribution is the solution to previous unfair government wealth distribution.
Hell I’m a full on Democrat and I strongly believe this will only make race relations worse. Like by a factor of 100 if they did that here. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and there’s no way sufficient time money and resources will be spent to actually make anything resembling fair happen here or in the US; you can’t do that when you’re trying to score political points.
Governments should be trying to help people from where they are now, not trying to reverse history and retroactively remedy history spread across hundreds of years.
Well considering the last slave (coerced labor) was freed in the 1940s, it’s still extremely recent. These are people’s grandparents and great-grandparents. The velocity of money is very real.
Honestly, it should never stop. There should be wealth, inheritance, and estate taxes that even out advantages and disadvantages over time. Poor people shouldn’t be paying for it because of their race, rich people should because of their advantages.
This is just communism. Distribute wealth until everyone is equal. You don’t even need to bring race into the equation to achieve the same results as being proposed here.
This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.
This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.
The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.
Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.
For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.
This is how I tend to view it too. We should be raising all poor people up and target wealth equality for everyone, regardless how they got there. I suppose reparations to POC would be a step in that direction but it by nature excludes people who might need help now. Idk, it’s a hard subject for me to form a solid opinion on too but I think social safety nets need to be prioritized for all.
I don’t know who implied paying it would be based on race. It should be based on class. Rich people are rich because they had advantages and exploited people. They should be taxed and the money should be used to raise up people who weren’t as advantaged or exploitative.
The entire concept of reparations for slavery is that non-black people will be forced to pay black people money, either as a one time lump-sum payment, or an open-ended pseudo-UBI. Some suggestions include mandated documentation of ancestral slabery, but the most popular ones don’t. The vehicle for this payment would be either increased taxes, or redirection of taxes.
If you’re not talking about race-based redistribution of wealth, you’re not talking about ‘reparations,’ which is what this thread is about.
There were families that made Bezos-class money at the height of slavery, and those families’ descendants are still rich today.
At the very least, these families shouldn’t be anonymously rich, they should be infamously rich, notoriously so. Even if a truth-and-reconciliation process is ‘too much’, let us at least have the truth out, and loud.
That’s not a reparations issue, it’s an unfuck the cities that were fucked by Robert Moses and his buddies as well as funding public schools better, making hospitals public instead of privately owned, and changing the punitive justice system to a proper rehabilitation justice system.
Otherwise you’ll just see short term happiness and provide arguments for “we’re equal now, we paid reparations! What else do you want?”
I’d say both are required, and also reparations should never end. The rich should be taxed for their advantages and exploitation and money should be used to help raise poor people up. The problem can never be fixed. There will always be advantaged and disadvantaged people and exploiters and exploited people. Implying it should be a one time payment for a one time thing I think is missing what is trying to be solved.
I don’t know. Plenty if other groups arrived much later in western countries, often with little or nothing to their names and feeling persecution, and have done much much better.
I’ll give you that the specter of discrimination still haunted western institutions until quite recently. But blacks were not the only group that faced discrimination.
I am not black or white. I can offer a perspective of an immigrant who isn’t white. Looking at how blacks were targeted for arrests and the disproportionate amount of arrests while being brought up in economically challenging environments, it is very hard to “move up”.
I immigrated to a western country with qualifications and with a good sum in my bank account and still it was challenging. I cannot imagine how generational oppression will do to a persons psyche and their worldview.
This is also why affirmative hiring and admission isn’t “racist against white people” as people see it as. It’s actually leveling the playing field.
Before implementing things like affirmative action or reparations, do any of us have any idea in mind for when reparations will be done making things “fair”? Or is the intent to have it go on forever? I’ve never heard this argument before and I’ve never heard of anyone having a set date for the end of affirmative action and the like, so it sounds like a slippery slope to future discrimination. This is probably what at least some of the “racist against white people” (and asian people) crowd are complaining about. I know I would be miffed if I lost an academic or career position to an objectively lower quality candidate due to something like government mandated diversity, regardless of how much I support civil rights. Obviously, ideally, everyone should have equal access to these opportunities and no one should be unable to get the education they want but that isn’t the kind of world we live in (at least in the USA).
Also, why can’t there be other ways to level the playing field in terms of environment, such as funding better schooling or housing for disparaged individuals, regardless of race? Despite black people having to fight an uphill battle in life, these things that uplift across the board without racial or ethnic discrimination would naturally end up helping them out more than others before leveling out as equality is achieved. The only problem, as always, is the bureaucracy involved.
The argument goes, as a British citizen, you have and continue to benefit from policies that your government made a long time ago. Reparations are not a tax on you, but an expense the government should have paid at the time of the work, but instead it did things like kidnap people from their homes, transport them to where labor was necessary, and force them into work. Now, the people who are the descendents of the kidnapped folks are requesting that the bills their great great grandparents were never paid. To extend that, after slavery ended, many of those who had been enslaved were left disenfranchised, and impoverished to the point that there is almost no possibility of building generational wealth.
As for if this will open the floodgates or not, who knows. An argument could be made in both directions, it’s not as though governments paying one time sums to places is rare, and reparations for wars used to be pretty run of the mill.
The “floodgates” component of the question is the “slippery slope” logical fallacy.
Consider the present claim in isolation, not its relevance to other claims.
It is not a fallacy to consider it might encourage other claims. If I am in a classroom and I accept to give someone candy publicly, do you think everyone nearby will not be MORE tempted to ask too, compared to whether if I said no?
In both cases, asking costs almost nothing compared to the potential gains.
Imagine you’re running a very long relay race. Just after the race starts, members of the other team jump out of the bushes, beat up your runner and tie them up. This happens for several laps until someone decides that this is probably bad so they stop beating and restraining you. But the race doesn’t stop and the positions aren’t reset, but the other team is like 20 laps ahead and allowed to finish. Is that fair?
Reparations would theoretically allow your team to catch up but former slaves and their descendants have never been allowed that. What’s more, in the UK, former slave owners were paid for the inconvenience of no longer owning slaves (edit: up until 2015!!!) while the former slaves got to continue living as second-class citizens for a while.
Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn’t work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth, advanced infrastructure and old laws that specifically aim to disadvantage black people (whether they were abolished or still on the books the effects are still felt). Imagine your great-granddad was able to build up a fortune, how likely would it be that your family would still be rich? Imagine your great-granddad lost every cent, how likely would it be that your family would be still poor? Sure, it’s possible that situations drastically over time but that’s the exception and not the rule. There are reasons why things are the way they are.
I believe that reparations should not be any lump sum of money but in the form of education, investment opportunities, resources and infrastructure. That way all persons living in former slave countries can benefit and pass those benefits down to their descendants.
Edit: I believe that up to last year Barbados went after Richard Drax for reparations due to his family’s direct involvement in slavery in that country. I don’t know how successful that was, but I support it.
Your analogy and argument is very well organized so I wonder how you think universal basic income could mitigate the negative impacts of generational wealth/poverty? In my mind, it is part of a solution to many social issues but I’m still learning. I know there are arguments that capitalism will just buffer against any implementation but I’m still forming my opinions.
Thanks, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time since it was a big discussion topic in my circle for a while.
I haven’t given the same level of thought to universal basic income, but I guess it would be a start. What people really need is a way to not only survive but to build wealth and pass that wealth on to their descendants. Like I said in my previous comment, education, investment opportunities, infrastructure upgrades, etc. will go a long way towards that goal. In my mind, a universal income could be a part of that but not the whole solution. And yes capitalism will find a way to ruin it but we can always hope.
Another part in my mind would be estate taxes. If generational wealth wasn’t as impactful on our lives then UBI could serve a bigger purpose. If the playing field were more level for everyone, then hate or fear couldn’t errode it as easily. It’s not something we can see in a lifetime, but I hope that I can see us aiming at a useful target while I am still around.
I think UBI could help with the problem. It won’t be solved without other things though. If we pay for UBI by increase estate and inheritance taxes, that could go a long way. Basically make it so generational wealth slowly decreases over time. Obviously it’ll never be zero, because education, social connections, and things are also generational wealth, but it’d be an improvement to the way things are.
Basically, it’s not fair that someone is rich because their parents were rich and someone is poor because their parents were poor. The rich person should be less rich and the poor person should be less poor (on average).
Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn’t work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth
In addition to that, slavery was never ‘abolished’. Just go take a quick look into the mining or cocoa industry.
So, can the Slavic countries claim payments of reparations from the formerly known ottoman empire? Perhaps Jewish people from Asia? Surely the Christians from the Arabs, and the Arabs from the Christians? Not to mention Vietnam from China, or entire Europe from the decendants of the Roman empire.
Or are all of those instances somehow different?
History is full of misery and trying to pay to make amends for somebody else’s actions, today, feels ridiculous. Just as OP, I don’t get it.
