When I got married, I was given an heirloom: a silver tea set from the family farm in South Africa. The teapot is a bad pourer but a good metaphor. Even though apartheid came to an end in 1994, and formal slavery in South Africa ended more than a hundred years before that, I still benefit from being descended from people who were able to acquire assets, capital and wealth while others were prohibited from doing so.
That is, essentially, the unanswerable moral argument for reparations: that while, at an individual level, some people will be able to catch up unaided, on average, the family with the silver tea set is going to be richer and more successful than the family that mined the silver. No amount of hard work or good luck is going to close the gap — only some form of redistributive action is going to cut it.
And, of course, that’s largely true. If you had to bet on two families, and had a choice between one that had been enslaved and unable to buy or acquire assets or property, and one that hadn’t, you would bet on the second family every time. Over time, you are much better off backing the family with wealth and assets than the one without.
I can engage in all sorts of sophistry about how it’s not really my fault that my ancestors got up to all sorts of awful things, and how if the boot had been on the other foot I might have been descended from the people who mined the silver rather than the ones who drank the tea. But that doesn’t change the fact that I still benefit from the awful things my ancestors did, while others are held back by them.
Another family feeling the benefit, to a much larger degree, are the Trevelyans. This family of British aristocrats have agreed to pay £100,000 in reparations to the Caribbean island state of Grenada, where the family owned several plantations. When slavery was abolished in 1836, the family was given £26,898 (a considerable sum at the time) in compensation by the British government.
The logic of the Trevelyans’ position is hard to argue with. And there is no reason why they shouldn’t direct their philanthropic efforts as they choose. For an individual trying to work out what to do with an uneasy inheritance, the logic of reparations may be a useful one. It is less useful for states, however.
One trivial reason for that is that talking about reparations tends to annoy people. Redistributing money to the poor, whether through state action or philanthropy, is not necessarily popular either, but reparations are even more unpopular. While a majority of Americans believe slavery affects the position of black Americans in the present, according to a 2021 study, just 18 per cent of white Americans support reparations. I suspect that this is because many recoil from the idea that they should pay for the crimes of their ancestors.
A more important reason is that the argument for reparations often overlooks the most important thing about people (and states) without capital or assets: which is that they start at a relative disadvantage to people and states who do have those things. The most important quality of the poor is that they’re poor. That they are poor because their grandmother was enslaved or because their grandfather was a disreputable drunk is neither here nor there.
The other problem is that arguments about reparations inevitably become about who should pay, rather than about who needs money. Politics becomes a debate about the moral status of creditors and debtors, rather than about what policies do or do not work. While no one would call them “reparations”, in practice the EU’s structural funds have helped to do the heavy lifting of reparations to countries within the bloc. They have enabled central and eastern Europe to recover from the consequences of living under Soviet rule, and helped Ireland recover from the impact of centuries of British rule.
But over the course of its membership of the EU, the United Kingdom has made a relatively trivial contribution to Ireland’s economic development compared to its long-term negative impact on Ireland’s prosperity, and a large one to central and eastern Europe compared to the scale of the UK impact on the countries of the former USSR. And if Ukraine is one day a member of the EU, net contributors to the bloc’s budget are likely to be paying to repair damage inflicted on the country by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
What talk of reparations often does is confuse a “nice-to-have” aim — which is that, ideally, those paying to fix the mistakes of the past will be the ones who have directly inflicted the damage or benefited from those mistakes — with an urgent one: that those mistakes actually be fixed.
