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Two wrongs don't make a right. Trite, yes. True, nonetheless.

There probably exists somewhere some mouth-frothing crazy-eyed person with a series of twisted justifications for the historical existence of slavery, but let's just go out on a limb here and take it as a given that slavery is wrong. It is usually a good idea to make sure everyone is on the same page when you discuss emotionally charged issues, so in the spirit of understanding, slavery exists not only when one human asserts that they own the person and the labor of another person, but society supports the slave owner. Other exploitive relationships like feudalism or serfdom may have looked very like slavery, but only slavery actually grants socially-supported property rights to other human beings.

The two examples of slavery that tend to generate discussion of reparations are the slave-holding societies of North America prior to the Civil War, and more recently, the slave labor of Jews (and other "undesirables") under the Nazi domination of Europe.

There are two basic theories behind the notion of reparations. The first theory, and the most difficult to deal with for anyone with a hint of conscience, is that slavery is such a basic violation of human rights and dignity that we MUST make a clear and tangible effort to express our repugnance. For the African victims of the slave trade who were shipped to lives of unpredictable but alien drudgery in the North American colonies, slavery was the total destruction of everything they had ever known. Their languages, cultures and ways of life were utterly obliterated, and they were required to conform to a single European notion of how a slave should behave.

Slavery perverts the slave holder and the society in which it exists. A slave holder held the power of life and death. A slave holder could interfere with the lives of his victims in ways which are essentially inhuman: refusing the right to marry, separating loved ones from each other, and most horrifying, OWNING the children of their slaves. Any one of us can imagine how it would feel for someone to have that power over us. Even at its worst, slavery in North America did tend to conform to certain conventions. The worst abuses of slavery were frowned on. Killing a slave was not just destruction of valuable property, it was considered . . . distasteful in and of itself. Distasteful. And so even though wives did not EXPECT that their husbands would be killed out of hand, or their children sold away . . .

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