Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 36
Putting a Price on a Lifetime's Worth of Stolen Labor: A conversation with Dr. Thomas Craemer
Happy Monday, and happy Labor Day! I hope you are taking advantage of the long weekend — and for those of us who do have to work today, I hope you’re able to do whatever it is that brings you joy or peace at some point today.
Today’s Hot Takes section is a conversation with my co-author and colleague, Dr. Thomas Craemer a professor at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Craemer, and several other professors worked on a chapter together that will be published in a multi-disciplinary book on reparations later next week; the chapter, which was published earlier than the rest of the book, can be read in The Review of the Black Political Economy here. The chapter is important because it is one of the most recent pieces of research to use various estimates of how much a reparations package would cost. Of the academics that I know, he is somehow both one of the smartest and one with the least amount of ego, and his commitment to this work has driven the conversation around slavery reparations forward. It was such a pleasure to be able to feature him today.
A couple of clear takeaways from our conversation:
Reparations, as a concept are not new, and are only seen as controversial because of how deeply rooted anti-Blackness is in our collective mental models.
While he has quite literally come up with a way to calculate how much a reparations package could be based on the amount in wages that were lost, you can’t put a price on a loss of life and emotional trauma, which is why reparations must be committed to in a deeper financial way for actual reconciliation to happen.
While efforts here are focused on slavery and post-slavery discrimination, colonial reparations is an issue that needs further exploration and attention.
Here are some recommendations for reading today:
This piece in The Nation that profiles/reviews Dr. Darity and Kirsten Mullen’s 2020 book, ‘From Here to Equality.’
I wrote this piece for The Plug, which examines the role of venture capital in closing the racial wealth gap from a policy perspective. It’s my first reported piece in a while, so go easy on me.
You should listen or read the interview between Jamil Smith and Clint Smith for Vox’s Conversations podcast. It’s about Clint Smith’s new book, ‘How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America,’ which Jamil describes as a “bold and deeply reported look at how the story of American slavery lives on in the present day.’ When I find the time, I hope to read it.
As he wrote the book, Smith traveled to Louisana to visit the Whitney plantation, which is one of the only plantations across the country that gives visitors facts and information about the enslaved people who were held there. This NPR piece highlights how a family whose descendants were enslaved on the plantation took refuge from Hurrican Ida in a house their descendants helped build.
Larry Elder, the Black conservative radio host running for Governor in California, argued that reparations should actually be paid to those who owned slaves, in a recent conversation he had with Candace Owens. It’s relevant because Dr. Craemer and I touch on this point a lot in our conversation.
West Point Academy, raised its first outdoor statue of a Black man, in memory of the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry as detailed in this Washington Post article.
Evanston has started to hold public meetings outlining the guidelines for what the city is calling a reparations program as detailed in this Evanston Roundtable article.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
The Nation: What Is Owed
The Plug: The Role Of VC’s In The Policy Fight To Close The Racial Wealth Gap
Washington Post: On Labor Day, we remember the Black women who helped win labor rights
CNN: Like Washington and Jefferson, he championed liberty. Unlike the founders, he freed his slaves.
Vox: Clint Smith III on confronting slavery’s legacy in America
TIME: How the Origins of Epidemiology Are Linked to the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Nevada Current: Slavery was the ultimate labor distortion – empowering workers would be a form of reparations
Yahoo News: Larry Elder argues slave owners are ‘owed reparations’ during appearance on Candace Owens’ show
Financial Times: Monumental injustices — relics, racism and reparations
USA Today: US mayors are organizing for reparations and equity for Black Americans
Center for American Progress: Unions Help Increase Wealth for All and Close Racial Wealth Gaps
The Hill: One way to address the wealth gap: Stop 'MacGyvering' Social Security
Vox: Critical race theory bans are making teaching much harder
Truthout: Attacks on Critical Race Theory Seek to Insert Fascist Politics Into Education
Regional News
NPR: Descendants Of The Enslaved Sheltered From Ida In A Historic Plantation's Big House
Washington Post: Slavery was part and parcel of the wealth of early Georgetown
Atlanta Black Star: Georgia Leads the Nation In Public Schools Named for Confederate Figures
Washington Post: As Confederate statues come down, West Point honors Buffalo Soldiers
Evanston Roundtable: Evanston officials lay out guidelines for City’s first reparations program
PBS Wisconsin: The Idea of Reparations Is Not New, But Big Questions Remain
Wisconsin Watch: Should Black Americans get reparations for state-sanctioned slavery and racism?
Washington Post: Republican Glenn Youngkin seeks teacher raises, ban on ‘critical race theory’ in plan for Virginia K-12 schools
The Columbus Dispatch: Is critical race theory an attack on 'whiteness' and American values?
International News
New York Magazine: Reparations for Iraq
Hot Takes
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Trevor: Can you tell me more about yourself, where you’re from, what you studied, and what you currently research?
Dr. Craemer: I’m originally from Germany. I came to the U.S. for graduate school in 2000 and graduated in 2005. I also have a doctorate in Germany, but that hasn’t served me very well. So I came here, and I had to do it again to get an academic position. I studied implicit racial attitudes and their effects on people’s opinions on race-related policies. I was trying to find a policy with no opinion leadership by any elites — no party or politician, which is very difficult to find. So, reparations seemed to fit the bill at the time because no party had taken a position on it. No politician was running on it, so I ran a survey and asked people for their opinions on slavery reparations.
I realized that people were more willing to support reparations if the modality was educational benefits rather than cash payments. I noticed that with educational benefits, support was almost 50 percent, which was enormous for 2006. This told me that the public is thinking about reparations and not just saying no. In most survey’s you are getting “no,” because people aren’t given any context.
What motivated me from my German background is that I always learned about the Holocaust and felt terrible and ashamed. So I always dreamed of sharing with a Holocaust survivor how I felt about it, which I thought would never happen. But then I met Mieciu Langer, survivor of five concentration camps and a death march, and he retired from Israel to Germany of all places, and our families became friendly. So I wondered how he could, after having gone through what he suffered in his childhood and being the only survivor of his family, ever find the confidence in Germany to spend his retirement years there.
After he passed away in 2015, I learned from his widow that he had received a reparations pension, Very small, about $2,000 per month, from the 1970s until he passed away in 2015. This intrigued me as an example, and I wondered if that had anything to do with his confidence in Germany; I don’t want to put any words in his mouth, but I’m sure it certainly didn’t hurt.
Trevor: You started to get into it, but I would love to hear why you personally care about reparations?
Dr. Craemer: I feel that there is an assumption that reparations benefit the recipients and hurts the providers, and I don’t think that is quite right. I think there is a benefit for both sides of it. First of all, it’s not about the money, because no amount of money could ever repay, for example, Mieciu for what he lost, or what price you could put on the suffering he experienced in the concentration camps. There is no money you can put on it. But, what reparations can do as a symbol, is make words of apology more meaningful.
Words alone are cheap, but a material symbol with money attached to it has a deeper meaning. If you think about how Germany and Israel are today, as friendly countries, that would have been inconceivable at the end of World War II, but I think that reparations played a small but important role in that. Racial reconciliation in the United States also could use reparations as a symbol of sincerity.
Trevor: I know you focus currently on reparations in the United States, but I know you’ve also given it thought globally. For the United Kingdom specifically, can they really repay for all of the colonization and destruction that they’ve done?
Dr. Craemer: I’ve dabbled in international reparations, but of course, the problem is always what kind of historical source there is to come up with estimates. I have tried to come up with several methods to estimate reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. First, how do you count the number of victims? There is a slave trade database out of Emory University based on records, but for every person enslaved and shipped to the New World, we think that up to four people are believed to have died on the transport route, so there are many unknowns. Then we have to ask, what price can you put on a life? As I said, theoretically, it is infinite because you cannot make up for the loss of human life. Still, some researchers have proposed taking what is internationally is agreed upon for what victims of airline crashes are paid from airlines, so that is one strategy. I have looked at taking the same per victim amount that Holocaust reparations represent; if you take the total amount Germany spent divided by 6 million Holocaust survivors, you arrive at somewhere between $5,000-10,000 per victim, which is a meager amount. However, if you multiply that with the number of victims of the slave trade, which happened over many centuries, it becomes quite sizeable.
This is more like back-of-the-envelope calculations to see if we can wrap our minds around what that would represent. Slave trade reparations I kept it conceptually different from colonialism reparations because there is a wrinkle in African history; when most of West Africa was divided among the European nations in the 19th century, most European nations had adopted abolitionist rhetoric to promote colonialism. So there was a weird thing happening: Europeans were fighting against slavery in Africa, and African elites were defending slavery against European encroachment. So keeping slave trade reparations separate from colonial reparations is important. Germany has recently agreed to pay reparations to Namibia, Germany Southwest Africa, where they committed the first genocide in the 20th century. In terms of colonialism, there is not much consciousness of guilt in Europe, so that it will take some more research.
There are a few cases. For example, in Kenya, victims of the Mau Mau rebellion have received reparations from Britain, some art has been returned, but a comprehensive program has not yet been formulated as far as I know.
Trevor: So you’ve done some research on implicit bias. What are some of the most important pieces of your research that you’ve found as they relate to reparations?
Dr. Craemer: With implicit bias, I’ve used two kinds of measures. One, the more common one, where you take positive and negative words that people have to recognize on a computer screen and then very quickly indicate by pressing one or another button if it’s a positive or negative word on the computer screen, what they don’t realize is that at the same time, pictures of Black and white faces are flashing across the computer screen. Or the implicit association test, which works similarly, but people see the Black and white faces on the screen, and they have to classify them by pressing one or the other button. If the word is positive and the face is African-American, or the word is negative or European-American, you have to click one of the other buttons. You typically find that there is an overwhelming pro-white and anti-Black bias, not only among white respondents but also among many African-Americans and Americans from other backgrounds. I used a different measure among the same respondents, taken from social psychology research on identification in long-term romantic partnerships. I switched out the partner with African-American’s as a group. I took that same measure, which requires people to describe themselves on 90 personality traits. Still, the funny thing is that there is a reaction time effect when the person uses a trait to describe themselves that is not descriptive of the group. I found through these measures that white people who identify with African-American’s on this implicit level were significantly more likely to support affirmative action and reparations for slavery, and it doesn’t matter what partisanship they have. I can’t explain where that is coming from, some white people identify with African-Americans, and others don’t.
I don’t know where that identification is coming from, but it has a politically relevant effect. That tells me that it is possible to identify across racial group boundaries in a politically relevant way. That identification will lead me to support pro-Black policies more passionately, which gives me hope that something like reparations, which have no financial benefit to white Americans, can still be supported if there are enough white Americans who identify with African-Americans a group. So to know there is a psychological mechanism that allows for solidarity to happen across group boundaries makes me very hopeful.
Trevor: Let’s flip to the wealth chapter for the Reparations Planning Commission. Can you summarize what the chapter is about and what it found?
Dr. Cramer: Basically, the chapter is a large overview of African-American history and how African-Americans have suffered wealth consequences from slavery and post-slavery discrimination. The wealth chapter details some estimation methods, especially for slavery reparations when slavery existed in the United States. We don’t have estimates for colonial slavery, not because it’s unimportant, but because further research would have to be done. The same is true for post-slavery discrimination, such as Jim Crow discrimination or discriminatory policies during the New Deal era. All these forms of discrimination had wealth consequences for African-Americans living today because they inherited less money from their parents, and from their parents, it has a multi-generational effect. At the same time, white Americans who have inherited homes that they bought under New Deal policies have a benefit that accrues from generation to generation. So there is an unfairness that needs to be corrected, and reparations are one way of correcting this. We left open the estimates of post-slavery discrimination and colonial slavery and went into detail for slavery reparations. The only reason for that is there are historical documents readily available for researchers to use.
Three methods have been proposed to estimate slavery reparations. One is land-based, one is price-based, and the other is wage-based. What that means in short for each of them:
Land-based: Based on the notion of 40 acres and a mule. Professor Darity and others have proposed taking the current value of 40 acres and a mule and calculating what that capital infusion would have meant for African-Americans living today.
Price-based: Uses the historically recorded prices for those enslaved as a financial signal to what the slave owner expected to benefit from owning a slave. A slave owner would expect to earn money from selling cash crops on the market, and the slave price expected what the owner expected to get out of the slave from cash crop production.
Wage-based: Takes the number of enslaved people in the US, which we know from Census records, and multiples that with 365 days per year and 24 hours a day at the wage that was then typical. In 1790 it was 2 cents per hour, and by 1860 it was 8 cents per hour, so puny wages, but if you multiply them up, you get the $18.6 trillion estimate in 2018 dollars.
The method that I propose (Darity and Marketti propose the others) is the wage-based method because the price-based method takes the perspective of the slave owner. My argument is that the slave owner gained less from slavery than the enslaved lost. So I recommend taking the perspective of the enslaved because they lost control over all 24 hours of the day, where they produced cash crops only during the 12 daylight hours of each day. So I argue that we should take all 24 hours of the day for the entire year and add that up.
We don’t settle on any of these estimates as the final estimation method; it is just an exercise in calculating what was lost. This calculation could also use this for post-slavery discrimination, but further research would be necessary because we need historical references for some of the numbers.
*The land-based reparations calculation would cost $12 trillion, the price-based calculation would cost around $13 trillion, the wage-based calculation would cost around $18 trillion.
Trevor: So do you have any recommendation on what calculation or number the federal government should use?
Dr. Craemer: That is something that would be up for negotiation from the descendants of the enslaved and the federal government. I’m not particularly eager to promote one number over the other. In the article, we show that if you change the interest rate from the conservative 3 percent interest rate that we used and use 6 percent, which has quite common during slavery, the number explodes into multiple quadrillions. So there is an exponential effect of compound interest. I don’t want to take sides on which amount would be the right one because it’s up to the descendant community. At a minimum, reparations should close the Black-white wealth gap because it is the cumulative effect of slavery and post-slavery discrimination. Closing the Black-white wealth gap could be one yardstick that you could use to arrive at an amount.
Trevor: Once we arrive at a number, how should the U.S. go about paying that, considering the debt we are already in?
Dr. Craemer: Professor Darity is likely a better source on this than I am, but I would say there are historical examples of how things like this have been done in the past. Ironically, the historical precedent for slavery reparations is reparations paid to slave owners, at times by the enslaved themselves, which was the case in Haiti, which was 10 years worth of Haiti’s government revenue as compensation for the slave owner.
Haiti took up loans with French banks, and they paid these loans back from 1825-1947; so two years after the Holocaust ended, Haiti was still paying reparations to France for the abolition of slavery. Similarly, when Great Britain abolished slavery in 1833, they compensated slave owners and took up loans that were paid off from 1833 all the way to 2015 (I believe). So there are several examples of the history of the government taking up loans and paying them off over several centuries, and the U.S. could do that here as well. Some people say that we can’t go into debt because we are already indebted. Still, the problem is that the United States already took up the debt from 1776 to 1860. In my mind, the money extracted from African-Americans runs into problems because the enslaved are recognized as persons in the Constitution. The 5th Amendment talks about how all persons are entitled to restitution when the government takes their property.
You could argue that taking a lifetimes work as labor in a way the government taking from African-Americans for public benefit. So in a way, you could argue that the debt exists and has to be paid back eventually. Rather than waiting any further, it would make sense to pay back now.
Trevor: Is there anything you’ve recently learned in your work that you didn’t know before?
Dr. Craemer: The thing that immediately pops to mind is the number of examples of where slave owners received reparations is mind-boggling. In Haiti and Great Britain, and Washington D.C., the government abolished slavery there in 1862. Slave owners received reparations during the Civil War when every penny counted for the defense of the Union. The government paid a large list of countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Venezuela, Brazil, and others, reparations to slave owners. Hence, the idea of slavery reparations is nothing new. The government had to compensate people for allowing that form of capital to exist was taken for granted as long as white people, who were the owners, and their heirs were considered. It is now becoming controversial as the Black descendants are considered to be beneficiaries. So I didn’t know how widespread it was to compensate slave owners.
Trevor: If you were to give it a guess, when do you think reparations for slavery could happen in the U.S.
Dr. Craemer: I am the worst at predicting political things. So today, the majority of the population opposes reparations, but I will say never say never because I’ve seen other issues flip, and it could happen to reparations as well. Demographically, white people will be the minority, so if the coalition for reparations is built in a politically smart way, it could become a pressure point down the line. Still, I hope it doesn’t take that long. On both sides, there is a benefit; on the side of African-Americans, I would like to see some of the suffering alleviated, and it is beneficial for everyone else to pay reparations sooner rather than later because the amount will only keep growing. I would not rule out that it could happen in my lifetime because I’ve seen other amazing things happen in my lifetime.
I don’t know, but I tend to be hopeful.
Trevor: Me too.