On Black Pain and White Indifference

This semester, I’m teaching a seminar on “Historical Justice in America.” We deal with America’s past, with histories of race and racism, and with the suffering and deprivations that stem from these aspects of the past. It is a course about large-scale and long-lived violations of human rights and the prospects and possibilities for enacting justice in their wake. 

One of the things we will look at are the public polling data on race in America and on reparations for slavery. For example, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst polled 1,051 Americans in January 2023 to gauge their attitudes on questions related to race, racial (in)equality, and historical (in)justice. Their findings were revealing, even if a single poll can never be fully relied upon to produce a comprehensive picture of complex social attitudes.

Among whites, support for reparations proved quite low. Seventy-two percent of white respondents opposed monetary reparations. Of course, this begs the question: WHY? Why are so many whites convinced that African-American descendants should not receive compensation for the injustices of slavery and its enduring impacts?

Maybe whites don’t understand how bad slavery was, or they can’t see how African-Americans today are affected by its legacies? Maybe whites–nearly three-quarters of them, anyway–don’t sense or understand what disadvantages black Americans contend with as a result of slavery and racism, or they don’t appreciate what advantages have accrued to whites as a consequence of slavery? Maybe they don’t know the facts on America’s racial wealth gap, or maybe they fail to understand the role that race plays in the current distribution(s) of wealth? Or maybe they’ve heard these arguments and found them unpersuasive?

Digging into the polling data suggests some possible answers.

Nearly half of white respondents (48%) accept that whites in the U.S. enjoy certain advantages over others (i.e., non-whites) based on the color of their skin. So there is substantial, though far from universal, understanding of the enduring effects and impacts of racism and racial inequality. Despite this, only slightly more than one-quarter of white Americans (28%) support reparations. Put differently, a broad swath of the white population accepts the fact of racial inequality, but only a fraction of respondents believe that the U.S. ought to enact a program of monetary repair to address this.

So it isn’t ignorance regarding racial inequality, and it isn’t denial or unwillingness to accept the fact of such inequality once presented. The low support for reparations points to something more akin to INDIFFERENCE. What the data suggest is that white Americans can see the damage slavery has wrought, they know that African-American citizenship is diminished in comparison to their own, but they don’t see the necessity of a program which would seek to repair or mitigate the injustice.

Do they simply not care? Or do they care to a degree, but also harbor doubts about the realistic prospects for repair?

Among whites who oppose reparations, the most common explanation given is the view that African-Americans alive today are “not deserving” of compensation (32%). A sizable proportion (25%) say that it is impossible to calculate what appropriate compensation would entail, and perhaps they reject reparations on that basis. Not finding any neatly printed ledger (Did they really look?), these individuals seem to have concluded that no debt exists. [Note: This has not prevented economists William Darity and Andrea Kristen Mullen from calculating and publishing “The Cumulative Costs for Racism and the Bill for Black Reparations.”]

Among whites opposed to reparations, a nearly equal number (23%) stated that treatment of whites and blacks is equal today, though it should be remembered that more than double this number (48%) acknowledge a discrepancy in the way these groups are treated.

For this group, i.e., whites who admit inequality on the basis of race, there would seem to be an absence of any distress or unease around the issue. Clearly there is no sense of personal or collective responsibility. Racial inequality is a fact they accept but do not wish to change, or at least they can’t imagine how the payment of reparations might contribute to any positive transformation. What we see, then, is intellectual disinterest and emotional disinvestment. For these whites, the deprivations that African-Americans have been subject to as a consequence of historical injustice and racial inequalities do not register as a moral or civic debt. Whatever pain, suffering, or diminishment slavery and racism have visited on African-Americans, the majority of American whites see this as something the former will have to live with.

Black pain. White Indifference. America in the twenty-first century. That’s what the polling data suggest.