An Apology for Jim Crow and Slavery

The House of Representatives has taken some time out from wrangling about minor issues like oil drilling and the economy and is poised to pass a resolution formally apologizing to African Americans for slavery and Jim Crow.

Slavery was officially abolished in 1865 shortly after the Civil War by the passage of the 13^th Amendment of the Constitution. Jim Crow refers to a series of state and local laws, primarily Southern states of the United States, which mandated racial segregation of schools, public accommodations, transportation, restaurants and restrooms. School segregation was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1954 in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education. The last vestiges of Jim Crow were abolished by the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act which were passed in the mid 1960s.

The fact that the US House seems poised to apologize for slavery, an injustice of which no perpetrator or victim is alive, and Jim Crow for which victims and perpetrators, if they are alive at all, are in their dotage is a bit odd. Why the Democratic-controlled US House now seems concerned about slavery and Jim Crow, which is about as current an issue as-say-the Schleswig-Holstein Question, can be answered by looking at a key part of the legislation.

The legislation reads, in part, "African-Americans continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow -- long after both systems were formally abolished -- through enormous damage and loss, both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty, the frustration of careers and professional lives, and the long-term loss of income and opportunity."

In other words, decades after the end of Jim Crow and almost a century and a half after the abolition of slavery, African Americans, including presumably Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Colin Powell, remain victims whose only redress is government action. What government action? The answer is reparations.

What are reparations? One idea is that every descendant of a victim of slavery and/or Jim Crow will be given reparations in the form of a cash payments as a way of saying, well, sorry about all that. Japanese-Americans, whose civil rights were violated when they were interned during World War II, were given similar reparations as part of an apology by the US government for their suffering.

Another model for reparations would consist of financing some kind of economic and/or education development fund for African Americans. It is unclear whether this fund would be in the charge of an agency of the federal government or under the control of black leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, with all the opportunity for graft and corruption that would imply.

The fact that no one who was a slave is alive is solved by the idea that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow last to this day. If we accept that proposition then every African-American alive is as much a victim as his or her unfortunate ancestors who were kidnapped from their homes in Africa and carried away into bondage, then we accept the idea of people who were never slaves being deserving of reparations.

One fly in the ointment is that few people living in the United States today are descendants of slave holders, nor is anyone alive been a slave holders. Should someone whose ancestors showed up at Ellis Island 40 years after the end of slavery be expected to fork over tax dollars for something neither they nor their ancestors were responsible for?

Proponents of reparations solve that problem by suggesting that the United States benefited economically from slavery, benefits which persist to this day. Therefore, everyone now alive "benefited" from slavery and therefore owe reparations.

The proposition falls down when one measures the cost of the Civil War and which took 600,000 lives, costs untold treasure. Also the African-American economist Thomas Sowell suggests that slave economies are actually less productive than the free, capitalist kind. Slaves have no incentive to be productive, outside avoiding the overseer's whip, unlike free workers who are paid wages for their labor. Sowell suggests that far from being a benefit, slavery was actually an economic drag on the early development of the United States, especially the South.

That will not stop the House from apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow. Besides preparing the way for another gigantic government entitlement, the slavery and Jim Crow apology is designed to make the guilty feel good about themselves. And that seems to be far more important that the hard work of forming an energy policy or coming to grips on the current, economic slowdown.

Source: House poised to apologize for slavery, Jim Crow, CNN, July 29th, 2008