What white people need to understand about reparations is that it is not about guilt for their ancestors’ sins.
Guilt is counterproductive and self-indulgent. It results in one of two things: either people refusing to learn about or acknowledge anything that might make them feel guilty.
This is where denial, willful ignorance, justifications, and deflection come into play. It’s about a person focusing on their guilt, using it as an excuse to avoid taking action.
That’s where we get reverse victim and offender:
- “I feel so bad that I don’t know what to do.”
- “I can’t hear about it, so anybody talking about it is doing it to hurt me.”
It’s about the systems of oppression in the United States that we continue to uphold and are complicit in upholding.
It’s not that white people need to pay reparations because they are to blame. The United States owes reparations.
As somebody who lives in the United States in 2023, we benefit from systems of oppression and the atrocities that built the United States.
The point of learning about the history of those atrocities and acknowledging them is not to make culpability disappear. It’s to learn how to do better now.
The History Of Paying Reparations
It’s not that the United States doesn’t have a history of paying reparations.
The United States paid reparations to former enslavers for their economic loss in the formerly enslaved.
Lincoln had promised 40 acres and a mule to the formerly enslaved, and that promise was rescinded by Andrew Johnson.
So if you don’t support reparations, you support the United States history of that broken promise.
The United States paid reparations to:
- Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II
- Families who lost loved ones during 9/11
- Americans who were held hostage in Iran
And that’s not about assigning blame to individual American citizens. It’s about the United States recognizing travesties that should be redressed.
Supporting Reparations
If you don’t support reparations, it’s like saying you don’t think the old system of slavery was terrible. And that the US should recognize and make amends for.
These are not sins of our ancestors. These are actions that we engage in now.
If you vote for a president who makes immigration rules stricter, this can cause a big shortage of workers. This might lead the farming industry to use prisoners for labor on a large scale, not seen since a very unfair time known as the Jim Crow era.
If you don’t learn or admit that the US prison system is linked to past slavery, it’s not just about the past, but about what’s happening now.