Slavery. Serfdom through sharecropping. Dispossession. Voter suppression by means of poll taxes and literacy tests. Jim Crow. Lynchings. Refugees fleeing from the south to the north. Deed restrictions. Predatory lending. Government encouraged segregation through redlining. Over-policing. Police brutality. The school-to-prison pipeline and a new Jim Crow.
Recently, I was asked to write about a Humanistic Jewish perspective on reparations. I contemplated it, read about it, and consulted a variety of viewpoints on the subject. As I did, I compiled that list of degradations and depradations committed against Black people in America and I thought to myself, what could possibly repair such damage?
One of the sources that I re-visited was “The Case for Reparations,” a lengthy essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates published in the June 2014 issue of The Atlantic. It remains a groundbreaking contribution to the debate, using individuals’ stories to weave the larger narrative of crimes perpetrated against Black people. Yet despite its title, it actually addresses few specifics about what reparations would look like:
"Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?"
Coates does not offer answers because the answers are not one person’s to give. It is, rather, the responsibility of the entire nation to come to terms with this issue. That is where repair begins:
"What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
"What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history."
Coates specifically consulted Jewish history, ancient and modern. His epigraph is from Deuteronomy with its command that when one releases a bondman (a slave), one must send him forth with the means to support himself. More significantly, his piece also offers a concise and accurate description of the early 1950s debates in both Israel and post-war (West) Germany over Holocaust reparations.
Few of us recall the widespread Israeli Jewish objections to German reparations. Future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin led a large, sometimes violent, opposition. On the other side, many Germans also opposed reparations for Jews. In the near aftermath of the Holocaust, still unrepentant Germans continued to deny their national crimes, feeling themselves to be the true victims of the war. Ultimately, the two sides reached an agreement. Today, historians widely acknowledge the role that the reparations debate and agreement played in launching Germany’s own reckoning with the Holocaust.
Our current movement for Black lives, the largest and most diverse protest in American history, represents a new openness by Americans from many walks of life to reckon with our own nation’s past. More Americans than ever are abandoning the erasure of our nation’s transgressions, recognizing the unbroken chain of debasement that began in 1619 when the first enslaved African came to these shores.
A national reconciliation of our racial divide does not, as Coates says, begin with questions about the mechanics of reparations. If America is to move forward in the struggle for racial justice, Americans must first engage in an honest consideration of how we keep finding ourselves in the same dishonorable place decade after decade.
In 1989, Cong. John Conyers introduced H.R. 40, the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.” Though its support remained small, he continued to reintroduce it each year until his death in 2017 when Cong. Sheila Jackson Lee took up the cudgel. A first ever hearing on that bill took place only last summer.
If Humanistic Judaism is about anything, it is about our desire to make decisions that draw from both Jewish experience and human reason. We are at an inflection point in American history, a time when we are being called upon to live up to our professed values. Let us open the door to a meaningful study of this issue. Let us demonstrate that Black lives matter to us by advancing the national discussion that they deserve. Let us learn to share how Jews have benefited from reparations. Let us support H.R. 40.
