Horowitz/Reparations for slavery

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sun Mar 4 19:53:33 PST 2001



>There is a distinct advantage in basing reparations on slavery
>in that (1) slavery can be fairly precisely defined and its
>worth (as lost wages) evaluated, whereas segregation and
>discrimination cannot; (2) there are surviving parties who
>can be held legally responsible for slavery, to wit, the United
>States government and the governments of the several states
>which supported slavery prior to the Civil War (all or most
>of those then in existence), whereas much of segregation and
>discrimination was (and is) carried out privately by persons
>who are now dead.
>
>
I am not sure that reparations for Jim Crow would be much harder to estimate. One could take the differential between wages paid to whites and black in the segregated south, in current dollars, as a rough estimate of the dollar value. Since official Jim Crow really started after the end of Reconstruction, one might start in 1877 or 1880, allowing the intervening 15 years to be written off as a period in which Southern Blacks got themselves up to speed to participate in the labor market in _relatively_ favorable conditions. After that, absent legal discrimination, there should not have been substantial wage differentials. The responsible parties are the Jim Crow states, and, after the Plessy decision in, what 1894, the United States, which authorized segregation. This is only a rough first approximation, but it could be refined. --jks

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