Do reparations activists want Barack Obama to pay damages but not Donald Trump?
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) may not actually descend from Native Americans, but she evidently did descend from at least one slave owner. This is according to a new Reuters investigation, which showed fellow Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) also descended from a slave owner, and as did every single living president — except for Donald Trump.
Back during her failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Warren called for a “national, full-blown conversation about reparations” for slavery, thus mainstreaming the proposal now backed by the state of California and a significant sector of the Democratic caucus in Congress.
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But as the Reuters report illustrates, the real roadblock to reparations is not just the cost or even the rationale. Rather, it’s the “how” that leads to all sorts of uncomfortable practicalities.
Consider the case of Barack Obama. The former president’s father was born in Kenya and only moved to America on a university scholarship to study economics. In a vacuum, Barack Obama Sr.’s lineage doesn’t put his son on either side of the reparations formula. His ancestors were never slaves in the United States. Obama’s mother, a white Kansan, had multiple slave-owning ancestors and probably black ancestors who were enslaved. Genetically speaking, matrilineal descent would put Obama on both sides of the reparations equation.
What is the purpose of reparations? If it is to redress slavery, then by logical extension, slaveholder descendants such as Obama would be taxed while Trump, whose grandparents were all European and thus never owned U.S. slaves, would be spared. Then how would recipients be compensated? If she were still alive, would Obama’s mother, who was legally and visibly white, be eligible for compensation? If the goal is to redress the discrimination faced by black residents during the Jim Crow era, when is the cutoff? Would Obama the elder then be included despite having no ties to slavery, as he studied at Harvard prior to the Supreme Court entirely eliminating Jim Crow laws?
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As much as racial essentialists (on both the Right and Left) wish to reject it, the reality is that the nation is becoming increasingly post-racial, not merely or even primarily in terms of attitude. By contrast, it’s a biological product of two of the nation’s greatest virtues: immigration and assimilation through intermarriage.
If we stayed stratified, with only white descendants of slave owners marrying each other, perhaps the case for reparations would be a little more obvious, but through intermarriage, we’re actively and genetically ameliorating the ramifications of the nation’s original sin of slavery. Aside from carrying a price tag we cannot afford, reparations are a solution to a problem that time, matrimony, and reproduction are already solving. And nothing else would make slave owners obsessed with racial purity more livid.