Will We Ever Hear the End of Slavery Reparations?

Biden thinks the issue needs further study, but few issues in history have received more attention

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"More than 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America between the 16th and 19th centuries, while only about “6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America,” according to historian Steven Mintz. Although the trans-Atlantic slave trade receives far more attention today, the trans-Saharan slave trade—which involved Arabs transporting captives from black Africa across the Sahara Desert and the Persian Gulf to the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East—involved a larger number of African slaves and lasted for a much longer period.

“It is striking,” Harvard scholar Orlando Patterson wrote, “that the total volume of African slaves acquired by Muslim masters is greater than the total acquired by Europeans in the Americas.” Nor, Mr. Patterson stressed, was slavery unique to Africa, Europe and the Islamic world or to a particular stretch of time. “There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery,” he wrote. “It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region of the earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably, there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.”"

"Angola President João Lourenço shot down the idea, insisting that it is “impossible” to make up for what happened in the past. “It only creates conflicts,” he told reporters."

"California was never a slave state, and its black population didn’t reach 2% until the 1940s. Today, California is a majority-minority state, where Latinos (40%) and Asians (15%) far outnumber blacks (5%). Why should Asians and Latinos, whose ancestors were never slave owners and who themselves have been subject to discrimination, be forced to compensate black people today who were never slaves?

Moreover, those blacks who did migrate to the Golden State in the middle decades of the 20th century did relatively well on average. “Blacks have long been better off materially in L.A. than in the rest of the country,” urbanist Fred Siegel wrote. “As early as the 1930s, Watts had the highest rate of black home ownership in the country. And blacks benefited from the World War II boom when Japanese internment and Mexican deportations created demand for low-wage African American labor.” A 1964 National Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the best big city in the nation for black employment, housing and income."

"the real moral obligation is to stop discriminating by race altogether, not change who’s on the receiving end"