The London-based Economist magazine has often acted as a conservative Anglo-American establishment mouthpiece. Its recent leader (“How Not To Repair America” June 10, 2023) and the accompanying main article (“The Tide Goes Out”, 10 June 2023) on the reparations debate in the United States, exposes both its illiberal ideology and consistent misreading of race issues in America. The British-based magazine crudely caricatures this important issue, making lazy arguments that are often put forward by conservative analysts: reparations are unpopular and backed by only 30% of Americans; most living whites played no part in Jim Crow segregation and so none can be held responsible; black Americans are not the only disadvantaged group in America; resources are finite, and should go towards better schools and health for all Americans.
The argument that reparations are not popular, however, needs to be disaggregated. Explaining complicated historical issues to voters also requires strong and courageous leadership, as America’s partisan media space is often deluged by stereotypical arguments presented by conservative outlets such as this Economist perspective. Many Americans tend to think differently once this issue has been sensibly explained as a structural one in which the country benefited from 400 years of unpaid labour which facilitated America’s industrialisation, using 450,000 enslaved Africans who only won their basic voting rights in the 1960s. Such an approach would also note that, as the Economist itself concedes, the lingering effects of this legacy remains with America today, with many of the victims still alive as heirs who have inherited these socio-economic disadvantages. The Economist itself observes that the median net worth of black families in 2019 was 13% that of white families.
Such gross racial inequalities are also evident in the lower levels of life expectancy and health, as well as continuing discrimination against African Americans. During the recent COVID/19 crisis, black Americans accounted for 30% of deaths, despite constituting only 13% of the US population. Today, members of this group are less likely to have healthcare; are more prone to police brutality; while 26% of black men have been incarcerated in what scholar-activist, Angela Davis, dubbed America’s “prison industrial complex.” Many African Americans also live in ghettos, suffering more the effects of bad housing, bad diet, and bad schooling, with 34% of black children born on or below the poverty line. These stark realities all constitute the continuing legacies of four centuries of slavery.
In terms of the Economist’s argument that African Americans are not the only group discriminated against, this is scarcely an argument for not paying reparations. After the Second World War in 1946, the US government’s Indian Claims Commission paid $1.3 billion (worth $20 billion today) in reparations to indigenous Americans who had historically been victims of widespread land dispossession and genocide. Japanese Americans incarcerated in concentration camps during the Second World War were also compensated through a $1.2 million payment (worth $18 million today). Though the Economist cites the Japanese case, attempts to repair historical crimes should not be turned into a hierarchy of suffering. Historical injustices with far-reaching and continuing consequences should be repaired regardless of the groups involved.
The Economist’s argument that no living whites are responsible for slavery ignores the structural issues of those who continue to benefit from four centuries of free labour, in stark contrast to those who continue to suffer from it. This statement is akin to saying that no one is responsible and should be held accountable for America’s contemporary racism, which was consolidated over 400 years of black exploitation, dehumanisation, and disenfranchisement. Governments in Canada, Australia, and Germany have paid reparations for crimes committed against indigenous populations and European Jews for which many of their living citizens were not directly responsible. The governments of Germany and the Netherlands have recently announced similar reparations for past crimes. Regarding, the Economist’s argument of resources being finite, the fact that Washington continues to spend more on its military than the next 10 countries combined is the clearest sign of the distortion of socio-economic priorities through its lobbyist-fuelled legislative process of legalised corruption. America can thus clearly afford to pay compensation to repair its past.
The Economist then cites the case of two commissions in the “Golden State” of California which recently recommended reparations for descendants of American slavery, as an example of how “it is impossible to create an actuarial table of injustice…to determine how much cash is owed and to whom.” The reparations commission recommended that the maximum cost of reparations per African American should be $1.2 million as a down payment, while a similar reparations commission in San Francisco suggested $5 million per person. The Economist notes that California is focused more on repairing current racial disparities which the magazine concedes remain considerable across the country. It further cites 2016 figures showing that black Angelenos had 1% of the wealth of their white compatriots in Los Angeles.
The Economist then suggests that the sum of the proposed reparations would cripple the state’s finances. However, its own British government had paid the country’s slave-owners – and not the exploited slaves themselves or their descendants – £20 million (equivalent to £17 billion in 2016) for the loss of their “property” after Westminster abolished slavery in 1833. This sum was fully paid out just eight years ago in 2015. If the British government could take out a loan worth 40% of its Treasury’s annual income and 5% of its GDP at the time, to make perverse payments to 46,000 slave-owners and their descendants over a 182-year period, why can the government of California not have the ingenuity to devise a similar long-term compensation scheme for a more just cause? The Economist’s alternative suggestion that race-neutral anti-poverty programmes be put in place instead of reparations, seems utterly insensitive given that the institution of slavery itself had been based solely on race. The magazine’s suggestion that the governor of California, Gavin Newson, and mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, oppose cash payments is also mean-spirited.
In seeking to nuance the Economist’s views, I consulted two mainstream American newspapers. The Los Angeles Times noted that California had been requested by its reparations commission to issue a formal apology for the persistent damage of slavery and discrimination, an important fact that the Economist omitted in its rush to discredit the case for reparations. The California-based newspaper further explained that monetary losses for the descendants of enslaved African Americans had been calculated based on the three categories of health disparities, mass incarceration and over-policing, and housing discrimination, making these sums less arbitrary than portrayed by the Economist’s superficial analysis. The New York Times also nuanced the 30% of Americans that the Economist noted are opposed to reparations, by citing disaggregated figures from the same Pew Research Centre survey: 77% of African American adults support reparations, as do 39% of Hispanics, 33% of Asians, but only 18% of whites. Unsurprisingly, the main beneficiaries of slavery are the most opposed to its redress, while the main victims of this crime against humanity are the most supportive. Significantly, the New York Times also exposed the ideological disparity in this debate, with 50% of Democrats backing reparations, in contrast to 8% of Republicans: a camp into which the Economist falls.
The Economist – not renowned for its cultural diversity, and notorious for a Eurocentric gaze on the non-Western world – tends to view race relations in America through the jaundiced lens of its own British society which is often in denial about widespread prejudices against black and brown people, despite clear evidence of institutional racism in its policing, public health, and more recently, its cricket. A magazine living in a London glass-house is clearly throwing stones.
Professor Adebajo is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.
