Lyceum & Book Club - Week 16 - Lecture Notes on the Issue of Reparations of Any Kind

When a non-dominant population is no longer placed in a subordinate position within a society to ensure they can not compete (and possibly displace those in the dominant position) on equal ground, the original issues that caused the situation will have been addressed and calls for financial reparations will not be so urgent. It is a society’s unwillingness to address in any meaningful manner the issues of racism and structural inequality of today that feeds a need to frame the resolution to the original harm in a single form of correction and repair.

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Utrecht looks at paying for descendants of enslaved people to change names

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/utrecht-looks-at-paying-for-descendants-of-enslaved-people-to-change-names

Many enslaved people were given the names of their owners, plantations or muddied Dutch names.

The city of Utrecht could pay for descendants of enslaved people to change their names, a sign of the growing debate in the Netherlands about its colonial past.

Councillors in Rutte’s liberal VVD party voted against the Utrecht resolution.

“It’s directly related to reparations – the general population, they are afraid of that, we also see that government itself is afraid of the financial consequences.”

Earlier this year an independent panel convened by the government urged the Netherlands to make an official apology for the crimes against humanity perpetrated during the slave trade.

The prime minister, Mark Rutte, said, however, he would not apologize because it was not his place to pass judgment on Dutch history.

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Slavery Reparations: The difficult flowering of an unconstructive demand

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2017/12/slavery-reparations-the-difficult-flowering-of-an-unconstructive-demand

(Note - the framing in this article is by a university in the Netherlands, in a nation that prides itself on its expansion of liberal thought in the one place in any nation that you are suppose to find the cutting edge of intellectual thought given air and consideration, and even in this sector, the framing is limited to what the dominant population find comfortable in rectifying the harm the dominant population has done to a sector of the non-dominant population and only lip service (to make themselves feel better - see how liberal we are) to anything that might curtail even one iota of dominant population privilege.

And then look at how even the head of the very institution set up to deal with racism and the effects of slavery is careful to couch his words so they do not displease the dominant population rather than seek to address the issues of the non-dominant population that were harmed in the first place. )

Beneath the surface of the sometimes toxic exchanges regarding the legacy of slavery in Dutch society smolders the question of reparations. Will admittance of 'guilt' by the Dutch state lead to demands for financial reparations?

From individual to national demands

If the wrongs of slavery should be remedied is hardly a contentious issue nowadays. The demand for financial compensation on the other hand seems to be one that only a few dare to discuss. The UN's initiative for a Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024) explicitly posits that slavery, the slave trade, colonialism, apartheid and genocide have a legacy that needs to be faced. To the question if actual financial compensation should be paid the response is far more negative.

No demands for financial compensation for slavery have ever been granted. Tracing case by case we see that almost everywhere slave owners were compensated by governments for the loss of their ‘property’.

Incidentally some people who were regarded as being ‘wrongfully enslaved’ did manage to receive indemnities as well.

People who had been regarded as legally enslaved remained unsuccessful in staking their claim. Their individual demands made to slave owners characterize the initial period immediately after the abolition of slavery. Quite often, these demands are not framed as compensation for the time one had been enslaved, but rather as a request to alleviate hardship after slavery.

This was also the form of the first collective movement for reparations that asked governments to intervene. Former slaves requested pensions from the US government. These were never granted and the movement was repressed.

As the last people who had lived in slavery began to pass away, so did the request for pensions.

Reparations became increasingly a rhetorical tool of activists to show that the demands of their movement were only modest, since they did not (yet) raise the issue of what was actually due to the descendants of the enslaved.

The aftermath of the Second World War and especially the Holocaust would propel the demand forward. It both emboldened reparations activists to see how formal apologies were made to Jews and actual financial reparations paid to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and other groups who had fallen victim to wrongful treatment. In the 21st century states have begun to taken up the question of reparations transnationally, making it an issue of international relations, far removed from the initial requests made by former slaves to their former masters.

Antoin Deul, director of the Netherlands Institute for the Dutch History of Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) stressed the importance of the discussion for the Netherlands. Deul told the audience that in the nineteenth century during the parliamentary discussion regarding the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands, the suggestion had been made to pay out sixty guilders to all those who were going to be freed. The idea was quickly dismissed.

Reparations are conceptualized in broad terms by NiNsee. They choose to argue for official recognition of slave history, medical programs to treat ailments that are specific to descendants of the enslaved, as well as education programs and national governmental support for a museum of slavery and a heritage institution.

As the evening showed, the harsh demand for direct financial compensation is not regarded as a constructive option, it does however open the space for talking about symbolic, social and other forms of reparations.

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There was a time reparations were actually paid out – just not to formerly enslaved people

https://theconversation.com/there-was-a-time-reparations-were-actually-paid-out-just-not-to-formerly-enslaved-people-152522

What often gets forgotten by those who oppose reparations is that payouts for slavery have been made before – numerous times, in fact. And few at the time complained that it was unfair to saddle generations of people with a debt for which they were not personally responsible.

There is an important caveat in these cases of reparations though: The payments went to former slave owners and their descendants, not the enslaved or their legal heirs.

A prominent example is the so-called “Haitian Independence Debt” that saddled revolutionary Haiti with reparation payments to former slave owners in France.

French slave owners weren’t the only ones to receive payment for lost revenue, their British counterparts did too – but this time from their own government.

The British government paid reparations totaling £20 million (equivalent to some £300 billion in 2018) to slave owners when it abolished slavery in 1833. Banking magnates Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore arranged for a loan to the government of $15 million to cover the vast sum – which represented almost half of the U.K. governent’s annual expenditure.

The U.K. serviced those loans for 182 years from 1833 to 2015. The authors of the British reparations program saddled many generations of British people with a reparations debt for which they were not personally responsible.

In the United States, reparations to slave owners in Washington, D.C., were paid at the height of the Civil War. It gave former slave owners $300 per enslaved person set free. More than 3,100 enslaved people saw their freedom paid for in this way, for a total cost in excess of $930,000 – almost $25 million in today’s money.

In contrast, the formerly enslaved received nothing if they decided to stay in the United States. The act provided for an emigration incentive of $100 – around $2,683 in 2021 dollars – if the former enslaved agreed to permanently leave the United States.

Similar examples of reparations going to individual slave owners can be found in the records of countries including Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela, Peru and Brazil.