The road to hell is paved with good intentions, says Will Hutton. But however well intentioned, the plans for massive reparations to US blacks will only deepen the racial divide
Special report: George Bush's America
Sunday August 26, 2001 The Observer
Slavery is America's incubus. It made racist hypocrites of the founding fathers who drafted a Constitution and Bill of Rights that proclaimed individual liberties for all as long as they were white, knowing exactly what they were doing. It disfigured American society for 250 years while it was practised, and for another 100 years after it was banned because North and South alike turned a blind eye to the idea of 'separate development' in the old Confederacy -the suffocating discrimination of the Jim Crow laws that denied southern blacks civil and social rights.
Its legacy hangs over every American inner city and every exchange between black and white. With the Democrats now agreeing they will champion up to $440 billion of reparations, and President Bush threatening to boycott this week's UN conference in South Africa on racism if reparations are on the agenda, slavery and its fall-out promises to become the hottest, most contentious issue in American politics -a debate that will poison not just US race relations but whose backwash will affect us too.
It's not as though America has not already paid some dues. The Civil War cost half a million lives -more than any other conflict the US has been involved in. Then for 12 years the states of the old Confederacy were militarily occupied by the North; the longest and most extensive military occupation of one part of a Western country by another in modern times. At the turn of the century various senators put up reparations bills to offer every black some land on the same scale as the early white settlers - 40 acres, $50 and a mule - but the bills were all blocked by southern votes. The 1960s civil rights movement brought the curtain down on the world of Jim Crow, and 30 years of affirmative action has tried to redress the position. Bill Clinton apologised - but still the issue has lost none of its sting.
The Democrats' last-minute conversion 10 days ago was acutely judged. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations America (N'COBRA) has been lobbying for an investigation into slavery and then legislation for reparations for years, and has launched a suit against the government. But the UN Conference was the catalyst. The Bush administration's threatened boycott is easy to portray as racist, but there is also hard cash at issue. Any US government signature on an international declaration even remotely agreeing to reparations in principle will damage its defence to N'COBRA's suit in court -maybe make it impossible. But the politics are deadly; the Democrats can confirm their black support, and the Republicans emerge as the racists.
The sums at stake are enormous. If every American black got $50,000 the gross bill would be around £300bn. In the context of a 10-year tax cut of $1.4 trillion this is affordable - just -but it would be the largest reparations payment in history. But reparations on this scale are not without precedent. Half a dozen Indian tribes have won reparations from the government over the past 20 years; and the tobacco industry has had to accept a $206bn liability after a protracted law suit.
Jewish organisations, after their success in winning compensation from German industry for slave labour during the Holocaust, are now suing American companies who traded with the Hitler government. In this compensation culture, with individual smokers winning $2bn damages from US courts, N'COBRA's claim looks almost mild. And such is the gathering moral and political force behind the movement -especially now with Democrat support -and such the proven willingness of American courts to accept the principle, it seems difficult to imagine that N'COBRA is not going ultimately to win.
Your first instinct, probably like mine, is to side with the reparations movement. There is even a conservative argument in favour, neatly put by Charles Krauthammer in this month's Prospect, that the quid pro quo for a generous reparations deal would be the end of white guilt and black reproach - America could start dismantling the whole apparatus of affirmative action in a Grand Compromise. It is a seductive argument - but wrong. The response to the fall-out from slavery cannot be a one-off payment as a result of one group in society holding the rest to ransom. The correct response is surely to make sure that the entire society sustains over time what the political philosopher John Rawls calls an infrastructure of justice -and invests in the educational, political and social structures that give every member of society, black and white alike, an equal chance to participate.
The paradox of reparations payments is that it will validate the Balkanisation of America into minority groups whose membership becomes at least as significant - arguably more significant - than membership of the whole. Universal principles of association become decried. To be black is to be more important than to be an American citizen.
The black reply is instantaneous; we were denied citizens' rights for centuries, and racist abuse continues daily. Moreover the knowledge that your ancestors were slaves is a kind of psychological torture. White efforts in the Civil War or in the Civil Rights movement count for nothing. We are owed; our debt should be discharged in cash.
The injustice is obvious, but allowing America to collapse into the politics of competing minority groups scrambling for advantage at the expense of each other lays the foundations of further injustice in future for everyone. The fuck-you society succours and is succoured by the same culture that legitimises reparations.
Nor is this just an American dilemma. There are plenty of multiculturalists in Britain insisting that we should also conceive of ourselves as a community of communities, conceding religious schools to ethnic and racial minorities and all the other social instruments that Balkanise and destroy a common civic culture. This is declared New Labour policy.
But as Brian Barry argues in his powerful book, Culture and Equality -probably the best egalitarian argument since Richard Tawney - you can't create a fair society without a common civic culture committed to some notion of liberal egalitarianism. Lose that, and we are on the road to perdition - legitimising alike the noxious politics of the British National Party and separatist Asian groups protesting the universal validity of their own sub-culture.
As the clamour for compensation, reparations and minority group 'separate development' with their own religious schools grows, we have to be clear-headed. A society can only hold together if it stands by universal egalitarian values and an universal infrastructure of justice -and it is within those we design our response to racism. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.