Reparations are grounded in white supremacy and only seek to reify white dominance

On Sept. 30, 2020, 401 years after human traffickers landed in Virginia and sold Africans to English settlers, California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 3121. The legislation established a nine-person task force to “Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, with a Special Consideration for African Americans Who are Descendants of Persons Enslaved in the United States.” On March 29, the task force voted 5-4 to limit the resulting reparations to Black people whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States, sparking a robust debate about who is deserving of reparations. While this may seem like the most straightforward solution, undoing the legacy and history of slavery is not that simple. As a descendant of Africans enslaved in America, I would benefit from this policy. But, as someone who has taught “Race as an Economic Construct” to college students, studied the history of Africans in America and has written extensively about reparations for two decades, I oppose this idea. It is my belief that the foundation of this argument rests on the precepts of white supremacy that created the disparities reparations are intended to erase. Instead of writing an entire treatise—which I’ve actually done a few times—here are the top 10 reasons why lineage-based reparations are a terrible idea. 10. It is based on white history. First of all, the bill states that “More than 4,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States and the colonies that became the United States from 1619 to 1865,” which excludes the descendants of Africans who were enslaved in America by anyone other than English settlers who showed up a century after Europeans arrived on the continent with enslaved Africans. We still don’t know what happened to the Africans who revolted in the Spanish colony of San Miguel de Gualdape in 1526. Historians speculate that they may be living in North Carolina but are we to think, in 500 years, none of those people made it to California? It also rests on the tenuous definition of “descendant” and the actual definition of African-American, which doesn’t actually exist because race is just something white people made up. 9. …And white math. This entire concept of tying reparations to ancestry is based on a white supremacist construct used to demonize welfare queens, social programs and the MAGA form of racism known as “economic anxiety.” According to the “zero-sum” philosophy, if everyone gets a piece of the American pie, there will be less for everyone. Unfortunately, that’s not how math works. When wealth is distributed evenly, it generates more wealth and less poverty. This economic concept has been so widely accepted that we don’t even argue about it anymore. We are willing to use taxpayer money to subsidize white farmers, billionaires and wealthy corporations by reasoning that the money will have a positive economic impact.