Commentary: Black Reparations Inspiring a Multicolored Pandora’s Box of Intersectional

Until a few years ago, the idea of paying financial reparations to descendants of African slaves was dismissed as a fringe idea.   

Now a notion that President Barack Obama once rejected as impractical is becoming public policy. California offers a dramatic example as officials there review a proposal that could pay in excess of $1 million each to some black residents, while more than a dozen U.S. municipalities are moving ahead with their own race-based programs to redress the legacies of slavery.  

But the reparations movement is bigger and wider than that. Its rise in the United States has inspired a global movement committed to redressing perceived historical injustices to all manner of aggrieved groups. The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations – and Roman Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning colonization, slavery, and genocide in the New World. Scholars, activists and legislators across the United States and Europe and in former colonies are drawing on the logic and language of the black reparations movement and international human rights law to make the claim that their causes also deserve atonement and compensation for past wrongs.   

Some warn that reparations open a controversial and bottomless Pandora’s Box, given history’s long catalogue of official policies that criminalized or discriminated against or sex workers, polygamists, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, and the Roma, among a vast array of potential claimants.  

“If we pay reparations to black Americans, there’s no way it ends with black Americans,” said Wilfred Reilly, a conservative political science professor at Kentucky State University and author of “Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War.” “Once you start paying people for things that happened in the past before their lifetimes, you’re setting precedent there.”  

Reparations advocate William Darity, a Duke University economist and one of five economic advisers to the California Reparations Task Force, acknowledged that claims against the United States and other European nations that enslaved Africans could potentially lead to similar claims against Western and non-Western countries that, in a previous political configuration in past centuries, engaged in slaving, concubinage, and other practices that were formerly accepted but are now viewed with moral revulsion.    

“I would encourage the people who are concerned about these histories of injustice to do the work and make the case,” Darity said, noting that the full scale of potential claims may not be fully appreciated. “It could be immense; it could be enormous.”   

A number of new claims are now in play. Gay reparations have successfully won financial restitution for surviving victims of government persecution in the 20th century, including incarceration and maltreatment in Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spain and Nazi Germany (a policy that was continued for another quarter-century in West Germany). The U.S. movement, led by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., seeks atonement and compensation for the surviving victims of the “Lavender Scare,” the postwar period of mass firings of thousands of gay federal civil servants in the United States who were suspected of being “perverts.”  

Advocates of climate reparations seek trillions of dollars in aid from the wealthy nations of the so-called global North to the developing countries of the global South. In response to such claims, the European Union this year agreed to create a climate fund to mitigate the predicted ecological and humanitarian toll that will be caused by greenhouse gas emissions emitted by industrialized powers.   

Gay reparations and  climate  reparations both have been the subject of recent books published by Oxford University Press in 2022 and 2021 and written by serious academics at reputable institutions, Bard College and Georgetown University. Foreign Policy magazine has run lengthy articles in support of  gay reparations  and  climate reparations just in the past few years. 

These causes draw on the academic literature, moral arguments, and growing success of the black reparations movement as a template for their own claims. Currently, more than 100 institutions are active in  Universities Studying Slavery, an international consortium whose members document their complicity in African slaving and develop reparations and remembrance projects. Last year the state of Virginia enacted a law requiring five public universities built with slave labor to provide scholarships or other benefits to descendants of enslaved Africans and African Americans.    

The movements are organizing conferences, publishing historical research, and trying to sway public opinion. Nearly one out of three U.S. adults now support reparations for black people, and support has risen to three out of four African Americans, who said they would most benefit from scholarships and financial aid for businesses and homes, according to a 2022 study from the Pew Research Center.   

But the question of who owes what to whom is complicated: According to Pew’s research, 27% of whites, 43% of Asians, 53% of Hispanics and 60% of black Americans believe that “descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade” bear “most or all” of the responsibility for repayment.   

Illustrating the complexity of the issue, reparations projects around the country are using inconsistent eligibility criteria. The California Reparations Task Force has defined eligibility in such a way as to exclude people like Obama, whose late mother was white and late father was from Kenya, by limiting benefits to descendants of free blacks or enslaved blacks who lived in the United States in the 19th century.  

But California’s definition currently doesn’t require the applicant to document that they have self-identified as African American, an oversight that could open the door for white people who have black slaves in their lineage, Darity said, unless the state’s task force revises the criteria in the final proposal this year.  

California’s eligibility standards were controversial and passed narrowly on a 5-4 vote. Public figures last year impassionedly urged the task force to make reparations available to all black people.  

“In essence, we’re saying people like that, who’re experiencing racism now — and you can’t tell me Barack Obama didn’t experience racism — could not be part of reparations,” said Reginald Jones-Sawyer, who represents South Los Angeles in the State Assembly, according to The New York Times. “The fact that we all came in, whether on a slave ship or a cruise ship — Guess what? We’re all in the same boat now.”  

More broadly, reparations claims mutually reinforce each other as a common cause. They often argue their petitions are based on government policy that was systemic in targeting a victim class to the advantage of the dominant social group.   

“The struggle for gay reparations in the United States is part and parcel of the struggles by previously marginalized groups – from women to African Americans to immigrants — for full acceptance into the American community,” according to the 2021 book, “The Case for Gay Reparations.”    

The movements seem to have one thing in common: They focus on former European colonial powers, not on other parts of the world where slavery, homophobia, misogyny, and other abuses were (and often still are) practiced and tolerated, such as Africa and the Middle East.  

When asked about this pattern, Darity said, “There might be a case to make against some of the Western African countries for their complicity in terms of expelling people into slavery.”  

But Darity, one of the preeminent reparations advocates of his generation, also worries that excessive and redundant claims will appear absurd to the public and exhaust public sympathies, to the point that the movement will be undone by its own success.   

“I know for some people it appears to be quite confusing as to who is asking for what from whom,” said Darity. “It is a potential problem that this simultaneous wave of reparations-based claims may actually undermine one another, or more narrowly undermine the effort on the part of black American descendants of U.S. slavery.”  

For many Americans the word “reparations” is synonymous with a financial debt owed to African Americans for discriminatory policies that advocates refer to collectively as the legacies of slavery, such as the “war on drugs” that led to a sharp increase in incarceration of black men. Darity contends that the racial wealth gap in the United States was created by the federal government through a…