Commentary: The Question of Reparations

By: Jackson Hamilton, Guest Writer

Reparations are hot issue on the left and most of those supportive of racial justice and while it, at first, seems easy and obvious. The how, who, and what of reparations is not easy or obvious. I used to be a supporter of reparations but no longer consider myself one. Not because I’m against the idea as a symbolic measure and I would support symbolic reparations. I am a veteran of the Bernie Sanders campaign and support a universal basic income and the most widely supported variant of reparations are direct checks to the descendants of American slaves. I can’t bring myself to support a universal basic income for some people but not for everyone or base the amount anyone receives on anything other than need. I am more inclined to support reparations directed towards organizations supporting the Black community but even then I don’t want to support one oppressed group over others such as South Africans descended from the victims of Apartheid or Native Americans or the the victims of imperialism everywhere or the victims of any genocide.

It is difficult to support importing refugees but not recognizing the atrocities they just escaped. There is the argument that America bears a particular responsibility to Black people descended from American slaves but most non-Black people aren’t descended from slaveholders. A Chinese-American whose ancestors migrated to America to work in near-slave conditions driving spikes into the western deserts for the railroads and then whose family spent decades living in squalor in the worst parts of San Francisco and Seattle doing janitorial and domestic work to eek a living to contribute to reparations is unfair.

The most ardent supporters of reparations tend to be those who would benefit from them, directly. Understandably, their cultural history is painful and they want justice for it but I feel that lacks an empathy for every other oppressed group who would get no justice under the program. That includes mine, people with disabilities. Life on the spectrum has been traumatic and difficult, to say the least, but American history has a litany of gorier atrocities against the disabled from freak shows to lobotomies to ugly laws. Even in recent history, it is more than just lacking accommodations and bullying but includes the fact that disabled people are exempt from the minimum wage and that my people, the autistic, have been the subject of a 24 year long smear campaign by the anti-vaccine movement which literally kills people.

The great question for me, as a liberal and a compassionate person, is what will maximize happiness and minimize suffering and take into account the stories of all people. Native-born legend, Charlemagne tha God debated reparations a few months ago on Bill Maher’s show and the debate centered around charity group versus individual-oriented reparations. The debate missed key questions. I would certainly be curious about his views on Universal Basic Income and what debts are owed to other oppressed groups, including mine. I would be overjoyed if my people could win a Johnny Depp-like defamation case against Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. Unlike that case, this one involves thousands of dead children from preventable diseases. Knowing they’re dead because we’re boogiemen is traumatic enough it warrants punitive damages against them. It certainly isn’t the same as slavery but the basic questions remain the same.

We don’t live in a world with a simple history but a complex one and a society with countless narratives throughout it. The best way to get justice for everyone is to create a society that is beautiful and kind to everyone where everyone has decent housing, food, education, health care, strong environmental protections, and a very weak gun culture. The answer is that everyone gets justice. The Native American. The Australian Aboriginal. The colonized Indian and African. The Irish. The disabled. The gay. I hate using the phrase “All Lives Matter” because when it is said, it is a conservative retort to Black Lives Matter. Like when they bring mental health into the gun debate, they defund mental health services so it is just a simple means to divert the discourse away from guns which they don’t actually mean. When they say “All lives matter”, they’re not thinking about all demographics, they’re just trying to discredit Black Lives Matter. It is, though, because all lives matter that a universal basic income and universal compassion is better than reparations payments to one group. We are one human family that has oppressed one another and whose responsibility is to raise everyone up. 

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