The Church and Reparations:
A Proposal in Four Parts
Part I:
Maths, Betta Fish, and the Apocalyptic Imagination
In recent years, the topic of reparations has claimed a patch of ground in the public square. The suggestion that justice demands financial restitution for the harms of White Supremacy hasn’t won mainstream acceptance, but it’s not relegated to the lunatic fringe anymore, either. We’re talking about it more. Unfortunately, for the most part, talk hasn’t turned into action. Raising the question of reparations is more likely to produce anxious hand-wringing that any kind of productive response.
It’s impossible to address the topic without some pain and discomfort. Under the right circumstances, pain and discomfort can be productive. The same is not true for anxiety. Anxiety is paralyzing. Personally, I’ve found the best remedy for anxiety is to face pain and discomfort head on, and with mathematical precision.
To that end, let me offer some maths: I believe White Americans and predominantly White American institutions could make plausible and substantive restitution to Black Americans for the economic effects of White Supremacy by paying .6% (six tenths of a percent) of our net worth in reparations each year, every year, for 30 years.
No dollar figure could make fair recompense for 400 years of brutal oppression, but restitution is a good idea. Specific, measurably, goals are a good idea. And White Churches being the ones to go first is a great idea.
I find maths have the power to open the doors of imagination. I often daydream in maths. My wife sometimes catches me scratching a random calculation on the back of an envelope. My talent and education as a mathematician are minimal, so I'm limited to the sorts of problems you can complete with 6th grade arithmetic, algebra and geometry. Things like:
How long it would take you to walk to the moon and back, assuming there was a road to walk on? (38 years, ignoring gravity, and if you took one day off each week.)
How much further away is the horizon from me, than it is from my son, when we both stand at sea level? (About .8 miles, a little less if he stands on his tippy toes.)
How long would it take you to spin a perfect round in Hasbro’s The Game of Life? (About 10 million times the age of the universe, assuming you spin fast, and don’t take bathroom breaks.)
I suppose these are trivial questions. But I’m always surprised by the power of questions, even trivial ones, to shift our perspectives.
For instance, one time we got a pet fish. The whole process excited my son. We named her Betta Rae, after the Mighty Thor’s alien compatriot, Beta Ray Bill.[i] And also after high energy electron radiation. And also because she was a Southern belle. It’s possible my wife and I were also excited about the process.
A couple days after Betta Rae had happily settled into her bowl, our son asked if we could get a another fish. Rae’s tank held just two gallons. You need that much water for each betta fish; the bowl was too small for another fish. We broke the news to him, thinking that would be the end of it. But he gets ideas.
He suggested that we could seal the apartment up with duct tape, and then flood it using the bathtub faucets, making our home into one giant fish tank. “How many fish could we fit in the apartment then?”
I admired his creativity, and his ambition. But I felt obliged to highlight certain logistical hurdles in this plan that he might have overlooked. Suffice to say, he was not entirely persuaded by my arguments. He workshopped every problem that I raised, developing new, and unexpected, solutions. I’ve probably got more common sense than him, but, if I’m honest, he’s a bit smarter than me. The combination makes arguing with him both surreal, and frustrating.
So I put him to bed. To be clear, our debate wasn’t the reason why I put him to bed. It was, in fact, his bedtime. That said, I won’t deny that the timing was convenient for me.
But his question was still rattling around in my brain: “How many fish could we fit in the apartment?”
After cleaning up dinner, I sat down with a bic pen and an old envelope. I remembered hearing the maintenance staff mention once that our apartment was just over 800 square feet. I eyeballed the ceilings as being a bit more than two feet taller than me, about 8 feet, for a volume of 6,400 cubic feet. I had no idea how many gallons are in a cubic foot. I cheated and looked it up on Google. It’s about seven and a half. Sealed in duct tape, and filled to the brim, our apartment could hold about 48,000 gallons. Under my son’s proposal, at two gallons a fish, and ignoring questions of feeding, filtration and aeration, we could house about 24,000 betta fish in our sealed, flooded domicile.
I chose not to share this information with him when he woke up in the morning. As I said, he gets ideas. And he knows where we keep the duct tape.
Still, the results surprised me, given what I perceived as the small size of our apartment. Now, I sometimes find myself imagining a massive school of brightly colored betta fish swarming through the air of our home. It’s given me new appreciation for the space we do have, and the possibilities it contains. That’s the liberating power of maths.
A few weeks ago, while having a more or less casual conversation with a fellow White person the topic of reparations came up. I don’t quite remember how we got there, but my companion made a comment that I have heard, in one form or another, frequently. I’ve thought it myself several times.
“I’m not saying it’s not right. I’m just saying it’s not feasible.”
I’ve never found a satisfactory response to this criticism. But this time, for the first time, the comment sparked a question for me, a mathematical one: “What might reparations look like, measurable terms?”
When I got home, I found a Bic pen, and an old envelope, and began to scribble, with the following result:
White Americans and predominantly White American institutions could make restitution for the economic (and strictly economic) impact of White Supremacy on the Black community by paying .6% of our collective net worth in reparations, each year, every year, for a thirty years.
For the average White American family, this would be an annual commitment of 1.5% of total income, roughly a tithe of tithe. If carried out across the board, by all White Americans, and all our predominantly White institutions, this would yield a total thirty year payment of just over $19 trillion.
I’ll get to the maths in Part Two of this series, at which point you’ll have ample opportunity to tell me everything I got wrong. Let me ask you to suspend judgment as I lay out what are, for me, the implications of these numbers.
Like my son’s vision of an apartment sized fish tank, I find these calculations offer a sense of openness and potential. The maths replaces a seemingly insurmountable problem with a difficult and painful, but achievable project. A friend of mine, Caroline Klam, suggested that a good criteria for reparations is to be: “substantial, doable and a little bit painful.” Six tenths a percent of net worth for thirty years is surprisingly substantial. Though it would definitely pinch, it is also, undeniably, doable.
And, while my son’s dream, for all its wonder, would leave our apartment ruined, underwater and smelling fishy; I suspect honestly wrestling with, and making payment on, the numbers of restitution would leave our collective national family home renewed, solvent and cleansed of a great many deceptions.
As a Christian, and a something of a softy in general, (not that those things necessarily go together,) I admit that my own forlorn hope for the future of this nation is a kind of post-racial utopia: a beloved community held across lines of diversity, where we cherish one another’s differences, labor together for the common good, and ensure all people have what they need to thrive.
In my imagined future, we would have abandoned the fiction of race, while still proudly claiming, knowing and living into our distinct cultures, heritages and histories. On Thursdays we would probably get together to make s’mores around a campfire, while singing Kum Ba Yah (not forgetting to pass around a collection jar for royalties to the Gullah community that wrote it.) It’s that kind of place.
I suspect many people could get on board with a vision like that, at least in theory. Unfortunately, as with my son’s dreams, there are some logistical hurdles in this plan we tend to overlook.
Liberal Christians often define this collective utopian objective as “Racial Reconciliation.” The ideal is noble, but our push for it may be premature. The fact is, we aren’t ready for Reconciliation. Not yet. We have work to do first. Promoting Racial Reconciliation, as a first order goal, is essentially equivalent to throwing a house-warming party for a home that hasn’t been built yet.
We can’t come together in community while some of us still reap benefits by the sabotage of others. Because no one could ever gather in genuine community with their own saboteurs. There is an order to these things, and it can’t be circumvented: Justice precedes reconciliation. Reconciliation precedes community.
Those first two steps are tough. Racialized sabotage and theft are foundational for our nation. As Ibram X Kendi observes, it’s Stamped from the Beginning. We can find its traces and on-going effects in every corner of our lives. Given this pervasive influence, when considered soberly, “Racial Reconciliation” would require an almost-Apocalyptic level reorganization of society.
That might sound very doom and gloom, but, as a Christian, I uphold an Apocalyptic faith. I don’t mean that in the tabloid-conspiracy-theory, big-budget-horror-show, Left Behind, sense of the word.
Biblically, the Apocalypse is not about The End of the World, but rather, as R.E.M. immortalized the phrase, “The End of the World, As We Know It.”
Christ’s teaching about the Apocalypse is intimately tied to his teaching about the Kingdom of God. In simplest terms, we could say that the Kingdom of God is the world the way God wants it to be. It’s the World As It Should Be. And it happens that the Kingdom of God is Jesus’ number one discussion topic. (Since we’re discussing financial reparations, it’s worth noting that his number two topic is: money and what we do with it.)
The Apocalypse is the unfolding of the Kingdom into our own reality. Put another way the Apocalypse is The World As It Is, becoming The World As It Should Be.
When we consider how riddled the Gospels are with stories of Jesus transgressing ethnic, cultural and national divisions to build relationship; when we consider how the Hebrew Scriptures highlight many similar transgressions throughout the whole history of God’s relationship with the Israelites, it doesn’t seem a stretch to propose that Racial Reconciliation is part of God’s plan for The World As It Should Be. Getting there is the hard part.
The lurid, sensationalist, and arresting imagery we associate with Apocalypticism (the kind of stuff you read in the Book of Revelation) is nothing more than the measure of that great distance between our reality, and God’s hope for us. It is the measure of the kind of dramatic action that is necessary to get from where we are, to where we need to be. And this is what I mean when I say Racial Reconciliation requires an Apocalyptic reorganization of society. It will take some dramatic steps to get there.
Given how deeply we are divided by violent hierarchies of racial injustice, it does feel like it might require a cinematic-style Apocalypse to set things right: seas boiling, sky falling, the sun turning to blood, Purple Rain, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, and all that.
Certainly, Jesus does talk about the Apocalypse this way sometimes. He describes the Kingdom coming like a thief in the night: unexpected and terrifying.[ii]
Ta-Nahesi Coates, himself an advocate for reparations, and a committed atheist, seems to envision something like this when he notes “should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.”[iii] We can’t even see the way forward from the place we now stand.
And yet, he does not take his epistemological pessimism on this point as excuse for not doing the work. As he states “Life is always a problem. The fact that … I don't necessarily see hope does not relieve people, does not relieve my son, does not relieve children, of the responsibility to struggle.”[iv] Coates expects, and exhorts, that we all must turn our feet, and trudge toward that longed for goal, even if it lies beyond the horizon of our imagination.
In this respect, as is often the case, one standing outside the faith of Christ models discipleship better than many of us who stand within. As a parishioner of my church, Jennifer Amuzie, recently remarked: "No one needs Jesus more than Christians.”[v]
Jesus tells us Christians, again and again, that while the Kingdom of God may lie beyond our reach and imagination, it is not beyond the realm of our responsibility.
Our long slog of discipleship through the World As It Is feels immeasurably distant from the World As It Should Be. It may even feel like we’re not making any progress. But Jesus reassures us that determined and persistent steps can yield startling results.
While he warns that the Kingdom will come like a thief in the night, he also encourages us, saying Kingdom is like yeast that slowly permeates a loaf of dough, until it is leavened throughout.[vi] He says the Kingdom is like a tiny seed that grows to become a mighty tree.[vii] Perhaps most significantly, he tells us that the Kingdom of God is in us.[viii] As Tolstoy observed, this teaching means, to some extent, that the Apocalyptic unfolding of the World As It Should Be, is within our hands.
It’s hard to reconcile a determined, life-long and persistent effort toward justice, with the visions of catastrophic change St. John of Patmos describes (the star Wormwood crashing from the sky, turning the rivers into gall, and what not). The first vision sounds progressive, the second revolutionary. How can they co-exist?
I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it might look like this: If we ever got off our butts and committed, as a people, to the hard and enduring work of justice, for the long haul, then, overtime, that work would become part of our identity. It would be who, and what we are. We would live in that strange space you experience when walking up a long hill. The beginning would be forgotten; the end would be out of sight. The climb would seem eternal.
If we ever finally arrived at the summit of justice, we would be startled to realize we had actually gotten there. We would feel that same dizzy, light-headed, wobbly-kneed confusion you experience when you realize your long slog is over.
An annual .6% commitment of White wealth for 30 years, could be a part of that long, transformative, slog.
I admit, alongside wonder, the prospect of this work raises some trepidation for me. It draws attention to other uncomfortable questions. In particular, when we consider the question of reparations to Black Americans, it is hard not to ask ourselves “What about reparations to Native Americans?”
And in considering that question, all the maths I can envision end with the same solution. Making just reparation to Native Americans would require handing over everything, the whole nation and all its wealth. And personally, I can’t picture a means towards that outcome which does not involve the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or something similar.
But, perhaps, like my son’s apartment/aquarium, the problem is not the suggestion itself, but rather the limits of my imagination.
We’re still hiding the duct tape from him, though.
[iii] Coates, Ta-Nahisi. (2018). We Were Eight Years in Power. London, UK: Penguin Books Ltd., pg. 152
[iv] Coats, Ta-Nahisi, “'His Ideology Is White Supremacy': Ta-Nehisi Coates On Donald Trump,” Morning Edition, Washington, DC, NPR, Sept. 7, 2017
[v] Ms. Amuzie’s remarks begin around the two hour and four minute mark.