Footing the Bill for Slave Reparations

By Michael Quinn Sullivan
CNS Commentary
April 20, 2001

Perhaps the American black leadership has it right; perhaps it is indeed time for reparations. But perhaps it is Africans who should foot the bill.

Many have watched with interest as human rights activists, journalists and government officials try to determine what recently happened to more than 250 slave-children a Nigerian ship allegedly transported around Africa to serve as factory laborers, domestics in the homes of the continent's well-to-do neighborhoods, or worse.

Staggeringly, the American Anti-Slavery Group says there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, some 27 million. Though now shunned as immoral, at least from a Euro-American perspective, there are many who would have us believe the West bears responsible for slavery. While slavery has existed since time immemorial, the practice's modern banishment began in Europe more than two centuries ago.

Today, the greatest concentration of slaves can now be found on the Dark Continent, with the legal, or at least tacit, approval of many regional governments. The offenders, to one degree or another, include, but are not limited to, Mauritania, Mali, Gabon, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Sudan.

Our society's penchant for hyphenating everyone, especially ethnic minorities, has forced many Americans to take on what should be a particularly offensive label: African. Why one would want to be culturally identified with the system that promoted the original enslavement of one's ancestors is incomprehensible, and especially when that culture still practices, or tacitly endorses, that most evil of human trades.

The modern institution of African slavery does not involve Europeans or Americans. Indeed, even at the height of America's involvement almost 200 hundred years ago, legal African traders usually sold existing slaves for goods, often keeping "white" involvement in the initial enslavement process remote, though still abhorrent. The slaves, then as now, came into their enslavement by one of three general ways: taken as a spoil of war; to pay family debts (today, families sell their children for as little as $14); or by birth. The traders, themselves black, have never cared about the buyer's race, just their money.

That some here are demanding restitution for slavery is at least understandable, if not reasonable, for slavery is a stain on our national heritage of liberty.

So let us, for the sake of argument, look past the inconvenient reality that there are no former American slaves or slaveholders living in the United States; no one who was legally enslaved on our shores. Let us ignore, momentarily, the immorality of forcing people who themselves never participated in slavery to pay-off people who themselves were never slaves. Let us assume there is indeed a rational, equitable way to assign a monetary value that will somehow compensate the descendants of slaves for the damages, assuming such can be determined.

In the United States, there is no entity or heir to hold responsible. The federal government? Why? It was the US government that ended the practice, at no small cost of lives and fortune. Perhaps the Confederate States? That government was demolished, with the "member" states and people forcibly reconstructed and pardoned.

There is the added consideration of the individuals. Most families, even most southern families, never held slaves. Reliable statistics demonstrate fewer than five percent of the population were ever slaveholders. And given the vagaries of time, how do we punish only those families' direct descendants? Fortunes have been lost and changed hands, the people,circumstances and attitudes are different.

Recent legal wrangling provides a more elegant solution. Did states go after the convenience stores in the tobacco cases? Are cities suing K-Mart and Wal-Mart for gun violence? No, manufacturers have been the targets.

It seems the most reasonable source for reparations would be the original source of the slavery problem: the slave-makers.

First, the nations that allow (actually or tacitly) the practice are corporate heirs to the scourge of American slavery. Then there are the slave-traders, whose businesses today were built on hundreds of years of slavery - including the backs of men and women sent to America. Surely the slave traders should bear responsibility.

The full force of the US government making a legal claim, on behalf of her citizenry, regarding the moral principle of slavery might force Africa to finally address its slave-holding ways. The American people did their part in ending slavery here and reforming the attitudes of our people; now it is Africa's turn.

If reparations are to be sought, let us seek them from the source. If we are to compensate the descendants of slaves, let us force the original enslavers to foot the bill. Africa should pay, but - most importantly - Africa should be forced to reform. Then, perhaps, the adjective "African" will be one worthy to describe the proud Americans who choose to bear it.

Michael Quinn Sullivan is director of communications for the Conservative Communications Center.