REPARATIONS, compensation granted to victims of injustice. Historically reparations have most often been punitively applied to states on the losing side of wars in the form of monetary payments to the winners to compensate the latter for wartime damages. In contemporary times, however, the concept of reparations has been broadened to cover victims of slavery, colonialism, and systemic racism and now involves compensating individuals or groups for past wrongs inflicted upon them in an effort to acknowledge harms, rectify their lasting effects, and promote reconciliation and healing.
After World War II West Germany paid reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and other victims of Nazi persecution as a way of acknowledging responsibility for the unprecedented crimes against humanity. In the United States reparations have been provided to Japanese Americans who were unjustly interned during World War II and to Native American tribes for land and resources forcibly taken from them.
Perhaps the most contentious and unresolved current debate surrounding reparations involves the legacy of slavery in the United States and its enduring impact on African Americans. The transatlantic slave trade, which lasted for centuries and forcibly brought millions of Africans to the Americas, was one of the most egregious human-rights violations in history. Although slavery was officially abolished in the US in 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, its legacy lived on. Jim Crow laws in the South sanctioned systemic racism for nearly a century, and in the North pernicious discrimination, though not aboveboard, was nevertheless rampant.
In 2014 the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, in which he examines the history of discriminatory practices aimed at preventing African Americans from achieving socioeconomic parity with Whites, not only in the Jim Crow South but also in the North, where Blacks had nominal political equality. He claims that “black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal” and thus deprived of one of the main sources of intergenerational wealth in twentieth-century America. In addition they were prevented from taking advantage of preferential governmental initiatives such as the G.I. Bill that facilitated entry into the middle class. Coates also focused on the ongoing de facto segregation of large American cities, in which the majority of Black people are in effect trapped in overcrowded and underserviced ghettos. He writes: “[A]s a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.”
As Coates acknowledges, the concept of reparations for African Americans was for decades not taken seriously by the mainstream, with opponents citing logistical and moral objections to their implementation. Some have argued that it would be prohibitively difficult to determine eligibility, as well as how much should be paid and who should pay it. Others question the fairness of holding present-day individuals and institutions accountable for the actions of their forebears, particularly if the latter were not directly involved in perpetrating the injustices in question. And for many, implementing reparations on a scale proportionate to the harms caused by the legacy of slavery seems simply impossible.
In the years following Coates’ article, however, the discourse in the US surrounding reparations has shifted, and politicians and cultural critics have begun to take it seriously. H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, had first been introduced in Congress in 1989 by Representative John Conyers of Michigan, and Conyers introduced the act in each successive Congress until his retirement in 2017. Each time it died in committee. In 2019, however, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas sponsored the act along with 173 cosponsors, marking a significant increase in backing. That same year senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris publicly voiced support for reparations-based programs.
Reparations efforts gained additional momentum following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Growing awareness of systemic racism and injustice fueled calls for reparations for African Americans in the form of direct financial compensation as well as investments in education, health care, housing, and economic-development initiatives.
In 2021 Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, became the first American city to pay reparations to eligible Black residents. Qualifying households received $25,000 for home repairs or toward a down payment. The program was intended to rectify the harm done to the Black community through anti-Black housing policies. Opponents of the plan argued that the recipients of reparations should be able to decide for themselves how to spend the money, calling it “paternalistic” in its seeming assumption that Black people could not be trusted to make their own financial choices.
In 2023 a state-level task force on reparations in California recommended the United States’ most sweeping program to date. The plan calls for providing Black residents with compensation in order to address the state’s racist history of housing discrimination, over-policing, and mass incarceration.
Numerous other committees and organizations have considered the question of reparations in the wake of 2020. Some municipalities and institutions have taken steps to acknowledge their complicity in perpetuating systemic racism, issuing formal apologies, establishing truth-and-reconciliation commissions, and providing financial assistance to affected communities. However, the scale and scope of such efforts remain limited compared to the magnitude of the injustices they seek to address.
Internationally the issue of reparations has also gained traction, with calls for restitution and compensation for victims of colonialism, genocide, and other forms of state-sponsored violence. In the Caribbean several countries have lobbied former colonial powers to provide reparations for the legacies of slavery and colonialism, including financial compensation, debt relief, and investments in development projects.
The issue of reparations is complex and contentious, raising profound questions about justice, responsibility, and reconciliation. While the question of how to implement reparations raises legitimate concerns and challenges given the scale involved, the need to acknowledge and address historical injustices remains a pressing moral imperative.