Arguments around the need for reparations are a distraction argues Richard Sudan. The case for restitution is as clear as day.
The argument for reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans is not complex, obscure, nor is it theoretical. It is one of the most straightforward moral and economic questions of our time. The difficulty has never been proving that reparations are justified, nor establishing whether they are possible. The difficulty lies in facing a political establishment that refuses to reckon with the truth. The modern world as we know it, was constructed on the forced labour, suffering, and death of millions of African people.
There’s no ‘enlightenment’, great development or industrial revolution without slavery, and the forced labour of captive Africans and their descendants.
The descendants of those people are owed compensation for the theft of their ancestors’ labour and the structural inequalities that continue to persist to this day, shaping their lives.
There is no ambiguity in the historical record. Slavery was a massive colossal economic enterprise that enriched European nations, funded the rise of Western banks, built universities, filled the coffers of private families, and formed the very basis of the American and Caribbean economies. Slavery was not a footnote amid the history of the West, but the very foundation. If you strip the history of empire down to its economic core, you find slavery and its footprint everywhere.
We see it in the creation of capital, the markets, shipping, insurance, banking, agriculture, mining, colonial administration, and global trade routes. You name it. You also find it in the formation of racial hierarchies and state structures that continue to marginalise Black communities today with incarceration rates, policing, and within the wider criminal justice system.
Against this dark backdrop, reparations are not only justified, they are surely unavoidable and furthermore the only good faith remedy to persistent inequality.
Reparations were always possible – when the recipients were slave owners
One of the laziest and most dishonest objections to reparations is the claim that they are too complicated to bring about or too expensive to fund. This objection collapses immediately under basic scrutiny. Governments have already paid reparations, many times, just never to the people most harmed by slavery.
The most striking example is the compensation paid to slave owners after emancipation. When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, it did not compensate the enslaved for centuries of stolen labour and violence.
Instead, it compensated the enslavers. The British government allocated arrounds £20 million a staggering figure at the time, to compensate plantation owners for losing their “property.” The figure represented about 40% of the government’s total budget at the time with payments swiftly made to more than 20,000 slave owning families.
That money was borrowed, and the debt was serviced by British taxpayers well into the 21st century and was only paid off fully in 2015. That means even the descendants of enslaved people living in Britain contributed to repaying a debt that enriched the descendants of those who had exploited them.
And, the payoff handed to the slaver owners was so large, that it was in fact, the biggest financial bailout in UK history, prior to the government bailing out the banks during the 2008, economic crash.
Slave owners receiving reparations, and not the enslaved should in itself settle the debate. Because it exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of governmental claims about affordability and complexity. When White wealth and White power, and White interests were at stake, logistics were no obstacle. The government identified who owned slaves, calculated their supposed losses, and issued payments without hesitation. The only people excluded were the victims.
If reparations were possible in the 19th century for slave owners, they are certainly possible today in 2025 for the descendants of the enslaved.
The Brattle Report. The numbers are already known
Another common objection is that the cost of slavery cannot be quantified. This, too, is false. Economists, scholars, and legal experts have spent decades meticulously analysing the economic impact of slavery. The Brattle Group’s report on reparations for Caribbean-descended communities is one of the most detailed and rigorous studies yet. It demonstrates that not only can reparations be calculated. They’ve actually done the leg work and arrived at a figure of £18 trillion
And to be clear, the Brattle Group are cold calculating consultants. The numbers they have crunched is the baseline. Because, ultimately, a crime such as slavery, with such wide reaching consequences, can never have a price tag – the suffering caused is simply immeasurable.
The Brattle Report outlines the economic value extracted from Caribbean enslaved labour over centuries, the costs of colonial exploitation, and the loss of generational wealth. It aligns with similar analyses conducted across the Atlantic world, from CARICOM’s 10 point reparations plan to U.S.-based studies examining racial wealth gaps. The data is overwhelming.
Governments still claiming that reparations are unworkable are not making a logistical argument. They are making a deliberate moral evasion.
Intergenerational wealth built on intergenerational theft
Reparations are not only about the past. They are about correcting the deliberate economic imbalance that slavery created and that governments have maintained ever since.
The families who were compensated after abolition did not simply pocket the money, they invested it. They purchased land, expanded businesses, diversified into new industries, and educated their children in elite institutions. They built the foundations of intergenerational wealth. The wealth remains in circulation. The legacy handed to the descendants of slave owners is wealth power, access and entitlement. The legacy left to the descendants of slaves is intergenerational trauma and broken history
The descendants of the enslaved inherited exclusion, from land, property, education, capital, and political representation. The racial wealth gap that exists today is not accidental. It is the direct result of a system designed to steal wealth from one group and hand it to another.
Wealth does not disappear. It compounds. But so too does poverty.
This is why reparations matter. They are not an act of charity. They are payment for the wealth stolen, the opportunities denied, and the systemic barriers created.
The institutions built by slavery still operate today
Slavery was not just a labour system, it was a financial engine. It was embedded in the machinery of global capitalism. Banks issued loans using enslaved Africans as collateral. Insurance companies insured slave ships and human cargo, reducing lives to numbers in a book.
Shipping firms made fortunes transporting enslaved people and slave produced goods. Universities trained colonial administrators and merchants who upheld the system. Even parts of the monarchy’s wealth were shaped by colonial extraction.
These institutions did not crumble after abolition. They flourished. They diversified. They embedded themselves in the centre of economic and political life. Their wealth today is inseparable from their past involvement in slavery. Perhaps the starkest example of intergenerational wealth and power accumulated is the Royal Family. While the exact figure is unknown, we do know that the first slavery expedition was authorised under Queen Elizabeth I under Sir John Hawkins and that the Royal Africa Company became immensely rich through trafficking Africans and exploiting their labour.
The disregard of those among the privileged class of calls for reparations is astounding – even when their own families were the direct beneficiaries. When David Cameron visited Jamaica in 2015, he essentially told Jamaicans to get over slavery despite his own distant relative, Sir James Duff being one of those who were enriched through the profits of slavery and reparations. The legacy of slavery has left in its wake both an ignorance and arrogance unrivalled in modern times. In fact, so steeped in delusion and amnesia is Britain that it has convinced itself that it was the first to end slavery rather than being one of the nations to most benefit from it.
Enslaved Africans in Haiti were the first to successfully outlaw slavery in 1804, and have been economically punished and bastardised in the media and popular culture ever since. Britain has rewritten its own legacy and has absolved itself from its role as one of the leading slave trading nations.
Reparations must therefore address not only the harm done to individuals, but the unearned advantage accumulated by these powerful institutions and families. These inequalities continue to shape modern Britain defining health and educational outcomes, access and power.
Present-day disparities are part of the evidence of the ongoing legacy
Opponents of reparations often argue that slavery is “in the distant past” and irrelevant to modern inequality. But present-day disparities are not separate from the history of slavery they are its living legacy.
Policing and criminal justice. The afterlife of slave patrols
Black communities are disproportionately stopped, searched, surveilled, arrested, and incarcerated. This is not the result of higher crime rates. It is the continuation of a system originally designed to control enslaved Africans and keep them in a state of subordination. In the U.S., policing evolved directly from slave patrols. In Britain, it evolved in tandem with colonial policing systems used to enforce racial hierarchy.
Disproportionate policing is not accidental, it is structural. It’s not a broken system, it’s a system working as it was intended.
Reparations acknowledge that these injustices are part of a historical unbroken line.
Education – Inequality designed to persist
Under slavery, the education of enslaved Africans was forbidden or tightly restricted. After slavery ended, education systems were structured to maintain racial hierarchy. Today, Black children still face greater rates of exclusion, fewer resources, biased curricula, and systemic underfunding.
Educational inequality is not an oversight it is the continuation of centuries of exclusion from knowledge and opportunity.
Healthcare – The price of structural neglect?
Black communities suffer worse health outcomes across nearly every indicator. This is not genetic, it is structural. It stems from poorer housing, economic inequality, medical racism, environmental injustice, and generations of being treated as less human by the healthcare system. The Covid pandemic shone a light on these disparities. But it’s something Black communties across the diaspora have known and lived for decades.
The disparities in health reflect the long shadow of slavery and colonialism and intergenerational trauma carried forward by successive generations. Reparations could help communities build their own health frameworks when the state refuses to do so.
Housing and wealth: a legacy of denial
While slave owners invested in property, the descendants of the enslaved were systematically denied land, mortgages, fair loans, and quality housing etc. Modern wealth is built through property ownership. Denying Black people access to this pathway for generations is structural theft.
These disparities are not accidental. They are the direct result of policies designed to preserve the advantages created by slavery.
“There’s no money” (for reparations) except when governments want war
Perhaps the most cynical argument against reparations is the one we hear most often: “There is no money.” Governments deploy this phrase as if their budgets are natural phenomena rather than political choices. When the topic is repairing the harm done to Black people, austerity is invoked. Financial caution is preached. We are told the state cannot afford justice.
But the moment war is on the table, money flows without hesitation.
When governments want to invade, bomb, arm, or occupy, no one asks where the money will come from. Budgets swell overnight. Defence spending skyrockets. Entire economies realign to support conflict. Trillions can be mobilised at a moment’s notice.
War receives a blank cheque. Justice receives nothing.
The message could not be clearer. Governments are willing to spend unimaginable sums to destroy nations, but claim poverty when asked to repair. They will fund violence before they will fund equality. They will arm nations before they will arm communities with resources. They will rebuild foreign armies before they will rebuild the lives of the descendants of enslaved people.
This contradiction exposes the truth. The problem is not affordability. The problem is political will. Reparations threaten entrenched power structures. War reinforces them.
A government that can fund endless conflict can fund reparations. A government that can find billions for bombs can find money to address the greatest economic injustice in history. Claims of scarcity are excuses and nothing more.
If governments refuse to fix inequality, cash reparations must be paid. It might be the only remedy and the only means by which our societies can move forward.
An antidote to broken promises.
Some politicians argue that instead of cash reparations, governments should simply “invest in communities.” But this argument ignores the fact that governments have failed to do so for generations. They have made promises. They have published reports. They have launched consultations. Yet inequality persists.
So long as governments refuse to address the disparities in policing, education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunity, cash reparations are not only justified, they are necessary.
Communities know what they need. Investment in schools, youth services, community centres, mental health programmes, housing initiatives, business grants, land ownership schemes, cultural institutions, community led and culturally sensitive healthcare.
Cash reparations would allow communities to build these structures themselves, rather than waiting for governments that have consistently failed to act. The radical spirit of the Windrush generation is a good example. Recognising the entrenched racism within the UK school system, Black communities who migrated to Britain after World War 2, set up their own Pan African Saturday schools to fill the gaps where the system had failed. Given the opportunity and resources, communties descended from the enslaved can support themselves.
Reparations are not simply about giving money, although this is a big part of it. They are about restoring autonomy stolen through centuries of exploitation and allowing self-determination.
Reparations are global because slavery was global
Slavery was not confined to the Caribbean or the United States. It was a global system, involving Europe, Africa, and the entire Atlantic economy. Wealth flowed in one direction, from the labour of enslaved Africans to the treasuries and powerful families and institutions of Europe. Underdevelopment, poverty, and instability were imposed on the Caribbean and Africa by design.
CARICOM’s 10 point plan outlines a model for national and regional reparations that addresses both financial compensation and structural reform. Reparations must therefore be understood as a global project, not a national gesture.
Reparations are not symbolic nor a handout or free money as some argue. They are a debt that is overdue.
When stripped to its essence, the case for reparations is simple. A crime was committed. Wealth was stolen. The perpetrators were compensated. The victims were left with nothing. The inequality persists. The debt remains unpaid.
Reparations are not about guilt, pity, or symbolic reconciliation. They are about justice. They are about addressing the theft, restoring the balance, and acknowledging the truth that the modern world stands on a foundation of Black suffering.
The descendants of enslaved Africans are not asking for favours. They are asking for what is owed.
The question is not whether reparations should be paid. The question is whether governments will continue to protect the wealth created by slavery or whether they will finally confront the truth and do what justice demands. Will our governments live up to the promise of democracy and an egalitarian society, or continue to bury their collective heads in the sand.
Reparations can happen. They were paid to Native Americans, Japanese Americans following internment during World War 2, Jewish communities following the crime of the Holocaust, Alaskans and as we’ve examined, even slave owners.
Slavery was yesterday in historical terms.
Furthermore, slavery is not ancient history. Within my own family lineage it’s just 3 people ago. My dad’s grandfather’s grandmother, born in 1832 in Guyana, came into the world as someone’s property, with a Scottish name.
Slavery is a crime which took place in recent history, and was so powerful that its impacts continue to reverberate throughout the world.
Increasingly, younger generations especially, are through with arguing to be viewed as equal and deserving human beings, begging for a seat at decision making tables and the corridors of power.
If governments are unwilling to even face up to their past, much less provide a remedy for it, then fortifying communties with the resources to compensate the labour stolen from their ancestors is the only way to move forward. The moral argument is clear. So too is the economics. But those in power lack the political will. One thing is clear. Ongoing demands for justice alongside ongoing state violence will continue to create the kind of social upheaval that governments should be wise to avoid and therefore incentivised to prevent. All it takes is another George Floyd moment to occur and Western societies could be brought to their knees.
Ultimately, the failure to deliver reparations could result in a far greater price being paid by society further down the line.
The flipside however, is that there is actually an opportunity to finally face and address the greatest crime in history.
Attempting to repair the deep long term damage created by slavery would be a revolutionary moment which could transform society long term for the greater good and for the betterment for all communties.
One thing is certain. Over the last few years, demands for reparations reached absolute fever pitch. And with good reason. Decades of injustice, has created an insatiable demand for justice.
And, those demands are going nowhere. Despite attempts to erase Black people, historical revisionism, and political gaslighting, the call for justice has gained irreversible momentum.
The reparations movement is like a locomotive that can’t be stopped. Time to get on board or get out the way.
Richard Sudan is a journalist and writer specialising in anti-racism and has reported on various human rights issues from around the world. His writing has been published by The Guardian, Independent, The Voice and many others.