Why Arguments for Slavery Reparations FAIL
This is the final of four posts on slavery reparations and the Bible. Read the first post here.
In the previous post, I addressed biblical arguments for slavery reparations. Here, I will address rational, non-biblical arguments.
Rational Arguments
An article that has been, as one commentator put it, “widely acclaimed for being one of the most erudite contemporary arguments for reparations made in recent years” [1] is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations" [2]. Since Coates's article is widely celebrated and his basic arguments are not uncommon to the literature [3], it is helpful to use his article as the focus for this summary of rational arguments.
Summary
Coates’s treatment is not particularly systematic. Through a winding narration of historical anecdotes, personal interviews, statistics, and accompanying commentary, he makes a variety of arguments, but his more morally-oriented affirmations might be summarized as follows: (1) historical injustice is a debt, and the debt is unpaid; (2) there are lingering effects to past injustices; and (3) there are ongoing evils, which are inherently connected to those in the past.
On (1) past injustices as an unpaid debt, Coates writes, “It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.” The view, then, is that although the United States has ceased its blatant discrimination against blacks in the form of slavery, segregation, redlining, and the like, it has not compensated them for these things; yet, the moral weight of these things demands compensation. So also, Coates alludes here to (2) the lingering effects, about which he later states explicitly that “the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.” As examples of those lingering effects, Coates offers such phenomena as the natural segregation that persists, and the wealth gap between blacks and whites. These examples relate less to slavery as to subsequent historical occurrences; for Coates, though, such a sharp distinction is not to be made. All of it is added to the debt. One example, then, of (3) connecting the present and the past in this way is found in Coates's discussion of affirmative action. He says that if the aim of affirmative action is to increase diversity, then “it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.” Notice from this statement that, for Coates, black people in the present are inseparably linked to black people from past centuries in such a way that public policy in the present should be informed not only by present concerns but by past concerns as well. This is an essential presupposition to the pro-reparations position.
Analysis
A biblical analysis of Coates’s first assertion, that historical injustice is a debt that remains due, must ask whether a biblical view of justice includes a concept of indebtedness to the sins of one’s ancestors. It has been seen from the discussion in the previous post that such an indebtedness is impossible. As noted in the discussion of Joshua 7, Mosaic law declares that children are not to be punished for their fathers' sins (Deut 24:16), a principle that is expounded upon emphatically in Ezekiel 18, which views every new generation with a proverbial clean slate (vv. 5-18; cf. Jer 31:29-30) [4]. There is no moral debt passed from one generation to the next.
Regarding Coates’s second claim, that the lingering effects of past injustices presents a moral impetus for reparations, the previous post’s discussion of Daniel 9 and Romans 5 observed that a connection to ancestral sin is only applicable insofar as a person and his own generation continue in that sin. This is also seen repeatedly in 1 Kings, where it is declared in various ways that one king or another “walked in all the sins that his father did before him” (e.g., 1 Kings 15:3) or “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, as David his father had done” (e.g., 15:11, 26, 34). So, each new king is seen as related to past generations based upon his own behavior, whether righteous or evil [5]. The connection to the past is predicated upon actions in the present. Even then, however, this connection is not such that the king is obligated to subject himself to punishment or entitled to reward himself for his ancestor’s deeds, but only such that he is identified with them and contributing to a corporate record of either righteousness or evil. The punishment or reward is up to God’s discretion (cf. 15:4-5). Consequently, while sins of past generations have effects that carry forward into the future, it does not follow that those lingering effects make the people of the future morally responsible for the deeds of those in the past, when they themselves have not committed the same sins. From this it can be concluded that, from a biblical worldview, any negative effects that linger from slavery ought to be addressed in a spirit of helping those in need (cf. Deut 15:11; Prov 14:31; Matt 25:35-40; etc.), not in a spirit of retributive justice or apologizing for sins that one's own generation has not committed.
That leads to the final argument from Coates, that there are ongoing evils which are inherently connected to those in the past. In light of the preceding discussion, it can be safely concluded that whatever evils are ongoing, their connection to the past does not carry with it a responsibility to self-penalize for historic sins. As political commentator Larry Elder has said, "All a state can be is just in its own time” [6]. That indeed is a standing obligation: where there is injustice, justice must be sought (Isa 1:17); where there is oppression, it must be corrected (Isa 1:17); where there is conflict, it must be judged impartially (Lev 19:15); where there is need, it must be met as one has ability (1 John 3:17). All of this is focused on the present, not the past.
Conclusion
Despite its unpopularity among Americans, the issue of reparations for slavery and for other historic offenses (real or perceived) has potential to remain a relevant issue in coming years. For the Christian, the determining factor for how to view and respond to this and every issue is what the Bible indicates about it. Though much more could be written, through this brief exposition and biblical analysis of common pro-reparations arguments, the sum of the matter is clear: reparations for past slavery are not consistent with a biblical worldview.
NOTES:
The above illustration of escaping slaves is from the 1872 book (p. 98) by William Still entitled The Underground Rail Road, accessible here: https://archive.org/details/undergroundrailr00stil/page/98/mode/2up.
[1] Darrel B. Harrison and Virgil Walker, "Just Thinking Podcast | Slavery Reparations," podcast video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsNCu7SI21E.
[2] Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations," The Atlantic, June 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
[3] In a relatively concise form, Coates's essay strives to accomplish what Darity and Mullen's lengthier and more recent book on reparations also endeavors to undertake: enlighten the reader on the history of offenses, demonstrate those events' connection to the present, argue for a moral obligation to redress those grievances, and suggest ways to do that (William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 1-6, https://www.google.com/books/edition/From_Here_to_Equality/bPXGDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover).
[4] Diane Bergan, "'Sour Grapes' (Ezekiel 18)," The Bible Today 51, no. 2 (Mar-Apr 2013): 86-88. http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.sbts.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=15&sid=7e100b64-0cd5-46f8-8f9b-f50ddd3f2de3%40pdc-v-sessmgr02.
[5] For example, as writes G.I. Williamson: "everyone who continued to adhere to Jeroboam was unavoidably involved in the guilt, sin, and punishment of Jeroboam. Now that is what we have in mind when we talk of corporate responsibility." G.I. Williamson, "Corporate Responsibility: What It Is and Why It Is Important," extracted from Ordained Servant vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1996), https://www.opc.org/OS/html/V5/1c.html.
[6] Larry Elder, "Why Are Black Conservatives Called Uncle Tom? Larry Elder Talks George Floyd Protests & New Film," interview by Jan Jekielek, American Thought Leaders - The Epoch Times, The Epoch Times, June 18, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbhFubiFiqg.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.