Nations that were the source of slaves remain on the whole impoverished and underdeveloped.

Nations that were slavers still remain on the whole wealthy and highly developed.

This is not a coincidence, and there is a reasonable case to be made for reparations on these grounds.

Here's a way to think of it:

If I steal all of your money and invest it to grow over time then I'll end up with even more money while you don't benefit from the growth that should have been yours. Now we have children and pass on our wealth. You pass on less because it was stolen, and I pass on more because of what I stole. This multiplies over the generations and a disparity is maintained. My offspring will have better educations and better opportunities because of the wealth they had access to, and yours will have fewer opportunities because you don't have the money to spend on them.

The goal of reparations is to attempt to correct some of this disparity. It tries to provide opportunities for people who don't have it but would have if something in the past weren't stolen.

For an example that's easy to see: In the US, black people are less likely to know how to swim. This has nothing to do with them being black, but what opportunities they had access to. This is for many reasons. One part of it is that most places had community pools, but they had restrictions for people of color. When this was outlawed, they instead just closed the pools or added memberships that required payment.

People also built up wealth over time through property, but black people were prevented from getting loans to buy property except in redlined places. This prevented them from building up generational wealth like white people were allowed to do. (This is ignoring the whole slavery thing...) It causes ripples through time where their children have less opportunities, which then causes their children to have fewer, and so on.

The argument goes, as a British citizen, you have and continue to benefit from policies that your government made a long time ago. Reparations are not a tax on you, but an expense the government should have paid at the time of the work, but instead it did things like kidnap people from their homes, transport them to where labor was necessary, and force them into work. Now, the people who are the descendents of the kidnapped folks are requesting that the bills their great great grandparents were never paid. To extend that, after slavery ended, many of those who had been enslaved were left disenfranchised, and impoverished to the point that there is almost no possibility of building generational wealth.

As for if this will open the floodgates or not, who knows. An argument could be made in both directions, it's not as though governments paying one time sums to places is rare, and reparations for wars used to be pretty run of the mill.

Imagine you're running a very long relay race. Just after the race starts, members of the other team jump out of the bushes, beat up your runner and tie them up. This happens for several laps until someone decides that this is probably bad so they stop beating and restraining you. But the race doesn't stop and the positions aren't reset, but the other team is like 20 laps ahead and allowed to finish. Is that fair?

Reparations would theoretically allow your team to catch up but former slaves and their descendants have never been allowed that. What's more, in the UK, former slave owners were paid for the inconvenience of no longer owning slaves (edit: up until 2015!!!) while the former slaves got to continue living as second-class citizens for a while.

Also, saying slavery ended hundreds of years ago and no one benefits from it today doesn't work because all slave-owner countries still benefit from slave labour in the form of generational wealth, advanced infrastructure and old laws that specifically aim to disadvantage black people (whether they were abolished or still on the books the effects are still felt). Imagine your great-granddad was able to build up a fortune, how likely would it be that your family would still be rich? Imagine your great-granddad lost every cent, how likely would it be that your family would be still poor? Sure, it's possible that situations drastically over time but that's the exception and not the rule. There are reasons why things are the way they are.

I believe that reparations should not be any lump sum of money but in the form of education, investment opportunities, resources and infrastructure. That way all persons living in former slave countries can benefit and pass those benefits down to their descendants.

Edit: I believe that up to last year Barbados went after Richard Drax for reparations due to his family's direct involvement in slavery in that country. I don't know how successful that was, but I support it.

So, can the Slavic countries claim payments of reparations from the formerly known ottoman empire? Perhaps Jewish people from Asia? Surely the Christians from the Arabs, and the Arabs from the Christians? Not to mention Vietnam from China, or entire Europe from the decendants of the Roman empire.

Or are all of those instances somehow different?

History is full of misery and trying to pay to make amends for somebody else's actions, today, feels ridiculous. Just as OP, I don't get it.

Slaveholders got to build wealth off the free labor of slaves. When they died, that wealth didn't disappear. It was passed down to the next generation. The descendants of slave holders are better off financially than the descendants of slaves because of that accumulated wealth. The descendants of slave holders should pay back the wealth they now own to the people it was stolen from.

EDIT: I knew this would trigger white people.

Group A was wronged by entity B. Group A goes to court to seek restitution from entity B. Courts rule that entity B did in fact cause damages to group A and must be held liable.

That's all reparations are. Entity B is your government. It's the same legal entity as it was 190 years ago, regardless of the composition of the population it represents. If a group was wronged by their government, this is their only means to legal restitution. Unfortunately since the primary form of income for some governments is taxation, it means people complain about paying for things when that's not exactly what's happening.

The alternative is to say that if a government "runs out the clock" and is able to avoid responsibility until the population turns over, then they can no longer be held liable for anything they did prior to that point. That's not a very good position, in my opinion.

Some countries ended slavery by buying off the slave-owners — paying them for the property that they were being deprived of.

It's kinda weird that they didn't pay the enslaved people, who had been deprived of their own work and work-product and life and freedom.

As an American whose ancestors came from Europe around the same time that slavery was abolished here, I can be sure that none of my ancestors benefited directly from slavery; but also that they joined a society that had profited immensely from slavery. The whole reparations concept is complicated.

It's not intended to be punitive. The idea is that slavery generated a massive amount of wealth for slave owning economies that left us richer and the descendants of slaves poorer. Think of it as being the child of a crime boss. You haven't committed any crimes but the hosue you live in and the school that gave you the education to get ahead were paid for with dirty money. The idea is fair, but just not likely to ever happen. I think the point is more so to make people recognize the problem so that more is done to catch up the people on the wrong end of the generational wealth spectrum

There's a couple of things to consider when thinking about this.

Firstly, dividing the total by the number of tax payers and concluding that everyone should pay £569 is misleading. Wealthy people pay far more tax than most people (still not enough IMHO!) and as such the per-person cost is wildly different for everyone too.

Secondly, consider your position - your chances of success, and the possible range of success, depends hugely on your parents' circumstances and those of other close people in your life.

So we have this clear chain of success breeding success - wealthy people can afford to give their children the kind of start in life that us poor spuds can only dream of.

A huge number of wealthy families used slavery to amass and increase their wealth massively. These families are still wealthy, still benefitting from the leg-up they were given on the backs of slaves.

These families are the ones who, ultimately through tax, would end up contributing the most. Us plebs would be paying relatively little.

Even if your family didn't own slaves, or exploit them directly, they'll almost certainly have benefited from their existence. I live in a mill town north of Manchester - the very reason for this town's existence is cotton, ultimately picked by slaves abroad. The money came from businesses and trade that relied on slavery.

If people flame you, it's not because it's a SQ, but because the people typically framing the issue like you are framing it are racist right wingers.

Nobody is going to take £569,000 out of the white man's pocket tomorrow and give it to a black person because of slavery.

If you actually take some time to read up on what is actually being discussed, the state of the debate is more like

1. The fair market value of what was stolen from slaves is £18T. We are mostly discussing what the most accurate figure is at this stage in history.

2. The slaves were never compensated in their life and that money ultimately benefited Western societies.

3. Justice has never been served, so we need to figure out how to make things right.

Absolutely no one has ever transferred a single cent as compensation to slaves or their descendants and it's not going to happen today or tomorrow either. But it is totally right that we are discussing the issue to see how we can make it right.

A more likely outcome would be to give a small token payment to descendants of slaves for the next 200 years and to provide the poor descendants of slaves with educational opportunities and perhaps help to finance things like a small business or home. Those richer descendents could also choose to donate their cash payment into the find for the poorer descendants.

Let's say that 5 generations ago, your great-great-great grandfather had a farm. It was highly productive and had a great location.

Let's say that my great-great-great grandfather went to the local government and paid bribes and maybe did some light killing and stole that farm. No matter who your g-g-g grandfather talked to, they all pointed to the new deed and told him to suck eggs. Your g-g-g grandfather fell into despair and poverty. His children grew up poor but also worked hard and climbed up the wealth ladder a little. So too did their children, and so on, until your generation. Let's say you're lower middle class or so. No generational wealth to speak of but not in poverty.

Meanwhile my family has developed that farmland, partitioned it and sold or leased pieces of it for business and industry. We have phenomenal generational wealth all built on that initial theft of land.

But hey, you never had land stolen directly from you, and I never directly stole the land. Everyone in the area knows exactly what happened. Everyone in the area knows that my generational wealth is built on theft. Nowadays everyone talks openly about it, including me.

Now, from the outside looking in, I say that the absolutely morally right thing to do is restore the ownership of the land to the descendants of the person who owned it. But from the inside, the living descendants of the thief say hey, WE didn't steal the land. We just benefit every day from the original theft. Why should we do anything to make amends for that theft, which we don't dispute but don't want to be accountable for either.

If you are genuinely curious, theres a collection of articles published by the Atlantic. It deals with the US but seems relevant to your question.

18,000,000,000,000/31,600,000 = 569,620

Don't want to be that guy, but it definitely changes the picture somewhat.

Britain paid reparations to the slaveowners and their descendants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837
The last check went out in 2015. So yes, people alive today benefited from this. directly.
If they want to make it fair, they should pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved people and/or take back the money they gave to slaveowners.

Shouldn't payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?

Truth is, white people still benefit from slavery to this day and black people still suffer from it.

I don't agree with reparations, and the issue is not black and white (hehe), it's very complicated.

But what it boils down to is "generational wealth".

Being a white person, your ancestors probably owned slaves, or at the very least benefited from an economy built on slave labor. So your grandpappy benefits from this. He uses his wealth to ensure that your pappy has a good upbringing. That he has a job that affords him, at the very least, the opportunity to be present for your pappy, as a pappy, and teach him good values, but also more likely to be able to afford to send your father off to a nice college. Now all of this transfers down from your pappy to you in the same way, affording you opportunities and advantages.

Meanwhile, black people have the opposite of these things, and even though today, for the most part, in my opinion, we have equal opportunities for all people, some black people aren't able to take advantage of those opportunities because they're raised in poor crime-ridden black communities without good role models. Not sure if that makes total sense but you get the gist.

Reparations are intended to give them a "leg up" to reach equal footing.

But the reality is that just giving people money doesn't solve the problem. Because those people will spend it poorly. And that's not entirely their fault. They don't know any better.

The money needs to be invested in education (above all) and mental health, and creating positive role models.

That's the cliff notes version of a very complex issue that deserves more time than I have to give.

Slavery ended a while ago, but in the US there is still people alive today who suffered through the Jim Crow laws, and there is still a lot of systematic racism. So, racism didnt end with slavery.

For what I understand about reparations, it is for compensating the black communities, because rich white people has many generations of wealth, meanwhile black people only until a few decades ago were legality unable to make it bigger, being confined to poor communities, and being discriminated agaisnt in every aspect of a white dominated society.

Basically black people had so many obstacules for progress until kinda recently, and reparation are a way to level the ground. Reparations would allow more black people to go to college, feed their families, and get out of extreme poverty.

We (the UK) have to be honest about how it is we come to be a member of a G7 country. It didn't come about in the last 20 years, it came about because we were the leading world power between the Napoleonic Wars and the start of the 2nd world war. During that time slavery was legal, then made illegal but at the same time we colonised other countries, keeping their populations in conditions not much better than slavery.

When you include the Industrial Revolution and what some people say was our own 'internal' psuedo-slavery of the working classes, the UK became massively wealthy and it's a foundation and status that we still have today.

This wealth via exploitation and slavery had the effect of not only making us a rich nation but the countries we raided and colonised, very very poor. That's a foundation and status they still have today.

I don't know what the answer is, but we can't pretend it's a simple as 'this happened a long time ago and therefore doesn't count'.

They are definately not fair. But fair is not an economic or political quantifyable term. Slavery wasn't fair either.

What is just or not changes with times and societies. If there is political capital to be made by making reparations then they make sense. If the public disagrees they can and will vote out those responsible. For better or for worse that's our system.

But I personally do not feel there's such a thing as Sins of the Fathers. I have nothing to do with the slavers of 300 years ago, the whole concept of owning a human being is repugnant to me. And I genuinly feel that should be enough.

I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay.

Weird way to view the situation. Then again, I bet a lot of slaves genuinely thought they shouldn’t have to be slaves.

Your number is a bit off. It's more around 569000 per person.

I wouldn't worry.

We won't even give back the stuff in the British Museum, and we've still got that, unlike some fantasy amount of money made up by an attention seeking judge.

Reparation payments sound nice sometimes, but I truly think it's just a distraction designed to promote infighting among the economically enslaved. Tax the rich, provide for all in need, and we will have made more of a repair than payment ever could.

I don't know exactly how to answer you, but the effects of colonization and slavery are still felt today in many former colonies. For instance, a lot of countries were created on a map with a pencil and a ruler without any regards for ethnic groups or culture, which is why there are so many straight lined borders all around the world, this created instabilities and conflicts within the countries. Many of them were also decolonized, pretty much overnight (the colonizers left, without organising elections or handing over the country to newly formed local authorities), which left them completely disorganised. I don't have an opinion specifically on reparation, but colonization and slavery left durable scars in countless countries around the world, and they are still felt to this day, with very little chance of ever healing.

Poor white people whose peasant ancestors were left jobless and homeless due to being unable to compete with free slave labor should pay reparations to the descendants of the people who were forced to work for free, while the rich descendants of the slave owners who dislodged one group while exploiting the other put their blood money in offshore accounts and laugh as the poor people squabble over crumbs.

Is "tn" not short for trillion (1,000,000,000,000)?

If that's the case then the actual number is 569,000 per person.

Putting aside the fact that slavery is still legal in the US thanks to the 13th amendment, and the fact that US orgs are outsourcing it to developing countries, the long-term effects and inequity of slavery continue to this day and should be addressed.

That said, I'm of the opinion we shouldn't give cash payouts - while it'll provide benefit to the community, it'll be spent in such a way that the benefits will flow out of the community almost immediately. It also gets into mucky territory judging how affected people were, and will be the basis for the stoking of massive racial animosity.

Instead, I think we should use the funds to invest massively in infrastructure and programs that will provide long-term benefits to the community. Transport, education, social services and the like that will all help maximise people's quality of life, opportunities, social mobility, and enfranchisement. If some low-income families that weren't affected by slavery benefit too, all the better.

There are a few mistakes worth pointing out here. I'll try not to "flame you" and just get to the mistakes or misconceptions. First, just because time has passed does not mean the impact of slavery is gone, not for the countries that were sources of slaves nor the families descended from slaves nor the states that benefitted from slavery. Think of the way wealth and influence get passed down between generations. In a similar way the King and the house of Windsor accumulates intergenerational wealth on the backs of slavery, the decendents of slaves accrued an intergenerational debt that is still weighing on many of them. The whole idea that historical wrongs "impacts nobody today" is, frankly, just false.

Another issue is this idea that slavery doesn't continue to impact these countries seeking or reccomended for reparations. There areany lingering impacts, but let's just look at population impacts. Conservatively,1833 was 8 generations ago. Take just 2 people out of a slave source country 8 generations ago, and assume they would have stayed behind to have children, assume 3 kids per pair, that's 3281 people just missing from that country. 3281 people that would have worked, farmed, conducted trade, produced art and conducted academics for every 2 slaves taken in 1833. How many slaves were taken? Just based on the population math how can anyone deny the impact.

Another mistake is to conflate you, personally, with the state. The state is permanent, its human members ephemeral. You may not personally be responsible for slavery, you may not benefit in any way, but the state did and the state is still responsible today for its historical wrongs and the continuing damage. You're worried about your £569, but a bigger concern is that the state can freely commit attrocity, then avoid culpability by just waiting out the directly impacted. Honestly, you should be focused not on denying the damage of slavery, historical and current, and focus more on which rich asshole the state should tap to make pay. Got any old money arristocratic families hanging around the UK that could use lighter wallets?

I don’t know about the UK but in the USA slavery was abolished in the 1865, but equal rights weren’t granted until 1965. All the states were not in full compliance until the early 1970s. You could easily argue there are people still alive today directly affected by slavery.

Making slavery illegal doesn’t mean everyone suddenly starts hugging in the streets and bigotry is abolished. I’m sure these same sentiments persisted in UK but hopefully not as long as it did in the USA.

Ending slavery doesn't reset everything back to zero. Imagine if you're running a race against someone else. The person officiating the race (no clue what this kind of person is called 😅) lets your opponent start running the race and keeps you back at the start line. Then, they have a moment of clarity and say to themselves, "Wait a second… This isn't fair!" So, they stop that person where they are, apologize to you, say they promise never to do it again, and blow the whistle so that you can both start the race.

But wait! That person still ended up starting way ahead! But we already ended head starts before the race started so it's OK, right? Well, no, because the person who got the head start still got to start from their advantaged position.

But this isn't quite the same because your issue crosses generations. So, a better analogy might be a relay race. Maybe the head start is stopped just as the second person on the opposing team receives the… thing you pass in a relay race. (Why am I making an analogy to a thing I know nothing about? 😅) They didn't personally get the head start. So, it's OK to go ahead and start the race now with one relay team already on their second runner while the other is on their first, right? It wouldn't be fair to punish that person who didn't directly gain the advantage of the head start.

Well, no, because that team still got an advantage and the other team still started at a disadvantage. Reparations are less about punishing an individual and more about leveling a playing field.

I absolutely love Atlanta Season 3 Episode 4. It’s a very fictionalized take on this.

You've gotten loads of replies on where the number comes from, but much fewer on why reparations should be paid.

Besides the obvious showmanship, diversions and international horse trading, there is one reason seldom mentioned:

Absolution.

You pay the reparations to clear your conscience, and to feel like you can move past an evil part of your history. You paid a pittance that went to all the wrong people, but at least you did a more-than-symbolic thing and can let it go.

I have no idea if this has ever actually worked or even been tried before, but imagine if your society could get rid of all the guilt connected to the slavery parts of history. All that emotional energy freed to enjoy, empathise and connect with current issues, and also finally be able to pick up the older issues that got overshadowed by the big looming Evil in the middle of the room.

I don't think they are. Since the Late 1960's the US has had a war on poverty. Almost trillion dollars has been poured into disadvantaged house holds. According to it's standards, poverty has been reduced from 19.5% to 2.3%. The numbers via ethnicity are not giving with certainty, the fact is total poverty has been greatly reduced. I would argue that is significant reparations.

Reparations are fair because of wealth that it created for a group of citizens: It doesn’t mean your personal wealth. Also just a note: repatriation doesn’t have to be monetary because labor can create wealth as well.

For example we are japanese american, wealth made from 1900-1945 was wiped out by internment. My husband’s family farmed on property that is now worth millions of dollars. That’s wealth that went to people who took the land from his family after they were forcefully removed. That wealth could have helped the next generation of japanese americans, that wealth went to white people instead because of policies made by white people. THIS IS NOT ABOUT WHETHER INTERNMENT WAS RIGHT OR WRONG.

Same thing with slaves, the work they did became wealth for white people collectively. Then when they were freed it didn’t mean that they got to get the wealth back from them. They ate still discriminated so the wealth they created are still circulating within white people as a whole.

Reparation means to circulate the wealth that white people disproportionately have to the group of people who otherwise be using that wealth right now.

Also no one told white people how to spend money they made off of black slaves. Why do white people get to tell how the reparation money should be spent? That’s not reparation, that’s still white people trying to control people of color.

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As far as I know, lot of these aids are wired through NGOs and many of them are more related to the Church who often end up using the money for its Crusade (Conversion & stuff).

They're not.

Oh I'm sure this question will elicit reasoned and calm discussion.

/S

I was thinking the same thing in my country. My grandparents immigrated. They had more to do with the French Revolution than the slave trade.

Oh NOW fair comes into it

It is moral blackmailing.