Juneteenth, Reparations, and What Do I Do About It?

Today is June 19^th, a day when we remember that our American experiment with freedom included over 200 years of enslavement for Africans stolen and sold to white slavers. Today is the day when HR#40, a bill to set up a commission to study reparations, was introduced for discussion in a House subcommittee hearing.

And today I considered the long and winding road of my own presence in America.

I have a history, y’all.

My father’s family came to America in the early 1700s from England—the region where Matlock, Derbyshire sits.

The family split early into Northern and Southern branches, with one group leaving for North and West, from North Carolina through Tennessee and Kentucky up into Illinois, where the family settled down along the Fox River. It’s the Unionist side of the family tree. The other group spread South and West, into Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. All along the Black Belt. They’re the branch we don’t talk about. Those people.

I did some genealogical research about my family’s origins using census records, and discovered a list of distant family members who were white slavers. That was hard to see.

What was harder to see was my own name listed, in three states, as owning enslaved people. 44 of them, by my count.

That’s not all the white slavers and all the enslaved. That’s just the men with my own name.

I blinked in astonishment and sadness.

I can use the excuse of “Well, it’s not my Northern branch, where I come from. It’s those Southern Matlocks. We are so much better than they—we didn’t own humans. We didn’t profit off slavery…we just got land from the government at reduced prices or even free, land taken from the indigenous, and we turned that into our wealth and our generational assets.”

Ouch.

It really wasn’t a North-South split, that somehow the South was the bad guys and the North was the good guys.

It was an opportunity split. The same motivation of “here is an asset we can exploit to our own profit” applied to both North and South. The South took people, the North took land.

It’s bothersome to think about. We weren’t born into wealth in the 1950s in California. We were an ordinary middle-class white family with six kids. I have no direct benefit that I can identify from my heritage in the North. But my grandfather went to college, my father went to college, and I went to college.

We lived in a safe, comfortable middle-class brand-new neighborhood in Southern California, with brand-new schools, brand-new churches, brand-new shopping centers, brand-new roads. All that energy and financial assets that were used to build Southern California came from somewhere, and it came from the massive transfer of wealth from the labor and lives of black Americans, North and South.

When we talk about reparations, we aren’t talking about what any one individual owes. It is not about a bill we, as white people, must pay as one person here, one person there.

It is about an invoice that is due, that we’re all corporately responsible for. It’s about repaying a people in America who’ve been robbed and cheated for 400 years of their own wealth. It’s about what we will do to rectify the situation. Fiat justitia ruat caelum the saying goes. It’s the foundation of law and righteousness: Let justice be done though the heavens tremble.

I don’t know what the end result will be of a conversation about what reparations are required, but I do know that if we want to live up to our own standards, we are going to have to figure out a repayment for all that was lost or stolen.