The US government currently has one federal program for reparations—it’s for investors. Anyone who has lost money in the commodities trading market due to fraud and other illegal activities can fill out a simple form online and find out if they are eligible.
Cornell William Brooks, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and former president and CEO of the NAACP, has been studying the mechanisms of reparations paid out by the US government, from farm subsidies to investor compensation, from Native American restitution designed to last for generations, to the paltry sums given to interned Japanese citizens during World War II. Brooks argues that the notion of reparations for harm is “regular and routine — for everybody but Black people.”
Brooks and fellow Harvard Kennedy School faculty member Linda Bilmes will publish a new study that examines “the norms for compensation of harms which already exist in the United States, and how harms against generations of African Americans fit into this model.” A descendant of enslaved people, Brooks speaks about his ancestors fleeing pre-Civil War plantations in South Carolina. “What would our lives look like if we had a fraction of what is owed to us?”
We spoke to Brooks about who receives reparations, the ongoing misconceptions around them, and why Black descendants of slavery have yet to receive a single cent.
Felice León: What, exactly, are reparations?
Cornell William Brooks: At this moment, when many have said we are in the throes of a racial reckoning, it’s important to go back more than 150 years and think about a washerwoman named Callie House. She was born into slavery near Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She created a movement of hundreds of thousands of people nationwide who organized to advocate for reparations. What she meant by “reparations” was compensation for formerly enslaved people.
When we think about the intergenerational wealth that was lost, that was stolen, that was misappropriated from the minds, the bodies, the beings of Black people, it is not merely about compensation for labor stolen; it’s about compensation for land stolen, for legacy stolen, for housing, jobs, health and well-being stolen. A definition of reparations must be full and robust, both in terms of the wealth extracted and the opportunity lost. And it must be restorative, meaning it must place Black people in a place of not merely equality or equity, but a full recognition of our citizenship.
In your forthcoming paper on reparations, you provide a taxonomy of racial harms. What exactly are they, and how have you found them useful?
When we consider this wide variety of harms over a long arc of history, how do we catalog them? How do we count them? How do we determine the cost?
When [Bilmes and I] began to write the paper, we began to think about a taxonomy of racial harms. “Taxonomy” is just a fancy word for a system of categorization. We look at those harms related to labor and wages and the economy, to health, to voting and political empowerment, as well as those harms related to violence and to land. When we think about these categories of harm, we can then drill down to specific acts of harm.
When we think about violence, we think about the lynching of individuals. We can also consider police brutality. We can also think about racial massacres in the past. But it isn’t nearly enough to limit it to these categories of racial violence. We must ponder the ways in which they interact and compound over time.
When we look at the harms visited upon Black people, we cannot put them on a checkerboard where the pieces move individually. This is critically important. Senator Mitch McConnell once asked why we would compensate people for something that happened 150 years ago, as though slavery was an isolated harm occurring once in time and ending. Slave codes morphed into the Black Codes, which morphed into the convict list leasing system and the childhood apprenticeship system in the slave patrols, giving rise to the Southern police departments — and now, this era of mass incarceration.
Our history is not a series of disconnected tweets, but rather chapters in a long-running novel of racial injustice, the length of which rivals “War and Peace.”
What do people get wrong about reparations?
Most people come up with what I would call the “three impossibilities” when it comes to reparations.
There’s a temporal impossibility: the presumption that the harm occurred too long ago. Slavery happened more than 150 years ago. There’s nothing we can do about that.
There’s the administrative impossibility: the presumption that, administratively speaking, America couldn’t possibly come up with a reparations program for the harms endured by Black people.
There’s the fiscal impossibility: the presumption that the U.S. couldn’t possibly pay for it. These impossibilities operate in people’s minds and keep us stuck.
The last thing we get wrong about reparations is that it is zero sum. As a country, we never suffered by compensating farmers who have lost their crops. As a country, we have never suffered as a consequence of compensating veterans who lost land on the battlefield or on a base. We’ve lost nothing as a country by offering restitution to victims of crime.
When it comes to Black people, we assume that we lose something as a consequence of doing something that we’ve done for others — if we do it for Black people, it will somehow hurt us. So, yes, some of this is a kind of intellectual scare tactic.
There’s no group in this country more responsible for American freedoms than Black people, both on the battlefield and in the courts. But we are also an economic engine of the country. America became a superpower on our backs — Carolina rice in the 1700s, cotton in the 1800s.
If we run so well as a country by doing wrong by Black people, what would happen if we did right by Black people?
Despite this, there is a precedent for reparatory compensation. Can you share a few of the programs that cover and provide compensation for harms in the context of the U.S.?
The assumption is that reparations as a concept has been foisted upon the public ex nihilo, or out of nothing. When we look at our federal government over decades, we see many programs that operate on what we call a “norm of reparatory compensation.”
In America, the government will respond to a harm that is visited upon people deemed innocent and deserving. The government will attempt to make a person whole, to make a community whole. This undergirds many federal programs and acts as a sort of fiscal precedent, a moral precedent, a programmatic precedent for taking action. Why is this important? It makes clear that reparations are not novel and not new, not in any way aberrational and exceptional, but, in fact, regular and routine — for everybody but Black people.
You will often hear people ask, “How would we find the descendants of those who are enslaved?” Let’s have everyone come forward with the documentation from Ancestry.com or blood samples. We compensate the direct victims of the harm, but also indirect victims of the harm. Operative in many of our federal programs is what we call the “presumptive element of eligibility,” which is to say that if you were near the harm when the harm happened, we assume that you were harmed and can be compensated.
We see this with our fellow citizens who are Native American. We see that they received reparations — certainly too little, certainly too late — and compensation for land stolen. This is critically important because this is a reparatory compensation program in which the benefits go to not just one generation, but across five or six generations. For those who say we can’t possibly do this; it’s too difficult. It is beyond our fiscal, moral and legal imaginations to contemplate a reparations program for Black Americans, all we need to do is look at reparations programs for Native Americans.
Consider also the reparations extended to Japanese Americans who the U.S. placed in internment camps during World War II. When these citizens were snatched from their businesses and communities, sent into the interior of the country and incarcerated for the duration of the war, they received compensation twice: a very paltry sum right after the war, and then decades later, more, but still a modest sum of money. We also compensate farmers who have crops that fail to thrive.
According to our research, we have exactly one reparations program in the federal government: the Commodities Futures Trading Commission’s Reparations Program. When investors lose money trading commodities, they have the means by which to, as the federal government calls it, “seek reparations.” It is not only multitudinous, it is also extraordinarily diverse. And why is this important? It’s important because these reparatory compensation programs prove that the U.S. government has the expertise to engage in reparations.
Would you consider the refusal to give Black people reparations anti-Black? Why or why not?
Absolutely. In 2002, the pioneering criminal defense attorney and Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree sued private institutions for reparations for Black people. A judge said these claims might be legitimate, but they were filed too late.
That denial was not rational. It was anti-Black. This is not merely anti-logic; it is not merely anti-law; it’s not merely anti-precedent. It’s anti-Black. We know this because so many other groups have received repertory compensation. And so, if this is a matter of historical, philosophical and legal consistency, we have to ask the question: If everybody else, why not us? And that’s anti-Black racism.
Why do you believe that reparations are such a hotly contested topic?
A majority of Americans oppose it. Why would that be the case? It has to do with the tension between perfect and imperfect victims. “Perfect” victims are those people who have been victimized by some injustice and who are deemed to be deserving — like children, or people who are wrapped in virtue and respectability.
When it comes to Black people, we are deemed to be “imperfect” victims. Critics look at Black people’s relative lack of wealth and say it’s a consequence of not working hard enough, ignoring that people abandoned their land to escape racial terrorism in The Great Migration. When we think about the fact that Black people were shut out of the highest-paying professions, the difference in the racial wealth gap becomes a measure of our presumed laziness, not that we were excluded from the social welfare of the New Deal.
These racial and discriminatory exclusions become moral biases attributed to Black people. We become the imperfect victims — not worthy of being compensated, not worthy of having our harms recognized and repaired. Not worthy of receiving some restitution.
You believe that Black descendants of slavery will receive reparations in your lifetime. Why are you so confident of that?
The reparations movement in the U.S. is one chapter in a long-running saga. If you were to ask anybody on the Edmund Pettus Bridge how likely the Voting Rights Act was to pass — as Amelia Boynton Robinson and John Lewis were being beaten to the pavement — most people would say not very likely. But they secured the Voting Rights Act that same year.
We’ve seen this over and over again. We have to live our lives with respect to our own confidence and our own ability to secure our own freedom.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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