Reperations Cannot Mend Human Injustices

To commit human injustice is to violate or suppress one’s unalienable rights and fundamental freedoms. Unfortunately, there are many instances of injustice that can be tied to past policies either overlooked or consciously acknowledged by active governments. These government-enabled human rights violations include, but are not limited to, genocide, slavery, arbitrary detention, and systematic discrimination. Violations such as these can cause serious damage to the physical and moral integrity of individuals and to the very existence of past-wronged groups of people¬¬. A society that once tolerated human rights abuses must come to terms with the past, accept responsibility, and try to make amends. However, when looking at the overly complex algorithm of determining how the funds of reparations are to be collected and distributed, along with its possible repercussions, one can see financial remedy is an insufficient compensation for committing human injustice.

It is easy to claim that a group was wronged and deserves compensation from the perpetrating party, nevertheless who is to recompense if there is no one who participated directly or indirectly in the misdeed? A highly controversial discussion of this topic surrounds the debate of whether or not African Americans should be paid reparation for slavery in America. Though slavery was widespread in the southern United States, slave ownership was not. It is estimated that less than 10 percent of whites owned slaves . The vast majority had neither the financial nor agricultural means to warrant slave labor. Slave ownership was restricted to a highly concentrated group of the landed aristocracy of wealthy southern elites. Today we live in a country with a population of 319 million people . As a result of immigration, it is safe to argue that the vast majority of white people in the United States are descendants from post-Civil War immigrants who had nothing to do with slavery . Many ethnic groups that arrived on American shores in the early twentieth century, such as the Irish, European Jews, and Chinese, were subject to severe discrimination. That being said, with every passing generation, those ethnic groups developed the occupational skills, knowledge, and cultural norms necessary to fully assimilate and rise to higher socioeconomic levels within American culture. Why then, should the descendants of these groups or first-generation Americans, be financially liable to blacks as a group? In the American legal system, damages hinge on the principle of cause and effect — one pays for the damage one causes. In the case of slavery, there is no culpable person alive to pay for the crime.

If John Smith gets drunk, runs a stop light, and hits the car of Jane Doe, it is clear as day the perpetrator is John Smith and the injured party is Jane Doe. One can assess damage done to the vehicle, injuries inflicted on Jane Doe, and estimated costs she would have to bear due to the accident in order to determine the settlement value. How would that formula translate into paying reparations for injustices? Following World War II, Germany was forced to pay reparations to the Allied Governments, along with Holocaust survivors for crimes committed by the Nazi Party. Those reparations came about in the form of the