Black folks are in debt because America is indebted to us
Cash reparations are a must — but they’re not enough.
Americans do not overthink slavery so much as they are over thinking about it. Politicians have canceled classes, limited librarians, and prohibited paperbacks with such ferocity that we are rapidly running out of ways to outrun our history. Yet it is foolish to believe that if we simply do not think about the rusted chains wrapped around us, that we will be free of them. For no matter how much we think we are done with history, history is never done with us.
As James Baldwin reminds us, the reverberations of American slavery are not subject to our recollections. “It is not a question of memory,” Baldwin writes. “Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”
Our leaders wish to believe that America’s debt to Black people died with the enslaved themselves. As Senator Mitch McConnell put it in 2019: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago when none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.”
Yet slavery lived on, long after emancipation. “For a century after the Civil War, Black folks were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror — a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell,” essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates quipped during his Congressional testimony on reparations. “It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder, from enslavement, but the logic of enslavement, of white supremacy, respects no such borders, and the guard of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs.”
McConnell’s view of history is myopic. Yet even if we adopted his nearsightedness, we still see that Black people are owed innumerable billions. If not for slavery, then for its “many heirs”— for convict leasing, vagrancy laws, redlining, poll taxes, debt peonage, and all the vestiges of Jim Crow. Yes, reparations is for bondage, but is not limited to it. The crimes extend into the here and now, extend far into the land of the living.
In McConnell and his acolytes, we see America’s absurd selective history. This nation proudly champions presidents born in the 1940s, yet sheepishly ignores the crimes inflicted on Black chain gangs in the 1940s. We haughtily celebrate the greatness of “the American Century,” yet refuse to acknowledge what America was during most of that century — an apartheid state. The issue is not that Americans are completely ahistorical; it is that they only like the history which flatters them.
When Black folks bring up the history of our ancestors, when we bring up how they lashed our backs, there is inevitably a backlash. It is this recoiling, this phobia of the past, which has made it impossible for the United States to proffer recourse and atone for unrequited toil. The result is ceaseless racial blight.
Black folks have long since paid our dues, but we are never paid our due. We languish in debt because America won’t pay its debts to us. Chased by cash-for-gold outlets, swarmed by payday lenders, stalked by used-car dealers, hunted by pawn shops, mobbed by title loans, Black communities are circled by every species of loan shark. From Compton to Charleston, hip-hop radio stations blare baritone ads threatening, “SETTLE YOUR IRS DEBT NOW,” as this cruel country, which enslaved our ancestors, Jim Crowed our elders, and mass incarcerated our kids, audaciously mails out tax notices telling Black folks how much we owe America. Madness!
Everywhere you look, the case for reparations resounds viscerally. It glares like the disheveled men in homeless encampments on MLK Boulevards from Atlanta to Los Angeles. It mourns like the GoFundMe pleas for the funeral expenses of Black grandmothers, who, after a lifetime of caring and loving, now face the indignity of being tossed in a pine box because they cannot afford to die. It is as vivid as the slaveholders inked on our dollar bills, as tactile as the plantations carved into the back of our coins. And yet, even if America were to pay up, even if it handed over its slave-themed dollars to the descendants of slaves, this would not be enough.
For if the US repaid Black families and did nothing more, we’d still reside in capitalism — that ravenous, bloodthirsty hierarchy fueled by consuming the people beneath you. If we only closed the racial wealth gap, we would simply move Black people from being on the dinner menu to being diners at the table. We would still subsist on others’ flesh and blood. What good would there be in repaying the victims of cannibalism if we continue eating humans? What justice is there in merely climbing the ranks from hunted to hunter?
America’s crime is not only slavery. It is not only the failure to pay reparations. It is also the failure to transform our economy away from being a human-engulfing maw. The formerly enslaved did not envision abolition as mere inclusion in America’s immoral economy. They did not just want their “piece of the pie,” because they knew the pie was made from pieces of them. Rather, the Freedmen envisioned the project of emancipation and repair as a wholesale reinvention of the American economy.
As Duke historian Justin Leroy notes, Black thinkers in the 19th century “conceived of freedom not only as the end of the institution of slavery and the equitable incorporation into the political forms of American democracy, but also, crucially, as a project to rework the relationship among land, labor, and capital.”
Leroy describes this holistic vision as an “economically-inflected understanding of freedom” that sought to inaugurate a “union between expansive participatory democracy and redistributive political economy secured by an egalitarian state.” This vision of Black liberation, what Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” is inseparable from any true program of repair.
It is only through this combination of reparation and transformation that America can pay off its debts and rest assured that it isn’t creating new ones — it is only through repentance and renewal that we can all truly be free.
Aaron Ross Coleman is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, The Nation, The Intercept, and more.
He writes the Freedom Studies Substack, a new publication exploring abolition, economic democracy, and what freedom can actually look like in practice.
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Reparations, yes, but the whole system needs to change for the reparations to be effective. Thanks for this thoughtful article!
Because after the pay out, then what? We absolutely need solutions. My friend and I were just talking about the various needs of our community - reparations yes but maybe another solution, in addition to reparations is establishing more think tanks - centers of research, and incubators of new ideas. One that consists of researchers, scholars, and everyday people to identify issues impacting long-term economic development, designing alternative policy frameworks to address the underlying issues. We see the symptoms, the think tanks help with recommending and implementing real solutions.