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In a similar vein,
George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate - today privately owned and operated as a living history museum - has an excellent series of exhibits which puts names and stories to the Washington family’s enslaved servants and laborers:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/groundbreaking-exhibi...
The re-enactors are all fantastic and very knowledgeable. It’s unsettling talking to a black re-enactor who’s firmly in-character as a slave, which I suppose is the point:
Washington is always the one that gets me. His will freed his slaves not when he died but when his wife died. So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
> So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
I'm pretty sure Washington's will freed his slaves on Martha's death because he didn't want to break up slave families (her slaves were part of her dowry and as such could not be manumitted so easily at will). Manumission law was quite complicated, and IIRC Washington himself lobbied to liberalize Virginia's law somewhat so that it was not as difficult to free slaves.
One of the most appalling aspects of US slavery was that it did break up families quite often. Washington doing this to keep the families together is hardly evil compared to what the alternative would have been.
EDIT: The parent post has grated on me a bit more. Why are we so arrogant to assume we know the whole context of what was going on two or three centuries ago? Every time I review the literature of historical situations, the richness and complexity is remarkable. We tend to think of our time as "more complex," but I think we are comparing the complex reality we experience with the simple stories we have been told (and continue to tell ourselves) about the past. In reality, much of the past was comparably complex to our own lives today.
In my experience, this is the behavior of 98% of the population. You're welcome to judge it as you may, but it is not at all surprising.
> That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
The average middle/upper class person today is the same, living on the fruit of foreign slave and subsistence laborers for clothing, food, and toys, and eating from the suffering of factory animals.
Often in histories of slavery, the slaves don't speak. If you want to hear their voices, read "Slave Testimony," edited by John Blassingame. It's stunning in length and detail. Not all suffered the same slavery we know today.
This passage is by an enslaved (interviewed by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission) in Kentucky, 1963, named Charlotte "I belong to Gen. Thos. Strange. I have two boys. I pay a dollar a week to him, and support myself and children, and pay my house rent. I have been hiring myself for over fifteen years; I get along very well, and keep the hire paid up. You couldn't pay me to live at home, if I could help myself. My master doesn't supply me with anything -- not even a little medicine -- no more than if I didn't belong to him. Each of my children pays him $2.00 a week. They work in tobacconist shops. I support them. One of my boys is thirteen years old and the other seventeen. They get $2 a week pay. If the boys make more than $2 a week a piece I get what is over; if they don't make that, I have to make it good to him. He has got to have it Saturday night, sure. I have not had good health. Sometimes I am ailing, but I always keep up enough to try to make my wages. I have only one room, and pay three dollars a month for it. I live by washing."
> Not all suffered the same slavery we know today.
What is the "slavery we know today"?
Do you mean "American slavery as we understand it today", or "Slavery in the current day"? If the former, then how is the passage you quoted different from our understanding of American slavery? Do you mean to say it was better, worse, or in some other way different?
Charlotte's family weren't the well known field slaves or house slaves. They were tenants, renting their own lives from their legal owner for $2/week.
Specifically slavery was more varied than "American slavery as we understand it today." The passage I quoted is different, in that it departs from the traditional model of plantation based, field labor slavery. It is still reprehensible exploitation, of course. It's just important to remember/question how diverse people's experiences actually were.
This seems like an absolutely indispensable technology for achieving reparations. Most black Americans have ancestors who (slavery) worked a lot of unpaid hours. Having clear metrics on how many slaves there were is a step towards having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be.
There are some places in the US which have started, but they're just kind of pulling numbers out of a hat and I don't see that being scalable. But reparations should be paid, if for nothing else, at least for the unpaid hours.
Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.
Disclaimer: my parents are immigrants, and I have absolutely no genealogical connection to American slavery.
> having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be
I just don't understand how someone can talk about a "well-founded number" for reparations in a serious way.
How can you calculate a dollar amount, even within 5 orders of magnitude, for something that happened to millions of people for hundreds of years, affects millions of people today, and we don't have details about any of it?
There are many people who:
- had African ancestors who sold other Africans to slavers
- have a mixture of heritage
- immigrated from Africa long after slavery ended
It's nonsensical to come up with a dollar amount for even a single person, so how can we possibly do it at scale? Should African Americans descended from slave traders be paying reparations to African Americans descended from slaves? Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?
There are so few records for any of this, it just seems absolutely insane to me. I am a huge history nerd, and there aren't concrete answers for a lot of things that happened this decade, even with impeccable records.
> It's nonsensical to come up with a dollar amount for even a single person, so how can we possibly do it at scale?
It's almost as hard to come up with a fair number on how much help a given person should get due to being adversely affected by the pandemic. Yet that's not seen as a barrier to provide money.
> Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?
As a collective? Yes.
I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never stand for any kind of reparations for descendants of former slaves. Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax. Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved? When there was still slavery in America, my people were enslaving members of their own ethnic group back in the old country. Forgive me for not wanting any part of this current dispute.
And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”. That shit still haunts me to this day.
"Achieving reparations" is difficult language for me to accept. It is "thinking past the sale" that does not treat the subject with the necessary fair-minded big picture consideration.
It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.
Be careful with your thinking if you care about being even-handed with your empathy. Being empathetic is a fantastic thing, but don't allow cynical people to hijack your empathy.
> It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.
These are important considerations that impact directly on the form that reparations "should" take. However they are orthogonal to the merits of the claim for reparations.
> It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect,
This is a very patronizing argument. If someone breaks into your bank account and steals your cash, then later is caught. There is no valid line of reasoning that goes "well I'll only give the money back if you tell me how you plan to spend it first". "Oh, you planned to spend it all on bubble gum and sweets? Then no I don't need to give it back, because I think that might do you more harm than good."
Argue on the merits of the topic, not based on knowing what's best for people.
People who are holding real estate exposure in the US are the primary beneficiaries.
Then you add in redlining, and it starts to look systemtic.
So the cure should be appropriate to the disease, make home ownership practical, affordable, and (if you are into reparations) subsidized.
Or at least as subsidized as being a rich person is in the mortgage origination process (via that stealth socio-economic test that is your FICO score).
Subsidized home ownership? Don't tell Thomas Sowell that idea.
How would that work?
You make it easier for people to own, then the prices increase. Do you subsidize more? If so, then it's just 2008 again.
> (via that stealth socio-economic test that is your FICO score).
Fun fact: First thing you learn from when moving to USA is to get a credit card immediately. Start working on that score. Even if you don't intend to stay, just in case you change your mind.
My first credit card 5 years ago had a $1000 limit. And only if I kept my bank balance above $1000.
Yes, having even just a starting point for numbers on this would be very helpful. Part of the issue is people won't even countenance the concept of reparations, so no one gets as far as saying, well if your great grandfather was enslaved for X years under system Y, here's an estimate of the value of their labor that was stolen by that system.
What are the limits? Who will be excepted? How will it be enforced? All good questions! But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with.
> But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with.
That's because the first order of business is to demonstrate that reparations are even a good idea. Engage with those who don't like the idea, and address the concerns they raise, if you can; then deal with minutae.
You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right? Where do your reparations end? Are you going to forcefully take money from me because African Americans were enslaved generations ago, but then forcefully have money taken from them for the other Africans and other races they themselves enslaved in Africa before that? Where does it end?
Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly? Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago? How do you foresee this working? How do you foresee this helping anything?
Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.
> But reparations should be paid, if for nothing else, at least for the unpaid hours.
You must be young to speak with such certainty.
Post-slavery, black sharecroppers basically made nothing after expenses. So how much was their time actually worth? (An economist will ask this.)
Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?
Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)
Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.
The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?
That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.
Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?
edit: expected downvotes of course; nobody dares to engage on this particular discussion about the vast sums the Europeans must be made to pay for their evil deeds (which they've skirted for hundreds of years now, like cowards)
> Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.
The most? The Europeans. Where is the money? It's in London and Amsterdam among a few other former empires.
The Europeans transported around 12.5 millions slaves to the Americas. They owe so much in reparations it will bankrupt half the nations in Western Europe.
It's very interesting how the Europeans - who were responsible for African slavery in the Americas - never want to talk about it and how nobody in the US ever asks any questions about how much the Europeans are going to pay.
The Europeans transported close to five million slaves to Brazil, nearly ten times as many slaves as were transported to the territory that became the US. One can imagine the reparations tally just for that alone to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Britain and the Netherlands should just go ahead and write a check equal to 10% of their entire national wealth to African-Americans. That might get things started on the path to justice. All of the assets of the British throne should be liquidated as part of the process and put into the reparations pot.
To all those who say it is "impossible" to right the wrongs of history: My family were refugees from a war that resulted in both the Nazis and Soviet Union expropriating property in their home country. Eventually they, and other branches of my family got their property restored or compensated. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, property in many of the former Soviet Union nations was returned to rightful owners, or compensation was issued. Expropriated property is restored in many cases. Compensation for expropriation is commonplace. American slavery was a business, and businesses keep records. There are no valid excuses.
A worthy cause.
Too bad they feel the need to run their own platform instead of contributing to wikidata. They're using the same software, and the data falls squarely within Wikidata's scope.
Even worse that they feel the need to stamp this with a CC license. Not only does this make it incompatible with the CC0/public domain requirement. I consider it borderline offensive to assert copyright over the basic facts of someone's life: https://enslaved.org/record/person/Q405665
This project obviously involves a lot of work. And, taken as a whole, some of that work is creative in nature. But individual records are not.
Luckily, US law does not recognise copyright for databases.
I think there's something to be said for putting this data in their own Wikibase instance. There are a lot of items here, including many items like 'Inventory of person X in year Y'. Adding so many items to Wikidata would not have been without its controversy. Also, i could imagine they need a lot of properties that are not available, or aren't used in the same way on Wikidata. There is a reason why all museums and other heritage institutions use their own databases and thesauri instead of putting it all in the same database.
However, the beauty of using a linked data platform is of course that it's easy to link back to other sources, like Wikidata. I could definitely see that in the future Wikidata could do an import of many of these items, or link properly to them using a new property.
I do agree that it's unfortunate that they're licensing everything under CC-BY instead of CC-Zero.
They want to publish it in an academic setting. Curation is important and reasonable in that context.
And under US law, the copyright on a database would apply to the collective work and not to the individual facts, so your frustration and analysis are sort of strange (they can't copyright the facts and whether the collective work would gain copyright is an open question without an obvious answer).
> They're using the same software, and the data falls squarely within Wikidata's scope.
The data only falls within Wikidata's scope if "every single enslaved person" can be described using reliable sources. That's a very dubious position. And Wikidata has scaling problems already due to their scholarly-article data - but at least that comes with plenty of surrounding info about authors, topics, citations etc. etc. that's uniquely suited to a general-purpose knowledge base. Can one make the same claim about the micro-level archival history of slavery in the antebellum U.S.?
Off topic but what does “tolerably spare made” mean? Is a euphemism for slightly overweight?
I like to use etymonline.com to find how a word has been used over time, for "spare" I find "sense of "lacking in substance; lean, gaunt; flimsy, thin; poor," is recorded from 1540"
etymonline.com/word/spare
A search on Google Books for "spare made" gave me this:
Which gives us "spare made", "well made", and "well set" as descriptions.
A similar "ethnography" (http://tiny.cc/3ip6tz) gives me this:
"Although from their wiry and spare conformation of body, the Villees look tall, they are not so in reality."
Which I would think implies thin.
I think it means skinny.
I have a pretty good idea, its about investing in Africa. America has a lot of assets, in the black population, they should encourage people to visit their homeland, on a paid trip. Helping the African economy and helping African Americans create business connects to Africa. Then there should be a programme where African Americans get a lump sum, if they start a business or invest in land in Africa. France is doing something similar but Americans have a much higher advantage something like 30 million people of African decent.
After visiting Africa I think will also help people expand their mind set about the world and that Africa is not a bad place and has lot of opportunities.
Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
Taiwan does something similar with a paid trip to visit Taiwan to learn about the culture and history and create business connection between the people.
It would not cost anything as well, you just reallocate aid money.
To a degree European Africans have been doing this for a long time, plenty of YouTube videos about people moving to Africa to start a business. Fun to watch too. Many of these European Africans have positions of power in the government or private sector.
Thoughts?
You may be interested to find out that in the 1800s there was a similar program pursued. The country of Liberia was originally founded by black Americans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Societ...
Later Marcus Garvey motivated another 'Back to Africa' movement. As I understand it the, the movement did not send very many blacks back to Africa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey
We have to wonder, do Africans want Black Americans to come colonize their homelands?
It's not a new idea - it was tried in the newly-made country of Liberia. The country has a very screwy subsequent history where, to put it short, the former U.S. slaves became a new oppressing elite and there was all sorts of backlash from the natives.
Yeah - And I should invest specifically in Mexico because my grandma happened to be born there. African Americans - are Americans. They often have their own American subcultures, but the U.S.A is their home. Sure they have history connecting them to somewhere. But they can invest wherever the heck they want. No need to limit our generosity to our many generations removed ancestral roots.
Would you say that white Americans homeland is Europe?
Most of African Europeans a)know what country their ancestors are from, b) have direct links to their relatives in Africa.
> Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
I think this is exactly Africa's main issue: being seen first foremost as a land of resources and economic ventures. You go to the Americas/Europe/Asia/Oceania to visit, and Africa to make money/for "humanitarian aid". Things may evolve when they change to "X has invested a lot in Africans".
> Thoughts?
Sure—why not set an example by starting your own fund?
"visit their homeland" - good luck marketing that. Would this go any better than if any American visited?
> to visit their homeland
This might trigger some people. If you used a term like "ancestral region(s)" or something, it might've been less triggering.
Firstly, the word "homeland" is not one typically associated with one's country of ancestry. I've rarely ever heard someone use that term. On the contrary, I have heard people say "my ancestors came from X country", or like "my great-grandparents came from Italy". The term "homeland" is usually used for the region where a person's current home is. And this not to mention that even a first-generation immigrant who has lived in X country for a long time, could consider X country to be his true homeland.
Secondly, there's an implicit assumption here that "Africa" is the "homeland" of African Americans. I don't need to explain why that's troubling.
Thirdly, many of my "African American" friends are of thoroughly mixed ancestry. One such friend did a 23andMe test, and it turned out he had 54% European ancestry (even though physically "he looks black"), 30-something% African ancestry, and a smattering of other ancestry groups (including Native American) for the rest. It would be inaccurate and inappropriate to consider him as someone "of African ancestry" (even though he looks somewhat so). The phenotypes a person's genome expressed do not necessarily correspond to a person's actual genetic ancestry.
I could go into more reasons as to why it's not a great term to use, but I think these three reasons make a good case.
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> get a lump sum, if they start a business or invest in land
While the underlying motivation behind your idea is pretty decent (and a fairly lofty goal I might add); I, for one, would rather prefer direct foreign aid (not loans, but literal foreign aid grants with no expectation of return). There's too much of a risk of corruption with your idea, and bad incentives are baked right into it. Just increase the current foreign aid to developing countries across the board. Do something like the Marshall Plan, where in exchange for free-market economic policies, we directly invest in education, infrastructure, and other things in developing countries.
On a secondary note, domestically, I would rather focus on just getting some kind of actual, concrete, meaningful (maybe financial) reparations bill passed through Congress. That alone seems like a huge and almost insurmountable political challenge, and I want to see that tackled somehow. We want to improve the quality of life and access to opportunity for the poorest economic classes in the US, so they can pursue their ambitions and dreams from a similar starting point as more well-off Americans. Achieving this alone would be a huuuge deal in and of itself.
Mindblowing this was just 220+ years ago, like even the Egyptian Greek Roman Mongolian Chinese Japanese Spanish empires, always blows my fucking mind how much better our conditions are right now.
There's likely more slaves now than then. We are doing better on the percentage but doing just as much or more collective harm.