Who Should Receive Reparations for Slavery and Discrimination?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The idea of reparations—real compensation made to the descendants of slaves or the victims of legalized discrimination—has gained traction since the publication, in 2014, of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s influential article “The Case for Reparations,” which appeared in The Atlantic. But even among proponents of the concept, the ideas about what reparations would mean vary wildly. Questions linger about the intended recipients. Should only descendants of people enslaved on American soil (rather than the Caribbean or elsewhere in the diaspora) be eligible? That is the contention of people using the hashtag ADOS, or American Descendants of Slavery, which has become controversial. How important is genealogical proof to making a claim, given that slavery often did not leave good records? What about Americans who may have had an enslaved ancestor, but have not personally identified as African-American? Alondra Nelson, a professor of sociology at Columbia University and president of the Social Science Research Council, talked with two prominent scholars who have addressed the issue: Darrick Hamilton, the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, and William A. Darity, the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Then Nelson sat down with The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman to explain the challenges faced.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a bonus episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:08.0	I'm Josh Rothman, an editor and writer at the magazine. The last episode of the show was all about the debate over reparations, whether this country ought to intentionally address the legacy of slavery.
0:20.9	Recently, I was meeting with Alondra Nelson, who's a professor of sociology at Columbia
0:25.3	and the president of the social science research council.
0:28.2	And she's been asking a lot of great questions about how reparations might really work.
0:32.4	Assuming we decide that we want to do it, how would we actually put it into practice?
0:36.8	What would it mean to try to concretely address the legacy of slavery
0:40.4	and the way that it has affected black Americans throughout history?
0:44.4	So Alondra, you wrote about reparations a bit in your book,
0:46.7	The Social Life of DNA.
0:49.0	Yes, well, I thought I was writing a book about the impact and effect
0:54.0	of the direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry
0:57.5	testing market.
0:58.5	And a few years later, I looked up and I was writing a book about reparations.
1:03.3	So what happened?
1:04.2	How did reparations come into it?
1:06.0	Well, reparations comes into it in the form of a historic class action suit that starts in 2002. Basically,
1:12.7	there are eight plaintiffs who say that reparations are owed to them from 21 multinational corporations.
1:19.7	So these included Lloyds of London, Aetna, CSX, the transportation company, and others.
1:25.6	Are those companies the descendants of corporations that were involved in the slave trade?
1:29.9	Yes, that was the argument that these companies would not exist today, if not for the proceeds
1:35.4	and the wealth that had been made during the slave trade.
	...

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