Comment by Martin A. Klein

Human beings have done nothing that has caused so much death and misery as the export slave trade from Africa. Other events, most importantly the Holocaust, arouse feelings of horror and outrage, but the slave trade took place over a longer period of time and caused more death. People died resisting the slavers, they died while being marched to market and on board the ships that took them to their destinations. The number that died was much greater than the number that died in the Holocaust. Those who survived went through experiences as traumatic as those suffered by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and at the end, they and most of their offspring were forced to live in the harsh conditions of slavery. Both the slave trade and the Holocaust were events of incomparable inhumanity. When I talk about the slave trade, I am talking not only about the Atlantic trade, but about the Saharan and Indian Ocean trades as well.

The question then is why not reparations. I think the analysis made by Howard-Hassmann and Lombardo is essentially sound. Both the victims and the perpetrators are long dead. Furthermore, the institutions that profited—states, banks, insurance companies, for example—have gone through so many transformations that we end up with a series of insoluble questions: who gives reparations, whom do they give them to, and what form do they take? These questions are well analyzed in the article.

I am not sympathetic with what the authors call the second wave, but then, I do not believe in inherited wealth. The second wave of Jewish reparations has focused on the rights of property. For me, those are much less important than the suffering and exploitation that different groups of victims have gone through. The question of the compensation for African soldiers who served the French is a totally different question. They are not seeking reparations, but rather a just compensation for their service. The problem of reparations is compounded by the fact that some African Americans have done well, particularly since the collapse of the formal structure of segregation in the 1960s, and similarly, some Africans have done well, particularly since the end of colonial rule. Should they pay as people who in some ways have benefited from the growth and development to which the slave trade contributed, or should they receive as people who had to surmount the barriers posed by racism or colonialism?

There is, of course, the larger problem of racism. I would argue that anti-Semitism and other forms of racism often have a double effect. Jews, Armenians, and Chinese in minority diaspora communities grow up with a sense that they are living in a hostile world. They have a strong belief in their worth, but are convinced they have to work harder than others. Their communities face intermittent pogroms and massacres, but they are generally able to pick themselves up and reconstruct their prosperity. For Africans, both those in Africa and their descendants in the diaspora, racism cut deeper. For those in slavery, only a infinitesimal number were able to do well. Slavery operated, particularly in the Americas, as an almost total barrier to self-improvement. For those in Africa, colonialism locked Africans into relationships that were politically and economically exploitative. There was somewhat more room for self-improvement, but the ceiling was very low. Both communities have been restrained by a racism that is in many ways a product of the slave trade. In the United States, that racism underwrote a century-long reign of terror in the Deep South and forms of discrimination that were so pervasive elsewhere that they severely restricted the ability of one of the oldest communities in the nation to collect on opportunities that other immigrant communities managed to benefit from.

Introducing racism and its multiple effects into the equation complicates the problem, but can also lead us to recast the question of reparations. Both Africans and their descendants in the diaspora have suffered centuries of injustice and exploitation. Those centuries have left their impact. Readers of this journal know well the problems of both the mass...