Calculating Reparations: $1.5 Million for Each Slave Descendant in the U.S
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by Denis Rancourt
For some descendants of persons held in U.S. chattel bondage, no monetary sum can compensate for the enslavement of their ancestors. However, for those looking for a number, there are various ways to calculate the value of involuntary servitude. Here’s one of them.
Calculating Reparations: $1.5 Million for Each Slave Descendant in the U.S.
by Denis Rancourt
This article previously appeared on Mr. Rancourt’s web site, Activist Teacher.
“This calculation includes only the money due to ancestors and their descendants, in terms of the stolen actual labor counted in person-hours.”
It is not difficult to calculate a MINIMUM amount of monetary reparation due to every single Black slave descendant living today in the USA.
If we leave out the reparations for physical violence, genocidal stress, inadmissibility to superior social classes, etc., and only take into account the stolen labor, at the today's equivalent minimum wage, then the calculation for the minimum amount due to the descendants of slaves is a simple one, as follows.
This calculation includes only the money due to ancestors and their descendants, in terms of the stolen actual labor counted in person-hours, based on a minimal economic value of that labor, adjusted at a lowest reasonable rate of interest.
Every step in the following calculation will use the lowest possible evaluators, such as to produce a MINIMUM amount due.
In the 70 year period between 1790 and 1860, there were, on average, 2 million slaves at any time in the USA. In the same period the average US population was 14 million.
Moving forward to 2000, the US population was 309 million, with 40 million slave descendants.
“We adopt the underestimate of 2% for the interest rate to be applied to the stolen income value.”
To obtain a minimal (under estimated) annual interest rate, we use the population increase from 14 million to 309 million in the 140 years from 1860 to 2000. This gives a population annually growth rate of 2.2%.
Now capital value increase interest rates in the US have been much greater that the population growth rate. Nonetheless, we adopt the underestimate of 2% for the interest rate to be applied to the stolen income value. We further apply the interest rate starting only in 1860, rather than earlier, thereby making our estimate even more of an under estimate.
The value of the stolen labor, for the period 1790 to 1860, at today's US minimum wage of $7.24 per hour is as follows. (Note that using today's minimum wage automatically corrects for valuing the historic currency to its present value.)
70 years (1790 to 1860 period only)
X
2 million slaves (average number in the period used)
X
365 days per year (OK, maybe I should exclude one day off per week?)
X
10 hours of work per day (again a minimum)
X
$7.25 per hour
=
$ 3.7 trillion
Next, I apply the 2% interest rate (compounded annually). This gives a multiplicative factor of (1.02)^140 = 16, for the 140 years from 1860 to 2000. Further compounding could be applied to bring us to the present. (Again, this is a minimum estimate.)
Compounding to 2000, therefore, gives:
$ 3.7 trillion
X
(1.02)^140 (or 16, if you prefer)
=
$ 59.2 trillion
The latter one-time payment would be easy for the USA to make, since its annual GDP is $15 trillion. (Think of a wealthy person's annual salary relative to buying a house in a safe neighbourhood.) The USA would not even need to sell any assets to achieve this modest payment.
For the 40 million Black slave descendants in the US today, the calculated reparation means that US white society owes each and every Black slave descendant a MINIMUM payment of $ 1.5 million, which is long overdue.
“The USA would not even need to sell any assets to achieve this modest payment.”
After the minimum payment is made, it would be appropriate to calculate and pay the addition reparations that are due.
My goal here was to show that these calculations are simple and unambiguous. Understanding the calculated minimum allows one to move forward from that established basis, towards a more realistic reparation number. At the very least, each Black slave descendant can legitimately demand $ 1.5 million payable immediately.
An obvious question that arises from this straightforward calculation is: Why are Black leaders not demanding reparation, as a priority demand?
Denis Rancourt is a former physics professor at the University of Ottawa, and is the author of the book "Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism." More essays by this author are HERE.
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You have raised an important
You have raised an important issue..Thanks for sharing..I would like to read more current affairs from this blog..keep posting.. Fre Stuff Online
No more "lesser evil" for me.
No more "lesser evil" for me. Was thinking today of how little we have known about candidates before the election cycles - except Obama, who was well covered on BAR. (I admit to having voted for Obama.in the general election, having voted for Kucinich in the 2008 Dem Primary.) There are no heroes, just some teachers and regular folks organizing all year round for change (sometimes overlap in both groups)...Yes, my job as old person is to state the obvious.
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"Legal Slavery" A Small Portion Of Debt
Reparations for "Legal Slavery" is a small portion of the debt owed to the descendants of stolen Africans. A full discussion of America's debt to its citizens of African descent would include:
Payments to rectify the illegal Banishment of African American families from their legal land holdings. According to the notes for the movie Banished :
"Between 1860 and 1920 hundreds of U.S. counties expelled their black residents. The pattern was depressingly similar in almost all cases. The counties tended to have small, defenseless black populations. A black man was rumored to have assaulted a white woman, was lynched and then white rioters attacked black neighborhoods with guns and firebombs. Few black property owners had time to sell their properties nor dared return to repossess them. Whites could then illegally assume ownership of them. African Americans not only lost their hard-won homes, farms and businesses, but saw their communities and families dispersed and their very right to exist violated. "
PBS goes more in depth here .
Wrongful Death awards for murder: whether by lynchings attended by hundreds of Euro-Americans in 1920 or the shooting of Oscar Grant on New Years Day 2009 by BART police, the result is the same --- cold blooded murder.
Restitution for false imprisonment: from former African American slaves snared by racist Vagrancy Laws in the Post Reconstruction South to the millions of African Americans trapped by current Drug laws that are only enforced in Black neighborhoods.
Compensation for generations African Americans cheated through the systematic underfunding of education: including the abuses of charter schools and privatization schemes.
Restitution for Eminent Domain Abuse: in countless cities and towns across the US, from Freeway Mania in the 1950's to the 1970's to todays thefts for corporate campuses.
Redress for centuries of outrageous lies, libel and slander: against African descent people to cover European crime and perfidy including contemporary hit jobs like The Bell Curve .
Rebates for US government programs: that benefited Euro-Americans during the 20th Century and systematically excluded African American taxpayers, such as the GI Bill, VA and FHA loans and the first 30 years of Social Security.
Full right of return and restoration: of lost homes and other assets for the African American survivors of Katrina.
Full recompense for all African Americans cheated out of their homes over the past decade: through predatory loans, asset stripping, robo signing, and other fraudfests by bankers, mortgage companies and title companies.
The notes to the film, Banished, sums up Euro-American attitudes that prevent true and full reparations:
"While African Americans seem compelled to remember, confront and redress the crimes of racism, many whites want to ignore them, not only to reject any responsibility for them but, more importantly, any responsibility for rectifying them. They do not seem to recognize that a free conscience can begin only with remorse. The theft of property, wealth, community and hope must at least be admitted and repaired to whatever extent practical. Racial cleansing is still rampant in the U.S., it just takes more subtle forms: red-lining, redevelopment, gentrification, gated communities, all-white suburbs, the Katrina Diaspora."
The author of this article is a racist
Don't be fooled by this guy. He is a racist (which is redundant because he is a white Euro-peon) Hey Mr. "I did some really smart calculations in five minutes to solve the problem of reparations", we don't need you to chastise our mis-leaders, we are doing that just fine. I am so tired of these wannabe bullsh*t professors and Euro-Canadian so-called anti-racists. They make me want to puke.
Hey, Mr. "I'm gonna end white supremacy with math", Look for some other natives to save. White "anti-racists" think they are the new saviors of Black people and if you challenge them, they can't stand any critique of their lily-white "I'm a good guy" bullsh*t propaganda.
Troll Alert...Troll Alert....
...that is all..
Jews owe most of money
Jewish people ran the slave trade, not Gentile whites. Also some whites were slaves before blacks arrived so those descendants should be compensated as well. Jewish people now own and run the Federal Reserve and most banks so they are in a position to pay this money but they won't. They are the ones in Congress who keep shooting it down while they continue to rake in reparations for a Holocaust that didn't even happen the way they initially said it did. 70% of American slaves were owned by Jews on massive plantations and they also treated their slaves especially cruel. White slaveowners generally treated their slaves fairly and with some measure of dignity. You have to understand who writes the history books because they almost always lie. They are the same people who control the media and force these lies into our heads via public education.
Really?
"White slaveowners generally treated their slaves fairly and with some measure of dignity."
Really? Isn't the essence of slavery confinement, unfairness and degradation? Anyone who thinks they "own" another person or persons will not treat them fairly. Nfamous, can you back up this assertion with any fact based historical records or articles?
"Jewish people ran the slave trade, not Gentile whites. "
Really? Nfamous, can you back up this assertion with any fact based records or articles? To my knowledge, the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade was dominated by the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British. In Spain, Portugal, and Britain the number and influence of Jews was negligible since those three countries had run their Jewish populations out centuries before the slave trade began.
"70% of American slaves were owned by Jews on massive plantations and they also treated their slaves especially cruel."
Really? Nfamous, can you back up this assertion with any fact based records or articles? Nearly all African American descendants of enslaved Africans have last names that originated with the Europeans that "owned" their ancestors: names like Jones, Jackson, Williams, McFarlane, DuBois, Sanchez and Washington. Those are all fairly common English, Scotch-Irish, French, Spanish and ---Christian surnames.
Should European Christian criminals be given a free pass so their Jewish cousins can be blamed for this atrocity against Africans? Really?
Wasn't Johnnie Cochran working on reparations..
before he died? Perhaps that is why no one else has stepped up to the plate? That mysterious & apparently contagious cancer seems to be making it's rounds in certain leftist circles..Hmmm...most curious..ft. detrick must be really busy.