The other night there was a truly momentous City Council meeting. After a long procession of futile resolutions dealing with national and international issues, a resolution dealing with the issue of slavery reparations--again, something over which the Madison common council has no power whatsoever--was brought to a vote. A long line of activists gathered at the speaker's podium to put in their collective two cents, and after a brief debate the council voted it down, signaling the end to these annoying resolutions for some time to come. Granted, it was a close vote, but the abstentions, counting as polite nays, deliberately explained as such in statements from those abstaining, defeated the ayes. It was an especially hard defeat for Progressive Dane, as alders they could normally count on as allies, such as Ald. Ken Golden, District 10, broke ranks to oppose the resolution.
There was a brief plot among opponents to simply walk out of the meeting until they would no longer be a quorum to even entertain it, but that was scrapped in favor of a formal vote, and rightly so. If their heads were there to stifle a quorum, the votes were there to defeat it outright, and they owed it to their constituents to debate the motion and duly defeat it according to their principles. Besides, the argument against the reparations movement is perfectly valid and deserves to be aired. A careful examination will show that the U.S. government does not owe reparations for the evils of slavery and to attempt to administer them would be wasteful at best and counter-productive at worst.
One of the cornerstones of the reparations movement, that the United States paid reparations to the victims of the Japanese internment and Germany to survivors of the Holocaust, is a false comparison. The Japanese internment camps were started and operated solely by the power of the United States government, as the Nazi death camps originated with the German government. By comparison, slavery was not begun by the United States but is an institution for human society stretching back to our very beginnings and unfortunately lasting to this day in some parts of the world. The old failing of American society regarding slavery is not that it began a series of atrocities but that it failed to end a long-standing one. When that end finally came, it was in the form a bloody civil war that killed more Americans than all other wars combined and caused a destruction of capital that crippled the South for over a century.
Furthermore, it would be incorrect to attribute modern racial troubles entirely to slavery. The historian C. Vann Woodward demonstrated that, contrary to popular misconception, racial attitudes had improved in the decades immediately following emancipation, only to be set back from the 1890s through the next several decades, when most of the Jim Crow laws were written for the specific purpose of turning back the clock on progress that had been made up to that point. To pin the modern cycle of poverty and racism on a long-dead institution completely discounts all other past and modern choices and personal responsibility of agents both black and white, setting back our own advancement.
Indeed, the focus on this issue comes from the same hubris that has motivated past resolutions from City Council, that all current problems can all be chalked up to greater events separated from us by a large interval of distance or time, regardless of the choices and events that have come in between. While solutions to solve universal problems of poverty and present discrimination should be put forward, some, like Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., are diverting themselves toward divisive rehashing of issues that have become submerged to the point of irrelevancy by other events over the course of nearly one and a half centuries. Society should not fixate on diversions, but should dedicate itself to solving the faults of the present day.
