London-based Economist magazine exposes its consistent misreading of race issues in America

The London-based Economist magazine has often acted as a conservative Anglo-American establishment mouthpiece. Its recent leader, “How not to repair America”, in the June 10 edition, and the accompanying main article, “The tide goes out”, on the reparations debate in the US, exposes its consistent misreading of race issues in America.

The magazine caricatures this important issue, making lazy arguments that are often put forward by conservatives: reparations are unpopular and backed by only 30% of Americans; most living whites played no part in Jim Crow segregation and so cannot be held responsible; black Americans are not the only disadvantaged group in America; resources are finite and should go towards better schools and health for all.

The New York Times, on the other hand, nuanced the number of Americans opposed to reparations by citing disaggregated figures from the same Pew Research Centre survey: 77% of African American adults support reparations, as do 39% of Hispanics, 33% of Asians but only 18% of whites. Unsurprisingly, the main beneficiaries of slavery are the most opposed to its redress, while the main victims of this crime against humanity are the most supportive.

Explaining complicated historical issues to voters requires strong and courageous leadership. Many Americans tend to think differently once this issue has been sensibly explained as a structural one in which the country benefited from 400 years of unpaid labour, which facilitated America’s industrialisation, using 450,000 enslaved Africans who only won their basic voting rights in the 1960s. The Economist itself notes that the median net worth of black families in 2019 was 13% of that of white families.

In terms of the Economist’s argument that African Americans are not the only group discriminated against; in 1946 the US government paid $1.3bn in reparations to indigenous Americans for the dispossession of their land, while Japanese Americans incarcerated in concentration camps during World War 2 were compensated through a $1.2m payment.

The Economist’s argument that no living whites are responsible for slavery ignores the structural issues of those who continue to benefit from four centuries of free labour, in stark contrast to those who continue to suffer from it. Washington also continues to spend more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, a clear sign of the distortion of its socioeconomic priorities. America can thus surely afford reparations.

The Economist then cites the case of a commission in California that recently recommended reparations for descendants of American slavery, as an example of how not to repair America. The commission recommended paying reparations per African American of about $1.2m, with a potential total bill of $800bn. While opposing this, the Economist itself cited 2016 figures showing that black Angelenos had 1% of the wealth of their white compatriots in Los Angeles.

The magazine then suggests that the sum of the proposed reparations would cripple the state’s finances. However, its own British government had paid the country’s slave owners £20m (equivalent to £17bn in 2016) for the loss of their “property” after Westminster abolished slavery in 1833. This sum was fully paid out just eight years ago.

If the British government could take out a loan worth 40% of its Treasury’s annual income and 5% of its GDP at the time, to pay 46,000 slave owners and their descendants over a 182-year period, why can the government of California not have the ingenuity to devise a similar long-term compensation scheme for a more just cause? 

The Economist tends to view race relations in America through the jaundiced lens of its own British society, which is often in denial about widespread prejudices against black and brown people despite clear evidence of institutional racism in its policing, public health and, more recently, its cricket. A magazine living in a London glasshouse is clearly throwing stones.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.

This article first appeared in The Business Day on 3 July 2023.