Month: May 2002

I heard an NPR article this morning about insurance companies in California which, as required by law, have released whatever documentation they have about how their companies were involved in slavery in the 19th Century and earlier. California was not a slave state, but the foul practice touched even there.

What irked me (yes, this is going to be another “irked” post, as so many in this Category are) was that this was being portrayed as still more ammunition to be used in the growing reparations movement, which seeks to derive from any companies any of the profits that they (or, in 99% of the cases, their corpororate predecessors, acquisitions, or merger partners) made from slavery during the dark years when it was legal in this country.

I’ve ranted on this one before, and since I was kind of rantful yesterday, I won’t belabor this. But a few items of note.

The records released had to do with life insurance policies taken out by slave owners on their slaves. This is being seen as a particularly heinous crime (cynically, I might observe that it is simply a well-documented instance of the slave trade, since insurance companies are notorious about keeping paperwork for eons), since it is supposed to represent how the suffering and death of slaves profited the slave holders and, of course, insurance companies.

(Insurance companies did not, of course, profit from slave deaths, nor even from their suffering. Indeed, they lost money when slaves died. The only made money by charging enough in premiums for those who lived to make up that difference. I can imagine insurance companies raising rates for particularly brutal slave holders, just as they might on car owners who have records of lots of accidents. But that just muddies the issue, doesn’t it?)

The problem here is not only that the practice was legal at the time, but that it effectively goes on today. Not slavery, but companies insuring their workers without the workers knowing about it or benefiting from the policies.

So what, then, were the crimes these insurance companies are liable to pay for? Doing something that is currently still legal and accepted for people who were doing something legal.

Bite my tongue for uttering these words, but, in this case at least, I really don’t see how the insurance companies did anything wrong.

And if what they did was actionable in court, then there isn’t a business in America that didn’t have at least as much involvement in the slave trade. Slavery was part of life. When will the tool manufacturers, the shipyards, the road builders, the guys who forged the chains or made the guns that were used to guard slaves, when will those groups be sued.

And all those people, and all those institutions, and all those companies, all paid taxes.

As I’ve said before, this country was built on slavery. It permeated our institutions and our society. If we’re going to get into the reparations game, it’s society as a whole that should be paying (never mind that it will, indirectly and unevenly, if individual corporations are forced to pay out on these suits).

Next, in an unexpected twist, some of the records released related to Chinese laborers who were shipped from China to Panama, and thence to California, where, as indentured labor, they helped build the railroad system (and other body-breaking work) in the state and beyond. “Coolies,” they were called.

Indentured labor is basically self-slavery with time limits. In most cases, it was a matter of “You provide me passage from A to B, and I’ll be your slave until X.” There were variations on the theme, but that was basically it.

The ongoing debate that’s arisen over these records is — are the descendents of Coolie laborers entitled to compensation? From the state, the railroads, the railroads’ passengers, or, for that matter, the insurance companies?

How wide do we open up this cash cow?

For that matter, indentured servitude was a common practice in the 18th Century and earlier, back east. Many white people came to the States as indentured servants, subject to treatment and abuse just as bad (and just as legal) as slaves. Do they get a slice of this pie?

When, might I add, will women get to sue insurance companies for unequal treatment in policies? When will Jews as a class get to sue companies that discriminated against hiring or promoting them? Ditto for other groups that are today protected from discrimination (and rightfully so, I’ll add)? When will the Okies file a class action suit against California agri-business interests for how migrant workers were treated in the 20s?

Go and tour Europe — be it Britain or Italy or Greece. Tour Asia. Visit the Great Wall. Tour Egypt, and look at the Pyramids.

When will the descendents of the slaves, indentured servants, or serfs that built those monuments, those roads, those castles and forts and walls and other public works, when will they get to file suit. And against whom?

I’ll add one more bit, and then drop this for the nonce. One of the pro-reparations folks who was touting the release of these records noted that this would somehow put lie to the idea that we’re in a color-blind society. “We’re not.”

And how, exactly, is suing insurance companies for what was done in the 19th Century (and earlier) going to promote such an ideal? Or is that even the goal any more.

We have certainly not yet reached the target of a society where men are judged, “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” and more’s the pity. But we’ve made strides that, half a century ago, would not only have been inconceivable, but which, had they been conceived, would have been roundly denounced by the majority. Race — and ethnic, and religious, and gender, and etc. — bias still exists in this country. But we’ve made tremendous strides toward legally, as well as socially, pushing it out to the margins, to making it unacceptable.

It’s not clear at all to me that the reparations movement does anything to further that cause.

It’s not clear at all to me that those behind the reparations movement are even all that interested in that cause any more.

And that, friends, is a real crime.