Slavery Reparations and the Bible
This is the first of four posts on slavery reparations and the Bible.
Should the descendants of slaves receive reparations?
That question has been debated in the United States for many years. The Bible is not often invoked in that discussion, but when it is, it’s often not done very carefully. Even some sincere efforts have arrived at dubious conclusions.
But since the idea of reparations is not likely to go away any time soon [1], Christians need to know how to engage the issue from a biblical worldview. So let’s take a look at some pro-reparations arguments to see how they stack up, biblically — but first, for context, we need to briefly consider the history of slavery, and how the Bible views that bygone institution.
Background: A Brief History
To understand slavery reparations, you have to have some understanding of slavery. Until the twentieth century, slavery was a pervasive, global phenomenon [2]. Many of those brought to the United States in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade had been slaves in Africa [3], and they were only a fraction of those sold and shipped around the world [4]. In the United States, these slaves were considered chattel, and used for labor. As most slaves were black and most slave owners white, the institution took on a racial component. The nature of slavery is seen clearly in slave narratives (accounts given by emancipated slaves about their experiences), which in some cases reveal severe indignities and violence — torn-apart families, sexual and physical abuse, and animalistic treatment, all for the profit and pleasure of the slave masters [5] — but, surprisingly, more often show a tamer portrait [6].
After the institution of slavery was brought to an end in the United States by way of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, reparations to slaves were promised in the form of land given to the freedmen, but that promise failed to finally materialize [7]. Though some "reparations payments" have been made over the years by the government and various other institutions, these have been small in scale, and no comprehensive national program or policy has ever been enacted [8].
“Reparations," defined by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, who are considered leading experts on the topic, "are a program of acknowledgement, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice" [9]. Indeed, though advocates differ on what form reparations for African Americans should take, it seems generally agreed upon that it would at least involve both acknowledgment of past wrongs and some transfer of resources either to communities and/or individuals who are descendants of those wronged, or to the black community and/or black individuals more generally [10]. Many advocates include in the scope of reparations not only slavery but also Jim Crow laws (segregation) and apparent present-day forms of discrimination [11]. For the sake of getting at some core principles, and also for the sake of brevity, we will limit the discussion here to reparations regarding slavery, and to arguments of morality rather than practicality. Those moral arguments are divided into two categories: biblical and rational. After some general comments about the biblical view of slavery, we will summarize and then analyze these pro-reparations arguments, and our analysis will demonstrate that the modern call for slavery reparations is, from a biblical worldview, misguided.
Up next, the biblical view of slavery.
NOTES:
[1] Though unpopular among Americans (Corey Williams and Noreen Nasir, "AP-NORC poll: Most Americans oppose reparations for slavery," Associated Press, October 25, 2019, https://apnews.com/76de76e9870b45d38390cc40e25e8f03), the issue of reparations has had something of a resurgence of attention in recent years, including a House committee hearing in June 2019, endorsements from 2020 Democratic presidential candidates last year (Jones, Thai, "Slavery reparations seem impossible. In many places, they're already happening." The Washington Post, January 31, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/31/slavery-reparations-seem-impossible-many-places-theyre-already-happening/?arc404=true), and a March 2021 news story about an Illinois city voting to enact reparations for its black residents (Alexandra Kelley, "First city in US to enact reparations for its Black residents," The Hill, March 23, 2021, https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/544524-first-city-in-us-to-enact-reparations-for-its-black).
[2] Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 219-221.
[3] Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations Along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 (Heinemann, 2003), 9, https://books.google.com/books/about/Planting_rice_and_harvesting_slaves.html?id=CfMpAQAAMAAJ.
[4] Peter Hammond, Slavery, Terrorism & Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat, (Cape Town, South Africa: Christian Liberty Books, 2005), 1-2, https://books.google.com/books?id=RAwRAQAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Christian+Liberty+Books.
[5] Cf. Henry Box Brown, Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide (Boston: Brown & Stearns, 1849), 55, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/boxbrown/boxbrown.html; Virginia Writers' Program, The Negro in Virginia, (United States: Hastings House, 1940), 172, https://books.google.com/books?id=a5caAQAAIAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions, quoted in Darrel B. Harrison and Virgil Walker, "Just Thinking Podcast | Slavery Reparations," podcast video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsNCu7SI21E; Armistead Lemon, "Summary," Harriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897 and Lydia Maria Francis Child, 1802-1880: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (Boston: published for the author, 1861), https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/summary.html; and Julius Lester, To Be A Slave (New York: Puffin Books, 2000), 49-50, https://books.google.com/books?id=_0ebEPS10E8C&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=49, quoted in Harrison, "Just Thinking Podcast."
[6] Steve Wilkins and Douglas Wilson, Southern Slavery As It Was: A Monograph by Steve Wilkins & Douglas Wilson (1996), 10-11, http://www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/documents/060175768qrasouthern_slavery_as_it_was.pdf.
[7] J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, "Reparations," Race, Poverty & the Environment 16, no. 1 (2009): 32-34, www.jstor.org/stable/41554921.
[8] Allen J. Davis, "An Historical Timeline of Reparations Payments Made From 1783 through 2020 by the United States Government, States, Cities, Religious Institutions, Colleges and Universities, and Corporations," UMassAmherst, last updated July 16, 2020, https://guides.library.umass.edu/reparations.
[9] 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), 12, https://www.google.com/books/edition/From_Here_to_Equality/bPXGDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover.
[10] Cf. Lawrie Balfour, "Reparations after Identity Politics," Political Theory 33, no. 6 (2005): 790, www.jstor.org/stable/30038464; Darity, From Here to Equality; and "Black Agenda," ADOS, accessed July 24, 2020, https://ados101.com/black-agenda.
[11] Cf. Balfour, "Reparations," 790; Darity, From Here to Equality, 23; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations," The Atlantic, June 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.