Reparations for slavery in the United States

rdf:langString Reparations for slavery in the United States

rdf:langString Reparations for slavery is the application of the concept of reparations to victims of slavery or their descendants. There are concepts for reparations in legal philosophy and reparations in transitional justice. In the US, reparations for slavery have been both given by legal ruling in court and/or given voluntarily (without court rulings) by individuals and institutions. The first recorded case of reparations for slavery in the United States was to former slave Belinda Royall in 1783, in the form of a pension, and since then reparations continue to be proposed and/or given in a variety of forms. The 1865 Special Field Orders No. 15 ("Forty acres and a mule") is the most well known attempt to help newly freed slaves integrate into society and accumulate wealth. However, President Andrew Johnson reversed this order, giving the land back to its former Confederate owners. Reparations have been a recurring idea in the politics of the United States, most recently in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. The call for reparations intensified in 2020, amidst the protests against police brutality and the COVID-19 pandemic, which both kill Black Americans disproportionately. Calls for reparations for racism and discrimination in the US are often made by black communities and authors alongside calls for reparations for slavery. The idea of reparations remains highly controversial, due to questions of how they would be given, how much would be given, who would pay them, and who would receive them. Forms of reparations which have been proposed or given in the United States by city, county, state, and national governments or private institutions include: individual monetary payments, settlements, scholarships, waiving of fees, and systemic initiatives to offset injustices, land-based compensation related to independence, apologies and acknowledgements of the injustices, token measures (such as naming a building after someone), and the removal of monuments and streets named to slave owners and defenders of slavery. Since further injustices and discrimination have continued since slavery was outlawed in the US, some black communities and civil rights organizations have called for reparations for those injustices as well as for reparations directly related to slavery. Some suggest that the U.S. prison system, starting with the convict lease system and continuing through the present-day government-owned corporation Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR), is a modern form of legal slavery that still primarily and disproportionately affects black populations and other minorities via the war on drugs and what has been criticized as a school-to-prison pipeline.