NYs reparations push denies complicated history too complex to be reduced to a check

The New York City Council has joined its San Francisco counterpart in proposing potential financial reparations for the descendants of enslaved Americans.The year-long, $1.5 million task force would consider “the impact of slavery and past injustices for African Americans in New York city and reparations for such injustices.” A similar commission to study the possibility has already been established for the state as a whole, by Gov.

Hochul. The Council is not wrong to bring attention to the fact that slavery was a fact of life in the city from the colonial period until its abolition here in 1827.But the prospect of financial reparations for descendants raises the possibility of a new injustice. It would do so by imposing costs on taxpayers as a whole — including both descendants of those who came to the city long after the end of slavery but even those resident during the slavery era, the vast majority of whom, historic records show, did not own slaves even when slavery was legal.We can learn a great deal about the extent of New York slavery thanks to the fact that the federal Census takers recorded not only the number of “free white males and females” but that of slaves in every household.  In 1800, the city’s population of 59,000 included 2,800 slaves (Brooklyn, then not formally part of New York City, however, had a far larger percentage of enslaved residents).It’s important to note, though, that even at its peak, a relatively small minority of households owned slaves.

Census records for one of the city’s most populous neighborhoods in 1800 — lower Manhattan — show that, although 417 of 4320 residents were slaves, 76% of households did not include any slaves.In Flushing — then an agricultural area in which most farms were small but larger ones were worked by slave labor — 12% of the population was enslaved but 72 percent of households had no slave.To be clear, there’s no doubt that large city households and farms could prosper by n...