I Deserve Reparations, Too

All of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors. 

― Damon Knight

The current unrest has sparked renewed talk of cash reparations to slaves' descendants.

Gallup, not surprisingly, reports that, while three of four Black Americans support cash reparations, two of three White Americans do not.

I'm one of the minority of White Americans who support cash reparations―with a proviso. It goes as follows: Should the federal government award cash reparations to slaves' descendants, it must also award them to wage-slaves' descendants.

Of course, Americans descended from immigrants who arrived on these shores after 1940―when wage-slavery ended―will object; and so will descendants of builders, bankers, farmers, merchants and industrialists.

Tough rocks.

I justify my the proviso as follows:

• Activists favoring cash reparations grant special status to slaves, as opposed to wage-slaves; but history shows that any differences between the two kinds of servitude were trivial. History in fact shows that wage-slaves suffered privations, injustices and outrages just as heinous as those inflicted on slaves.
  
  
• Cash reparations, activists say, are meant to redress slavery, not race; so in fairness they should be paid to all descendants of slaves―including wage-slaves―regardless of race.

At this point, the activist would cry, Wait, cash reparations aren't meant to redress slavery so much as present-day inequities that can be traced to trauma―400 years of it. Trauma due to slavery and trauma due to injustice (segregation, discrimination, redlining, lynching, police brutality, etc.).

If that's the activist's argument―and it is―then cash reparations aren't meant to compensate only for slavery, but for systemic racism. But if that's true, doesn't every Black American deserve cash reparations, even one, say, fresh off the boat from Cameroon? To deny that individual payments is in effect to say, "cash reparations are only for slaves' descendants; no other Blacks need apply."

Which loops us back to the simpler claim, that cash reparations are meant to redress an historical event, slavery. And I would insist we add wage-slavery.

So who were these 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century wage-slaves I mention? 

Largely my forebears, the Irish.

Irishmen, working for slave-wages, built America's infrastructure. We owe their descendants cash reparations.

It's as clear as day, as these three examples will tell you:

• From 1828 to 1850, Irishmen dug the C&O Canal, a 200-mile waterway between Washington, DC, and Cumberland, Maryland. Equipped with nothing more than shovels and picks, they spent 15 hours a day moving dirt, while mired waist-deep in cold, muddy water. Hunger, disease, maiming and death shadowed them, and employers routinely shorted their wages―or paid none at all.
  
  
• From 1850 to 1856, Irishmen laid the 700-mile Illinois Central Railroad. They dug out the roadbed, built up the ballast, put down the cross-ties, and laid, bolted and spiked the iron rails―every mile of the way―by hand. If injury or cholera didn't kill them, the same men continued for 30 more years to lay track through the adjoining states of Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado.

• From 1919 to 1927, Irishmen dug the Holland Tunnel, the one an a half-mile underwater tube connecting New York and Jersey City. Thousands of them cut rock for long hours in dark, pressurized chambers built on the bed of the Hudson River. Over 500 men got the bends and 13 perished from overwork, one of my ancestors among them.

If, as activists claim, America's wealth was built on the backs of Black slaves, its infrastructure was built on the backs of the Irish.

I rest my case―and eagerly await my first check.

Postscript: If your forebears were German, Swedish, Polish, Italian or Chinese laborers here in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, you deserve cash reparations as well. But you'll have to stand in line behind me.