How Is Slavery An Ethical Issue

Slavery has been around since the early years of mankind. Even before the 1400’s forms of slavery were in existence. Every major empire has had some form of slavery or indentured servitude. From the Mayans, Spaniards, Romans, Chinese, to Africans boarding slave ships to America, the morality of slavery had not been put under the moral scope of humanity until the last hundred years. The African slaves were seen as subhuman and lower than dirt. Rudyard Kipling first wrote about the white man’s burden then others put their own meaning behind it. They thought it was their “burden” to bring “light” to all the dark places in the world.(Kipling) In legal terms, there was no foundation for compensating the descendants of slaves for the crime against their ancestors when, “no crime was committed”. For at the time, most white men thought that they were doing a moral thing since there were no laws prohibiting slavery and the fact that the African American community had no political power, or even a platform to speak out on. Many claim that since slavery was legal in U.S. history, reparations aren’t due to the black community;
however, the entirety of the black community struggles every day due to the implications of slavery, not just those involved with slavery, and the United States Federal Government needs to step in and provide as much aid as possible.
Economic Implications of Slavery
Simply put, the United States of America’s economy and rise to dominance was built off of slavery.
The profitable crops of the South including tobacco and cotton were built into the mega corporations which we see today, including the American Tobacco Company and U.S. Cotton(Abagond), and were originally built off the backs of the hard working slaves. According to researcher, Thomas Craemer, from the University of Connecticut, the amount of money that U.S. slave labor made through roughly working “12 hours a day, 7 days a week” would be around $5.9 trillion dollars today(Ehrenfreund), which doesn’t include the hardships black individuals faced after the abolishment of slavery. The money that America made through slavery was never repaid. The government at least needs to make strides in apologizing and beginning to explore how reparations could work
out.
Records regarding slavery are hazy and most slave owners didn’t keep their books up to date or even had them erased, so tracing lineage would be almost impossible this way. This argument against reparations doesn’t matter. People don’t trace back individual black people’s lineage and come up with a system to only discriminate those with slavery in their ancestry. Instead, they discriminate against the entirety of the black population. In David Frum’s Atlantic article titled “The Impossibility of Reparations” he argues against the call for reparations. Although he uses clever phrases almost every one of his arguments has holes in it. For example, he states that if the U.S. government traced back White individuals lineage far back enough and found record or slave owning and the U.S. government send out a “massive bill to the descendents of every slaveholder and slumlord who did business from 1619 through 1968” and if that happened the money wouldn't change the “unhealthy dietary patterns, or enhance language skills, or teach the habits on which thriving communications are built.” Which first off is a massive assumption to assume the black community lacks in all those areas, but secondly the call for the investigation of reparations never said that automatically the government would be handing out money. The funding(if the government was smart enough) would be going back into the communities, and not just to individual people in hopes of investing in the future of said communities. So when people say that you can’t trace a lineage that far back, it's true, but irrelevant. The argument doesn't matter because the entire black community is being affected from the U.S.’s ties to slavery, and all should be compensated equally for their decades of unequal opportunities
Black communities in the 1940’s through the 1960’s were cheated out of fair housing prices. According to local resident Clyde Ross, who had been living in Chicago’s North Lawndale district since 1961, in highly populated black communities such as his own, black individuals “bought” houses for an estimated $10,000 extra dollars(Manning) on top of an already expensive price. This happened despite the fact that they weren't really homeowners because they made payments to the seller, not the bank(Coates).With the Federal Housing Act of 1934, the government helped out with payments on houses, but it was based on a racist system. They ranked each neighborhood based on their “perceived stability” and almost all black neighborhoods weren’t even eligible for the insurance. In addition to the unfair prices, the sellers could evict them without a 30 days notice if they missed even a single payment(Coates). Once the seller evicted them they brought a new black family into the house and restarted the vicious cycle. Communities just like North Lawndale suffered from inflated prices and peddled contracts. 85% of North Lawndale houses were bought on contract meaning that only 15 percent of the black individuals attempting to buy homes were getting a fair price.(Coates) The sellers took advantage of the black communities, and there was next to nothing they could do to stop it. The unequal mortgage rates and outrageous evictions against the black communities in these areas are just a few examples of why the black community deserves reparations. For decades these sellers took advantage of low income African-Americans. Slavery took its toll in many forms; According to Catherine W. Zipf, PhD, an award winning architectural historian, “the impact of slavery on architectural and urban design, development, and livelihood during the twentieth century is undeniable”(Zipf). After slavery was abolished, the attitudes towards black individuals stayed about the same. They weren’t equal on any social, political, or economic levels, so many white people thought it would be fine in a moral sense to treat them as subordinates since they still couldn’t do anything about it. This attitude carried right over into the 21’st century. White privilege shows how white individuals can get away with so much more than a black individual just because of their skin color. This was prompted by the buildup of decades of racial discrimination. The fact is, white and black individuals are treated differently. The white community received help on mortgages and insurance during the housing acts, while the black community collectively lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they deserve reparations to help them gain something after decades of unequal treatment.