Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations

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Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans

Linda J. Bilmes, Cornell William Brooks
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences June 2024

Abstract
Paying reparations to Black Americans has long been contentiously debated. This article addresses an unexamined pillar of this debate: the United States has a long-standing social norm that if an individual or community has suffered a harm, it is considered right for the federal government to provide some measure of what we term “reparatory compensation.” In discussing this norm and its implications for Black American reparations, we first describe the scale, categories, and interlocking and compounding effects of discriminatory harms by introducing a taxonomy of illustrative racial harms from slavery to the present. We then reveal how the social norm, precedent, and federal programs operate to provide victims with reparatory compensation, reviewing federal programs that offer compensation, such as environmental disasters, market failures, and vaccine injuries. We conclude that the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans.

SNIP
The article examines the harms through the lens of a novel framework: in the context of the federal government’s policy norm of providing what the authors term reparatory compensation to many segments of the population, for varied harms, throughout U.S. history. These compensation mechanisms demonstrate that financial restitution for harms to victims is a widely accepted, utilized, and institutionalized practice of federal government with centuries of precedent. The article raises a unique question: if reparatory compensation is common for government-recognized harms, why do we not compensate the massive racial harms suffered by Black Americans? What if Americans considered racial harms to Black Americans in the context of the many laws and programs enacted to address other profound harms? What if Americans endeavored to address the racial harms to Black Americans equipped with the same norm, precedent, and fiscal imagination applied to many nonracial harms over so many decades? The existing mechanisms, with their diverse funding streams and variety of ways for compensating harms, can serve as precedent, models, and norms for reparations for racial harms.

Reparations are surprisingly commonplace practices in the federal government’s role of compensating harms. The United States has paid many forms of reparations throughout its history and has implemented hundreds of programs that compensate individuals and their dependents for various harms. Even though the use of the term reparations is not commonly applied to government programs, reparatory compensation or providing financial restitution for recognized harm is quite common.
https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/10/2/30