Reparations and the Churches: Share in Production Better Plan

by Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter
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An escalation is probable in the demands for reparations by our minority groups for past injustices. Some churches have responded with enthusiasm to these demands, hoping to achieve relevance to current needs and to see charity and brotherhood realized in political and economic life. The idea of reparations, however, is unworkable. The churches are trying to respond to a need that is economic in origin. Economic distribution based on the need principle demoralizes production and is impossible to administer. The problem of eliminating poverty cannot be based upon redistributing limited output of the existing economy. The purchasing power gap must be closed by enabling each individual to participate in production, both through employment and the ownership of productive capital.

In March, 1969, the president of San Francisco's Greater Chinatown Community Service Association, J. K. Choy, inspired by the upcoming centennial of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the dire need of the nation's most picturesque slum for welfare services, sent a letter suggesting that the Southern Pacific pay $300,000 to his organization. This sum would posthumously honor 10,000 Chinese laborers who, at coolie rates, sweated the railroad to completion between 1866 and 1869.

Two months later, the National Black Economic Development Conference issued its now famous Black Manifesto demanding, for an opener, $500 million from American churches and synagogues as "reparations due us as people who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized, killed, and persecuted." Hardly was the ink dry on this pronouncement when representatives of a group affiliated with the Poor People's Campaign met with White House officials and key senators to press their demand that businesses be forced to pay "restitution to all the poor," not only for exploitation wages in the past but for jobs not provided. Next, Roy Innis, national director of CORE, dropped in on the Bankers Conference on Urban Problems, sponsored by the American Bankers Association and the National Bankers Association, to deliver his demand that the nation's bankers deposit $6 billion in black-owned banks. "We want this money as a recoupment of our birthrights with compound interest for the years of lost earnings and exploitation," Innis explained. Whereupon James Forman, the Blank Manifesto spokesman, immediately decided that his original reparations figure of, in his words, "$15 per nigger" had been unduly conservative. He announced that his group had raised its demand to $3 billion. Since there are no known limits to need projections by the needy, we may predict that this one-upmanship game is just beginning.

Some Obvious Flaws

An idea whose time has come is indeed powerful - especially when the idea is bad. The sequence of the reparations development, with its competitive escalation of assessments, demonstrates the cardinal flaw. Injustice suffered in the past by persons anonymous and dead is beyond remedy, of course. Nor is there an objective standard for measuring or evaluating that suffering, even if its cause and appropriate recompense could be apportioned to lineal descendants of the original wrongdoers. Choy's request for $300,000 to honor 10,000 Chinese heroes of labor works out to $10 per year per man - a figure he may wish to recalculate in the light of the going reparations price of sweated black labor, and even of labor that is to be posthumously remunerated because it was not sweated. Mexican-American, Irish, Polish, Jewish, Greek, Filipino, and other emigrant groups have yet to estimate the worth of their allegedly exploited ethnic sweat, although a claim for $80 million has been submitted by Mexican-Americans to the United Presbyterian Church general assembly.

Obvious candidates for reparations, on a preferential basis, if we should choose to use this disguise for distributing income on the basis of need, include:

Descendants of men killed or wounded in American wars waged for such questionable objectives as territory, markets, resources, profits, and employment - with supplementary punitive awards when the deaths or injuries were the result of military and/or political incompetence.
Women doomed to empty low-status lives because the husbands that nature intended for them were military sacrifices to society's egotism, stupidity, and greed.
Japanese-Americans detained in concentration camps during World War II who suffered mental anguish, loss of civil rights, and a personal property loss of more than $400 million.
Children casually sired and then abandoned by American fighting men abroad.
Innocent victims of thousands of instances of labor and other poverty-caused violence.
Victims of primitive industrial conditions (for example, miners), whose casualties no one even bothered to count for at least a century and whose occupation still exacts a heavy toll in death, injury and disease.
Victims of the twelve-hour, the fourteen-hour, and the sixteen-hour day, including the toiling children whose childhoods were snuffed out in the mills and factories of the first century of the industrial revolution.
Victims of technological change.
Victims of religious persecution.
Children born because society forbade giving contraceptive knowledge to parents too poor to afford children and too hard-pressed economically to care about them.
The female sex in general, whose personal and economic development has been discouraged by discriminatory laws, customs, and practices similar to those that have repressed the blacks.
Victims of lies socially and even academically sponsored and perpetuated (government propaganda, economic and political myths, fraudulent history, and other distortions of fact and reality sponsored by special interests).
The hundreds of millions of victims of preindustrial economic concepts that doom virtually all members of society to depend solely on labor, real or pretended, to legitimate their incomes.

This inventory is but the tiniest fraction of institutional wrongs that have been and are being inflicted on innocent men and women. Doubtless the reader could contribute many more.

What compassionate indemnity would award to everybody can in practice be claimed by nobody when the coin of reparation involves the finite, tangible goods of the present economic order. We are all descendants of men and women who have been victims of bad institutions, and we are all, even the luckiest of us, the victims of bad institutions now. Surely, the counsel of wisdom is to identify bad institutions, to rationally analyze their defects, and then to set about changing them. Licensing victims to sue each other unto the third and fourth generation does not teach us anything about the causes of the injustices for which various groups, or all of us collectively, might be held responsible. Admitted into political and economic life, the reparations concept would reduce us to a nation of whining, self-pitying grievance-collectors and mendicant-extortioners; it would quickly lead to anarchy.

There is another problem with the reparations principle. It is a cornerstone of law, of ethics, and of moral theology that one is accountable only for one's own acts. The notion that some may be punished for the deeds of others - particularly deeds not legally questionable at the time of commission - is not moral advance but regression, a return to the primitive totalitarian mentality that characterized society in its earliest stages. Individuals have taken many millions of years to differentiate themselves from the primitive collective; it has been a slow, painful evolution bought at incalculable cost. One of its precious fruits is a legal system designed to protect individuals from irrational and arbitrary assaults - like the demands for reparations - on their persons and property.

The practical absurdity of the reparations concept becomes evident as soon as it is stated. Some members of society (the propertied) are obligated to share their accumulations with other members of society (the unpropertied who are first to demand them); these payments are to be regarded as damages paid to redress injustices and life conditions of the past imposed upon men and women long since dead. This money is not to be paid to the heirs of the original victims, since they are unknown, nor to all the descendants, since they are too numerous. Instead, it is to be paid to self-appointed representatives of the plaintiff class who have volunteered to serve as its stewards and guardians. These intermediaries are to use the funds in the name of the general welfare as determined by them; they are to do this without accountability, much as the "new class," to use Milovan Djilas' term, designates its bureaucrats in communist states to own all productive capital for the benefit of "the people." If the projects of this self-appointed power elite are ill-chosen, economically unfeasible, poorly designed and organized, badly administered, and finally fall flat -- well, everyone concerned had only the best intentions.

Church Reaction

Churchmen are schooled in the discipline of logic; they are also credentialed authorities on fallen human nature. Nevertheless, while some congregations have rejected the demands of the Black Manifesto in fact and principle, others have acquiesced - some with enthusiasm. Some have even started to collect reparation funds. Those who have rejected the demand from "a platform of negative vigilance" (Dr. John Knowles' phrase to describe the reactionary who presents no solutions but only fights change) certainly deserve no praise. But it is strange that so few churchmen have felt obliged to point out the moral and philosophical dangers of attempting to solve the poverty problem through any kind of reparations. Many are lending a sympathetic ear, and some even their pulpits, to demonstrate their sympathy for a concept that logic, common sense, and moral theology seemingly would reject out of hand. The explanation must be that these churchmen are not thinking but reacting. What seems to them a dialogue is, in reality, a duet composed of two radically contrapuntal themes. The clerical theme is the desire for relevance; the black theme is the desire for equality of economic opportunity, a right to which economic justice unquestionably entitles them.

Marx once declared that the Church of England would rather part with all of its thirty-nine articles than 1/39th of its income. Churches today, however, are concerned about their function in a society that has undergone more change in the last fifty years than in the past ten centuries. The churches understand with frightening clarity that they are confronting their own Dies Irae. Either the religious establishment identifies with the alienated in their demand for a just and humane society ("a society we can love," as a young campus militant touchingly put it) or the alienated will bypass the churches, draining them of vitality, significance, and moral influence. Thus for the churches, the black guerrilla theater being staged in their chancels is something more than a modern morality play in which the traditional black-and-white symbolism has been reversed. It is quite literally a drama of its own life or death.

But the alienation of the young and the racial minorities to which the churches are trying to respond is economic in origin. The remedy, if there is one, must be addressed to the cause. Here the churches are at a disadvantage. The world of production and distribution is as mysterious to clerical temperament and experience as the mysteries of the Tabernacle are to the majority of scientists, managers, engineers, technicians, and workers. Nor do the alienated themselves appear to understand the origin of the evils they are so determined to eliminate. The young do not understand the system because they are still its dependents; the minorities are, in general, equally ignorant of the workings of the economic order because they have been excluded from participation in it. Moreover, the churchmen, the young, and the racial minorities, being a part of the social body, share its economic illusions and believe its economic myths, for in the economic order only a quantum advance in concepts can update our business and financial institutions so that they can accommodate our science and technology.

On Labor Day the glories of honest toil are extolled from every pulpit in the land - notwithstanding the fact that the primary purpose of technological advance is to make toil extinct. Despite the evidence that material deprivation is hateful to all human beings, including churchmen, the churches continue to celebrate the glories of poverty and to admonish tired, careworn, overburdened men and women (who have not enough money in their pockets to fill the collection plate, pay a restaurant check, or take a real vacation) as if they had just jetted in from a Roman orgy. The clergy have bought the myth of the affluent society, just as the black militants have bought the myth of the affluent church. The blacks are poor, but they think that the churches have lots of money and should give them some. The churches are poor, but they think their parishioners have lots of money and should give them some. The parishioners are poor, but they think the government has lots of money and should give them some.

On the stage this is a comedy of errors, but in a generally impoverished society, the results are less than comic. At the end, everyone believes that he or she has a right to receive income without being obligated to produce the physical goods and services that the income will be used to buy; that everyone has a right to consume but no correlative duty to produce. In the real economic world, this translates into the notion that the productive are obligated to support the nonproductive and underproductive. Aside from the rather obvious defect that this principle will never be popular with the productive, it has other weaknesses that make it unworkable as a principle of distribution.

"Two hundred million people are victims of contemporary forms of slavery. Most aren't prostitutes, of course, but children in sweatshops, domestic workers, migrants. During four centuries, 12 million people were believed to be involved in the slave trade between Africa and the New World. The 200 million - and many, of course, are women who are trafficked for sex - is a current figure. It's happening now. Today."

(Michael Platzer, head of the United Nations Center for International Crime Prevention, Vienna, Austria, "Traffickers New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women," New York Times, January 11, 1998, p. 1 (quote, p. 6)

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