Redress and Reparations Are Hard. But They’re Not Impossible, Nor Without Precedent in the U.S.

Survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race riots, Dr. Olivia Hooker, 90, gives her personal account of the historic race riot at a briefing before members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other leaders on Capitol Hill, on May 10, 2005, in Washington.Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP

The idea of paying reparations for slavery and our long history of racial violence and discrimination gives many pause, and it fails to win broad public support for a number of reasons. Common concerns include that the problem is simply too big for any amount of money to fix, that the amount of money needed is too vast to consider, that those against whom slavery and violence were perpetrated are long gone anyway, and that it would be a windfall to some and a punishment to others who today are unconnected to the original immoral practices and events. 

And yet, it is common throughout the world to ask wrongdoers, whether individuals, corporations, or countries, to atone for and make real amends for deep injustices. Money is, for better or worse, the thing that gets people to pay attention, and so money is used in settlements, reparations, and redress cases everywhere as an imperfect but important solution.

The idea that we could never get the government to pay reparations to a whole class of people fails out the gate because we already did so. In 1942, over 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were forcibly evacuated from their homes and put into internment camps, without charge or trial for (as George Takei says) “the crime of looking like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.” They lost their homes, businesses and liberty for years. And for four decades, nothing was done to compensate them for their mistreatment. Indeed, the only thing they received from the government was a bus ticket home and some pocket change. With that, they had to start completely over.

Within the Japanese American community itself, there was strong resistance to the idea of reparations. The second-generation Nisei often felt deeply ashamed of what they had endured for years, likening it to having to admit that they were in jail. They didn’t want to draw further attention to the injustice by demanding reparations, especially after spending so much time, and even spilling so much of their own blood during the war, trying to prove their own loyalty. But their children, the Sansei, who grew up in the Civil Rights Era, wanted the truth known and the government to apologize for its actions.

The redress movement was launched in 1978 by the Japanese American Citizens League. It gained in strength when the Nisei came on board with the idea that seeking to hold America accountable and true to its principles was in fact a deeply American thing to do. After years of lobbying, the Civil Rights Bill of 1988 providing redress to internees was enacted, and each living survivor of the Internment was paid $20,000. George Takei promptly donated his check to the Japanese American National Museum to help continue to teach the history of the internment and his community.

The nation is at last coming to a reckoning with long oppression of African Americans, including harrowing race massacres like Tulsa. The question of how to hold wrongdoers accountable, provide for victims and their descendants, and bring the entire truth, however painful, out in the open is once again at the forefront—with many of the same critiques leveled. Tulsa, for example, happened 100 years ago. Today there are only three living survivors. How do you even go about making reparations in such a situation? 

One thing we cannot do is to simply throw up our hands and say the problem is too big and therefore we will do nothing. This would permit a deep wound to continue to fester, and it would send absolutely the wrong message to later generations: that we would rather sweep our troubled and violently racist history under a pristine red, white and blue rug. Given that any reparations are highly unlikely to pass a divided Congress, however, and that the mere raising of the question of racial injustice today sparks calls for bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory, we shouldn’t hold out for a federal level response. Indeed, such a process might even inadvertently absolve the government from taking any real action. Four hundred years of racial oppression—slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and continued police terror against the Black community—are unlikely to be ameliorated significantly by a Presidential Commission to study the matter.

But the Japanese American experience showed us that where we can define a specific injustice against a specific group of people, as well as do our best to track down and compensate those who were directly affected, we can come to some collective agreement on the right course of action. There are many specific cases of racial massacres, state-enabled lynchings, and even participation by prominent institutions in the slave trade. Rather than try to tackle the entire question of reparations, we could begin from the most egregious and definable instances as a path toward truth and reconciliation. These questions could be handled at the state and local level by stakeholders for whom the matter remains of great salience, especially to families and communities that remain affected by the trauma. Successful actions for redress in one case could serve as models for others.

There are many who do not want any of these rocks overturned for fear of what horrors we might discover. As the mass graves that are finally being exhumed and investigated in Tulsa demonstrate, that surely will not be an easy process. But there is no other path forward. We can begin this long journey with the most important of steps, which are always the first ones.