- Mar 11, 2015
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Documenting the Costs of Slavery, Segregation, and Contemporary Racism: Why Reparations Are in Order for African Americans
Joe Richard Feagin is an American sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on racial and gender issues, especially in regard to the United States. He is currently the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. Feagin has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, University of California, Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, University of Florida, and Texas A&M University. Feagin has done much research work on race and ethnic relations and has served as the scholar in residence at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has written over 60 books. He is the 2006 recipient of a Harvard Alumni Association achievement award and was the 1999–2000 president of the American Sociological Association.
Since the mid-1600s, now for some fifteen generations or so, the exploitation and oppression of African Americans has redistributed income and wealth earned by black labor to generations of white Americans, thereby leaving the former relatively impoverished as a group and the latter relatively privileged as a group. Consider just the value of the African American labor that was expropriated. The white owner’s cost for maintaining an enslaved African American was generally very low, and under many circumstances large profits could be generated from the labor of such a subordinated worker. For example, researcher Larry Neal has calculated that the current (1983) value of the slave labor expropriated by whites from 1620 to 1865 ranges from about $963 billion to as much as $97,064 billion, depending on the rate of interest chosen for the long intervening period. Historical economist James Marketti estimates the dollar value of the labor taken from enslaved African Americans from 1790 to 1860 to be, depending on the historical assumptions, from $7 billion to as much as $40 billion. Such a figure roughly indicates what black individuals and families lost in income because they did not control their labor. Marketti suggests that, if that stolen income is multiplied by taking into account lost interest from then to the present, the current (1983) economic loss (income diverted) for black Americans ranges from $2.1 to $4.7 trillion. Updating these 1983 estimates to today would place the current value of the diverted income from black labor, plus interest, into many trillions of United States dollars.
Numerous white analysts have attacked the idea of white society owing such back wages for slavery; they argue that figuring out the debts of a supposedly too-distant history is just too difficult. Yet such an argument almost always fails to note that the damages done to African Americans did not end with slavery, but persisted for another one hundred years in the form of legal segregation, and then for several more decades in present-day discrimination. The era of black enslavement was not followed by a century of redress, justice, and equality, but rather just the opposite. Moreover, today, there are millions of living African Americans who suffered severely under legal segregation, and many more continue to suffer today from racial discrimination at the hands of many white Americans.
Of course I will see the standard retardation by delusional racist whites and those who wannabe white about democrats and liberals, but this is reality and if you have to concoct some crazy shit to deny what is documented in the American record, your ass is a mental case needing to take up residency at your nearest funny farm.
Joe Richard Feagin is an American sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on racial and gender issues, especially in regard to the United States. He is currently the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. Feagin has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, University of California, Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, University of Florida, and Texas A&M University. Feagin has done much research work on race and ethnic relations and has served as the scholar in residence at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He has written over 60 books. He is the 2006 recipient of a Harvard Alumni Association achievement award and was the 1999–2000 president of the American Sociological Association.
Since the mid-1600s, now for some fifteen generations or so, the exploitation and oppression of African Americans has redistributed income and wealth earned by black labor to generations of white Americans, thereby leaving the former relatively impoverished as a group and the latter relatively privileged as a group. Consider just the value of the African American labor that was expropriated. The white owner’s cost for maintaining an enslaved African American was generally very low, and under many circumstances large profits could be generated from the labor of such a subordinated worker. For example, researcher Larry Neal has calculated that the current (1983) value of the slave labor expropriated by whites from 1620 to 1865 ranges from about $963 billion to as much as $97,064 billion, depending on the rate of interest chosen for the long intervening period. Historical economist James Marketti estimates the dollar value of the labor taken from enslaved African Americans from 1790 to 1860 to be, depending on the historical assumptions, from $7 billion to as much as $40 billion. Such a figure roughly indicates what black individuals and families lost in income because they did not control their labor. Marketti suggests that, if that stolen income is multiplied by taking into account lost interest from then to the present, the current (1983) economic loss (income diverted) for black Americans ranges from $2.1 to $4.7 trillion. Updating these 1983 estimates to today would place the current value of the diverted income from black labor, plus interest, into many trillions of United States dollars.
Numerous white analysts have attacked the idea of white society owing such back wages for slavery; they argue that figuring out the debts of a supposedly too-distant history is just too difficult. Yet such an argument almost always fails to note that the damages done to African Americans did not end with slavery, but persisted for another one hundred years in the form of legal segregation, and then for several more decades in present-day discrimination. The era of black enslavement was not followed by a century of redress, justice, and equality, but rather just the opposite. Moreover, today, there are millions of living African Americans who suffered severely under legal segregation, and many more continue to suffer today from racial discrimination at the hands of many white Americans.
Of course I will see the standard retardation by delusional racist whites and those who wannabe white about democrats and liberals, but this is reality and if you have to concoct some crazy shit to deny what is documented in the American record, your ass is a mental case needing to take up residency at your nearest funny farm.
