Illustration: Les Marrons de la Liberté, French Guyana

Author: Likam Kyanzaire

One hundred fifty-seven years since the abolition of slavery, the city of Evanston, Illinois is paying reparations to its Black residents. These residents are being paid for redlining policies done in their city, back in the sixties. The resolution passed six-to-one. The lone dissenting voice, Cicely Fleming, a Black alderwoman, with a lineage in Evanston going back to the early 1900s, called the reparations, "a housing plan dressed up". Among her complaints, she said the plan allows only limited participation and does not grant enough autonomy to the community that has been harmed. She went on to explain further:

"We can talk more about the program details, but I reject the very definition of this as a 'reparations' program,' " she said in her remarks. "Until the structure and terms are in the hands of the people – we have missed the mark."^[1]Triesman, Rachel. 2021. “In Likely First, Chicago Suburb of Evanston Approves Reparations for Black Residents.” NPR.org. March 3, 2021.

Her comments are historically anchored in an old international debate on the Transatlantic slave trade and the need for reparations. In a 2014 article in the Atlantic, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates explained his case for reparations for Black Americans, not only for chattel slavery, but also for the Jim Crow laws, and other racist policies & practices instituted by American society at large. A powerful history of America’s racist legacy, Coates’ article is a plea to Americans to reckon with their past. And while Coates claims his point is to make the case for reparations, in his article he explains his real motivation for writing such a scathing piece of Americana:

“More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.”^[2]Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2014. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic. May 22, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

More important to Coates than the material progress reparations would bring, he sees the idea of reparations as providing the groundwork for a moral reckoning. His lackluster case for reparations has opened the door for detractors. An article by conservative political pundit Kevin D. Williamson of National Review criticizes Coates’ moralism:

“Even controlling for income, blacks are financially risk-averse compared with whites, which probably has something to do with the history that Mr. Coates cites; but this risk aversion has the long-term effect of leaving them worse off as they forgo higher returns on their savings, which is one reason, though not the only one, that black households are likely to have less wealth than white households with identical incomes.”^[3]https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/05/case-against-reparations-kevin-d-williamson/

Williamson focuses on wealth disparities between white people and Black people, while failing to reckon with the legacy of chattel slavery in shaping the US’ racialized economy, and the economic consequences of Jim Crow laws, which heavily influenced “what work people did, how well they were compensated for their labor, and what standard of living they were able to afford.”^[4]For an economic analysis of the impact of Jim Crow laws on Black American wealth and social mobility, we refer the interested reader to: … Continue reading Williamson’s essay argues that the racial wealth gap comes down to a default of character, ignoring how the racial bias inherent to the US financial system hinders the effort of Black households when it comes to building wealth.^[5]https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/credit-gap-black-americans-building-wealth-2021-1?international=true&r=US&IR=T Coates’ moralizing of reparations fails to reckon with the political economy of slavery and its historical structure, and therefore cannot offer a proper rebuttal to conservative views on reparations such as Williamson’s. In this essay, we argue that, unlike Coates, one should adopt a materialist approach, by defending that reparations are a labor issue.

The Political Economy of Chattel Slavery

The political economy of slavery is defined by its accumulation of capital to forward the industrial revolution. In his book Capitalism and Slavery,^[6]Williams, E. E. (1994). Capitalism and slavery. University of North Carolina Press. Eric Williams claims three important arguments for our conversation:

1. Williams found that antislavery sentiment conveniently accelerated in support of an apparently more efficient and less capital-intensive method of commodity production. Slavery was no longer needed. Ideological superstructure followed the economic base;
2. labor coercion continued post-emancipation in the form of sharecropping and wage peonage as formerly enslaved people quickly experienced proletarianization;
3. that capitalism as an economic modality quickly replaced slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital from slavery.

The first of these points is detailed later in this essay, in discussions about the morality issue, but Williams' points on the labor relations of enslaved Africans, and the evolving forms of accumulation, are a great starting point to talk about chattel slavery. Tied to the relationship between capitalism and chattel slavery are labor relations. Distinct from feudalism forms of production, the institution of slavery held people in coercion, as capitalism does even today. The difference between the three distinct frameworks is as such:

“In the case of feudalism, it is the land that is monopolized by feudal lords, with direct producers owning only the instruments necessary to produce their subsistence goods. In capitalism and slavery, the totality of the means of production belongs to the dominant class. This legal monopoly of the assets indispensable to the reproduction of subsistence conditions is the basis for the appropriation of a surplus”.^[7]https://technomaterialism.com/2021/11/23/the-shock-doctrine-applied-to-dance-music/

Crushed by chattel slavery, the African labored class was treated as property rather than labor. According to our framework above that means they were owned much like the land was by feudalists. The dominant class in the South, planters were subordinate to Northern capitalists, who were the middlemen between the South, and world markets. Incredibly reliant on exports to the North and abroad by 1860, 75% of cotton production was exported. A large market for the primary products of the South, the North also provided new systems of banking, credit, and other financial inventions, without which they could not sustain their feudalistic way of life. Maurice Dobb notes that “their fortune (merchants & middlemen from the North) are bound up with those of the dominant producers (Southern plantations), and merchants are more likely to seek an extension of their profits than to try and reshape the economic order”.^[8]The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, Genovese, E.D. and Wesleyan University Press. 1989.

More than happy to accept profits through the business of slavery, the Northern bourgeoisie (merchants) would financialize Southern property, including enslaved Africans. The commodification of the slave market meant that the first bonds for sale in the US were based on the property ownership of enslaved Africans. Structured around property, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond draws conclusions on the connection between the American economy in the past and today:

“Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when the land was not worth much and banks didn't exist, most lendings were based on human property.”^[9]US. Bureau of the Census Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Part 2 Washington, D.C., 1975

As Williams notes, the end of slavery did not free enslaved Africans, so much as proletarianize them. Moved from chattel slavery into wage slavery, freed African Americans would have trouble asserting their freedom while being coerced into working plantations again. Without a change in labor relations, newly freed Africans fell into similar circumstances as when enslaved. At every turn, governments meant to reproduce the subsistence conditions that chattel slavery provided. According to the World Food Policy Center:

“The North Carolina Landlord Tenant Acts of 1868 and 1877 codified a fundamental power imbalance between landowners and sharecropping farmers. The laws entitled property owners to set the worth of a crop at settling time and did not obligate landlords to put contracts in writing or require tenants to have access to ledgers or records. (...) The result of this power imbalance, combined with the unpredictability of nature, was that most sharecropping and tenant farmers were barely able to make ends meet, and many became indebted to their landlords.”^[10]https://wfpc.sanford.duke.edu/north-carolina/durham-food-history/sharecropping-black-land-acquisition-and-white-supremacy-1868-1900/

Fredrick Douglass is a great example of how the abolition of slavery did not stop the exploitation of the US’ Black population. At one point in his time as a slave, Douglass was able to hire out his time to other people for an income. A skilled caulker, Douglass managed to hire out his time for further compensation still, and though he was required to pay Auld room and board, he was now more in charge of his own life than ever before. He set up his own contracts and found his own employment—duties typically undertaken by the master. As Douglass would later write, his master “received all of the benefits of slaveholding without its evils; while I endured all of the evils of a slave, and suffered all the… anxiety of a freeman.” As Douglass put it, “rain or shine, work, or no work, at the end of each week the money must be forthcoming, or I give up my privilege.” Douglass earned about $7 to $9 dollars per week. $6 went to his master.^[11]https://mangoprism.com/anxiety-of-a-freeman</fn> Even at a relatively high wage, Douglass felt just as trapped by his material circumstances. Even outside of chattel slavery, African Americans … Continue reading^[12]Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance. The imposition of wage labor, both in Europe, and the settler colonies, was looked down upon by Europeans. This spirit also survived through Southern aristocratic traditions that saw labor as beneath the antebellum gentleman. Instead, economic ability lay in wealth. In the north, wealth was earned through capital assets (bonds, machinery, railroads, etc), whereas in the south it was a wealth of property (including enslaved people).^[13]Williams, E. E. (1994). Capitalism and slavery. University of North Carolina Press.)

Even as the importation of enslaved people was abolished in 1808, the sheer number of births in the Black population led to the US dominating the western hemisphere in terms of enslaved population. By 1861, the US had fifty percent of all the western hemisphere's enslaved Black population, but only imported four percent of all African people brought to the Americas. Approximately 10 million enslaved people lived in the United States, where they contributed 410 billion hours of free labor.^[14]Hacker, J. David. 2020. “From ‘20. And Odd’ to 10 Million: The Growth of the Slave Population in the United States.” Slavery & Abolition, May, 1–16. … Continue readingFurthermore University of Connecticut researcher Thomas Craemer calculated $14 trillion of unpaid wages to enslaved Africans. This was calculated by tabulating the hours enslaved people worked between 1776 and 1865, multiplying the time they worked by the average wage at the time, then accounting for 3 percent annual interest. ^[15]Jacob Jarvis, “After Reparations Study Suggests $151 Million for Each African American, Experts Say Money Alone Isn’t Enough.” Newsweek. July 17, 2020. … Continue reading

Why Liberalism Has No Solutions for Reparations

Politically and philosophically liberalism fails to address reparations with any meaningful solutions. However, like the case of the city of Evanston shows, solutions such as housing vouchers are part and parcel of the great fraud around the reparations debate. Instead of repairing the harm done under redlining, vouchers simply regulate Black Evanston residents to the same structural processes that caused segregation. A Long Island real estate investigation proved as much, as journalists found similar practices to redlining, disadvantaged Black residents more.^[16]https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2022/02/01/how-systemic-racism-is-baked-into-the-fabric-of-american-housing/?sh=5381be8b430f

With slavery, as with other liberal institutions, the legal framework that existed saves governments, individuals and businesses from facing any trial, thus any kind of justice. Reparations for slavery should be a form of reparative justice. Providing the material conditions for liberty among the descendants of enslaved Africans, reparations would work to empower Black people to freedom by reducing the wealth gap between their white counterparts.

In the context of slavery, simply freeing enslaved Africans did not assure their freedom. Giving them the economic means to attain their freedom is needed. Liberals prefer acts of negative peace, that is,removing limitations to being free.⁹ So from a liberal point of view, after Lincoln's proclamation, the US government's job was done.

Guided not by moral value, but dollar value, any question of reparations can only be conceived as charity by individual actors. The city of Evanston will pay historic Black residents of Evanston for policies like redlining policies in the sixties. Redlining began as a policy in the New Deal by the federal government, and while it was practiced by private institutions and local governments too, a legislative framework that went after the federal government specifically could help improve material conditions for descendants of enslaved people. Instead the scheme so far plans to give $25,000 to sixteen Black residents. A real drop in the bucket.^[17]Gross, Terry. 2017. “A ‘Forgotten History’ of How the U.S. Government Segregated America.” NPR.org. May 3, 2017. … Continue reading

Racializing Capitalism

The main theory of late Marxist thinker Cedric J. Robinson is that capitalism did not grow out of feudalism but kept the main element from it to add racialized capitalism.

“The creation of the Negro was obviously at the cost of immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies in the West. The exercise was obligatory. It was an effort commensurate with the importance Black labor power possessed for the world economy sculpted and dominated by the ruling and mercantile classes of Western Europe.”^[18]Black Marxism The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson

Moreover, “the Atlantic slave trade and the slavery of the New World were integral to the modern world economy. Their relationship to capitalism was historical and organic rather than adventitious or synthetic.”^[19]Black Marxism The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson

Ellora Derenoncourt, a professor at Princeton, studied the racial wealth gap from 1860 to 2020, with surprising findings. What had been a 56-to-1 wealth gap fell to a 10-to-1 gap by 1920, and in 2020 was 5 to 1. What looks like promising change is murkier, as they note how in 1950 the gap was 7 to 1. From the 1950s the gap stopped shrinking and instead grew, which Derenoncourt assumes is due to the increase in stocks over housing prices. More likely to hold wealth in housing over stocks, Black Americans have seen this difference depreciate their wealth comparably. Unable to delink financialization from chattel slavery, Dernancourt found it would be next to impossible to eliminate the racial wealth gap without massive redistribution. "Wealth is an inherently historical object because it goes from one generation to the next," Derenoncourt says. "It accumulates over time. This is the kind of mathematical law that we've looked into, given where we started."^[20]https://drpop.org/banking-on-slavery

Making a case for reparations as a labor issue means making the relationship between colonialism and capitalism central. As pointed out by Cedric J. Robinson,^[21]Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism The Making of the Black Radical Tradition “It would be an error to [assign] slave labor to some "pre-capitalist" stage of history. For more than 300 years slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion.” For this reason, reparations need to be more than a moral reckoning. Reparations need to provide material change and counter-balance the impact of chattel slavery on Black workers, Black households’ wealth, and the material life conditions across the entirety of the African continent and its diaspora.