I notice yesterday Obama weighing in on reparations for slavery and I’m sure that once it gains traction in the US and moves further into the Overton Window of what is politically acceptable, the idea will be picked up in Australia.
Not for slavery, but for Cook and Phillip and the British empire as it was at the time, laying claim and settling the Great Southern Land.
Its was a case of breaking a few eggs to make an omellette.
The idea of reparations does raise some interesting and serious questions though.
In the American context, reparations payable to whom, by whom, for what and how much?
Assuming the reparations were paid out of the common tax pool into which African Americans also contribute would it be a case of paying reparations with their own money.
Would it be by way of a tax credit or cash? To individuals or groups? Would it be by way of a tax levy on everyone else except African Americans but including native Americans and if so wouldn’t that be discriminatory?
And then wouldn’t the Native Americans then say, “what about us”? “We were here long before any of you”?
But we are talking about the descendants of slaves and of original inhabitants and all mostly born in the last, say, 100 years, so reparations for what exactly? What have they lost as opposed to what have they gained?
This then brings us to the but for argument.
The but for argument or test is a method used in law to determine factual causation and asks whether the harm would have occurred but for something the defendant did.
Assume you were involved in an workplace accident that wasn’t your fault, you would argue that but for this accident you would be much better off, leading a normal life of daily activity, going to work and playing golf on the weekends. You wouldn’t be housebound and in pain, with leg in plaster and massive medical bills, but for the accident.
In short your damages are measured by what your situation would be like IF that accident hadn’t happened in the first place.
So now, let’s reverse that scenario and say that but for an event happening to you that actually left you better off. Why should you be paid reparations? You would not be a victim of circumstance. You would be a beneficiary of circumstance.
The reward is that you’ve been left better off because of the event and would have been worse off but for the event or if the event (settlement) had never happened.
So with that rationale what would the circumstances of the descendants of slavery or the descendants of Australian aborigines have been like had there been no trans-Atlantic slave trade into North America at all or Australia hadn’t been settled by the British?
Well, they would still be existing in Africa and in Australia, living their tribal life.
And so the next question is, what would their comparative quality of life and their fate have been then?
Better than now, or worse? Think, the Congo. Think, Rwanda or Zimbabwe for example.
Compared to the overall quality of life in the West, the entire logic underpinning the reparations argument falls away because life in the West with all its problems in 2021 is immeasurably, light years ahead of the much poorer existence in Africa in 2021.
Think, the basics like decent roads, sewerage, housing and drinking water, an abundence of food, education and career opportunities and a steady income and even social security when things go sideways…
In other words, as criminal and evil as it was, the slave trade for the descendants of slaves and the descendants of the Australian aborigine, settlement was in fact a plus. A conveyor belt over time to a much better life in the West.
In the wash up, on the balance sheet of life, the descendants of slaves and aborigines have been net beneficiaries
But for the settlement of Australia by the British (or the French or Dutch) their life would be as it was 250 years ago. But it was inevitable that Australia was going to be settled by another nation at some point in time. In fact the first fleet only beat the French expedition led by La Perouse into Botany Bay by a few days. They passed each other going in an out of Botany Bay.
As Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan about those places before settlement, where the danger of violent death was ever present, “..the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short..”
People calling for reparations need to identify what it is they’re being compensated for.
A person born in Australia in say, 1970 or 1980 should draw up a balance sheet of what’s been lost (that they personally never had or experienced anyway) and what has been gained overall and you’ll find that the benefits flow in one direction.
In short, they can’t know what they think they lost because they never had it. In other words they can’t prove a negative. It’s a logical fallacy.
Apart from that, what are the various programs over the years like the, ‘Closing the Gap’ program if not a form of reparations or trying to make good? What about the affirmative action declaration triggered on all government forms where they specifically ask the question “are you of aboriginal heritage”? And the creation of instrumentalities like ATSIC or entire government departments funded by billions of dollars. These kind of taxpayer funded endeavours are already a form of group reparations as opposed to an individual windfall.
In the case of America what also has to be factored in and remembered is that a civil war was fought over slavery and the slave owning side lost and the slave owing side were the Democrats and the Democrat Party.
Just to add to the confusion many black Americans and West Indians were also slave owners. How does that figure in the reparation calculation?
Its worth considering the thinking of Zora Neale Hurston a black feminist writer and anthropologist.From her autobiography, Dust tracks on a road —
“..From what can learn, it was sad, certainly, but my ancestors who lived and died in it are dead. The white men who profited by their Labor and Lives are dead also. I have no personal memory of those times and no responsibility for them, neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks. I have no intention of wasting my time beating on old graves. I don’t belong to the sobbing school of negroes who holds that nature has somehow given them a low down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt by it. Slavery is the price I paid for civilisation and that is worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it…”
So if reparations are to be paid, in America, they should be paid by the Democrats and while we’re at it, as well as reparations to black Americans reparations should also be paid to the descendants of those settler whites of the north that fought against the south and died or were badly injured in this war against the iniquitous and barbaric practice of slavery.
And Australia? We too had our own slaves. They were the white anglos, all 162,000 of them between 1788 and 1868, transported to bleak prospects on the other side of the world, never to see their families again and for the most trivial of offences.
They were, literally the “slave labor” in the Australian context that did all the work. They built the early roads, the buildings. They quarried the stone. They dug the wells. But you never hear about reparations from their descendants instead, as with the Anzac diggers in WW1 and WW2 and more recents wars, they’re just eternally grateful, to those that went before and paid the price.
Its a shame there’s not similar gratitude from the aboriginal activists in 2021.