Reparations

My first house, a 1927 bungalow oozing charm, cost $43,000 in 1990. The mortgage interest rate was 9.5% and I had very little money to put down, but I as a first-time home buyer, I could finance the closing costs through an FHA loan. I sold that house seven year later for $71,000, and the resulting equity enabled me to purchase homes in Tennessee, then in West Virginia, and finally in Pennsylvania. I refinanced my last house twice to cover the cost of a home remodel then a car, paid off the mortgage, and retired debt-free.

At each step of my journey in home ownership, I was assisted by family, friends, realtors, and bankers. Although I never earned a large salary, I worked hard and scrimped on others things to make mortgage payments. I cared for my property to maintain or even increase its value. But I am only recently understanding how much my ability to accrue home equity was aided by something entirely random: my race.

I knew that “redlining” was a system that signaled to mortgage lenders and insurance companies that certain neighborhoods were deemed poor investments. I assumed the racist nature of redlining was subtly coded, but in fact it was quite explicit.¹ When the FHA was established in the 1930s, its loan assistance was restricted to White Americans, denying Black Americans federal aid to buy homes and creating segregated neighborhoods. Some deeds actually required that houses be sold to White people, and the FHA would refuse to insure any homes in a neighborhood with Black residents or located too close to Black neighborhoods.

Other federal programs reinforced this exclusion, as 1.2 million Black WWII veterans were denied benefits through the GI Bill. In the 1950s, the interstate highway system ran right through predominantly Black urban neighborhoods, sealing them off behind a concrete barrier.

My parents benefitted from these programs, and my siblings and I will eventually inherit the equity they accrued in their home, in addition to our own. This generational transfer of wealth has helped to expand the racial wealth gap, so that in 2019, Black Americans held only 2.9% of this country’s wealth, although they comprised 14% of the population.

Home ownership is only one aspect of wealth, but it offers a clear example of structural racism. The U.S. government intentionally shut Black Americans out of programs to finance and insure homes, one of the most reliable ways to accumulate wealth that compounds over successive generations.

To illustrate the difference this could make in Black families, consider the case of Henrietta Wood. Having been freed from slavery in 1848, she was kidnapped and re-enslaved five years later and did not regain freedom until after the Civil War. In 1870, Henrietta Wood sued Zebulon Ward, who had kidnapped and sold her. In 1878 she won the suit and was awarded $2500, a fraction of the $20,000 she requested in damages.

Nevertheless, the value of her award today would be $65,000, making it the largest sum ever awarded as restitution for slavery.² Even such a small settlement made a difference in the lives of the Wood family. Henrietta and her son Arthur moved to Chicago and bought a house. Arthur attended law school, and his success allowed his descendants to enter professional careers, even as redlining curtailed opportunities for other Black families in their south Chicago neighborhood.

This story illustrates that lost wages for enslaved laborers along with subsequent policies and practices denied generations of African Americans opportunities to accumulate wealth. A short experiment with racial equality during Reconstruction (1865-1877) was followed by Jim Crow laws, lynching, sharecropping, and redlining. Under these racist structures, many Black families continued to fall behind, while Henrietta Wood’s family was able to move forward through the reparations she received.

Ah, reparations – the term that makes White progressives squirm, and outrages White conservatives. White Americans who fear the loss of cultural dominance feel further threatened by the idea of losing economic advantage. We like to attribute American prosperity to our White ancestors’ hard work, ignoring the fact that it was built on land stolen from Indigenous people and through the uncompensated labor of enslaved people forcibly removed from their country.

Two-thirds of Americans oppose reparations, many claiming that White people who never owned slaves should not have to pay Black people who were never enslaved. But the situation is more complex than that. Not only was the accumulation of Black wealth stalled, but racist structures continue today.³

While a national reparations program may be decades from becoming a reality, if it ever does, some cities, the state of California, and other institutions are exploring or have actually initiated reparations programs. Individuals are also making reparations.

Sara Jenkins describes meeting an African American woman named Elaine at a conference. As they introduced themselves, they discovered that they shared the same last name and roots on Johns Island, South Carolina. It was clear to both that Sara’s ancestors had enslaved Elaine’s ancestors on their rice plantation.

Over the next few years, Sara got to know Elaine’s family, and, wanting to compensate them for their ancestors’ enslavement, she created a scholarship at Claflin University, a historically Black school in South Carolina. Named in memory of Elaine’s parents, who were civil rights activists in Charleston, SC, the scholarship fund benefits students from the the five Sea Islands near Charleston.

Race is so deeply entrenched in our country’s social structures that addressing it in any significant way poses a daunting challenge.⁴ Because this history took place in individual lives, individual encounters like the Jenkins are not insignificant, and are facilitated by Coming to the Table, an organization that connects descendants of enslaved people and slave owners. Even those families without slave-owning ancestors can look for ways to use their accumulated wealth to address racial inequality.

While no one alive today is responsible for chattel slavery, we are the ones who can address the racist structures that persist to this time. We are the ones who can try to unravel an injustice that is woven into our national fabric, in which one group of people is privileged and another is disadvantaged in every way that matters, based solely on the color of their skin.

1. I am indebted to presentations on this history by Wayne Hare and Bill McKibben as part of a Racial Justice Pilot Program by Third Act, which has posted a transcript of their conversation.
2. This payment was no hardship for Zebulon Ward, who left an estate worth at least $600,000, or more than $21 million today.
3. The criminal justice system is a prime example of structural racism, as documented by Ava DuVernay in her film 13th, available on Netflix. Police forces in the US trace their roots to “slave patrols” that pursued runaways and quashed rebellions. African Americans today are subjected to mass incarceration, comprising 38% of inmates but only 14% of the US population. Despite high profile cases such as the death of George Floyd and national protests, unarmed African Americans continue to be killed by police.
4. There is no shortage of excellent work detailing our racial history, including Nikole Hannah-Jones’ acclaimed 1619 Project for the New York Times and the documentary version available on Hulu. Efforts to teach a more realistic version of of U.S. history in public schools have been thwarted by White nationalists seeking to shield future generations from the discomforting truth behind White dominance.