I got on a bus at 3:30 a.m. to visit the famous temple at Abu Simbel, about 40 kilometers from the Sudanese border, and yet another testament to the enduring narcissism of Ramses II.
As I walked around the four seated statues of the pharaoh carved into a mountain while they glared over the Nile, daring the foes of Egypt to tempt them, I couldn't help but feel a tinge of pride: My people totally built that. You know, the ancient Hebrews? We were slaves here, long ago before we escaped from Ramses II.
I was walking into the temple and raising my camera to my eye when this big Arab guy dressed in a long galabiya and Nubian headdress grabbed my camera and said, "No! It is forbidden!" I shot the guy a dirty look and said, "No, no, you don't understand. If it weren't for my family, you wouldn't even have a job here! You owe me these pictures!"
Clearly, I wasn't thinking that rationally at the moment - I was pretty pissed off. But it took me a little while to realize the significance of what I had just said - does this random Arab guy owe me because of what our possible ancestors possibly did to one another 4,000 years ago?
The Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice will have to answer a similar question in its final report due this year.
The problem with reparations is in the details. To say that Egyptians owe the Jews, or whites owe blacks for slavery, is a ludicrous overgeneralization. The modern Arab population doesn't even resemble the Ancient Egyptians. Since the Jewish liberation from Egypt there's been an invasion of Macedonians, then Romans, a Coptic era, an Islamic conquest and finally a secular authoritarian regime. Egypt owes the Jews? Which Egypt are we talking here?
Likewise, what does a recent immigrant from Ireland owe a recent refugee from Sudan? Yes, one is white and the other is black, but neither had anything to do with slavery in America. Even if we could trace all the descendents of slaveholders, it is a gross injustice to hold them responsible for the mistakes of their ancestors. It's as if someone can pay for someone else's sins - but we all know only Jesus can do that.
Allow me to point out one important difference between my analogy and Brown: Brown is not some random actor like a Jew and an Egyptian meeting at Abu Simbel. Since the University is an institution with historical continuity, a claim of responsibility is better founded. Nevertheless, the problem of who is owed what remains.
We need to figure out exactly what the point of reparations is: Correcting an injustice or rehabilitation/reconciliation. I contend it has to be the latter.
For one thing, slavery can never be corrected, no matter how much effort you put into it. Money only belittles the sacrifice. That leaves us with rehabilitation and reconciliation, with imposing structural adjustments on society in small steps to aide a people that never fully recovered from slavery. Examples are affirmative action, scholarships and programs to foster cultural understanding, which transcend the specifics needed for monetary reparations like in a civil court. The logic goes like this: Slavery was a crime against the black people, against humanity, not simply individuals; thus, by instating affirmative action we are attempting reconciliation in a manner we think might be helpful to the descendants of slaves.
But with a new definition of reparations, an old problem arises: Who exactly are we reconciling with, blacks living today or 150 years ago? Imagine we create a scholarship program with its own little office and place on the wall a plaque that reads "Hereby, the purpose of this scholarship program is to aid today's black men and women of America in return for the sacrifices their people made in the cotton fields of the South." Now that just sounds weird - what on earth is the correlation between toiling in the field and a scholarship? Plus, the argument has come full circle: Someone is benefiting for someone else's sacrifices - the slaves have become America's Jesus.
Since crimes against humanity can never be justly recompensed, and even the best solution bears a dubious connection between those wronged and those we're helping, reparations merely distract us from what should be our priority: Fixing the problems of today.
Benjamin Bright-Fishbein '07: Through the past, darkly.
