By Douglas Burns

On car trips, Sirius-XM satellite radio is a blessing. I roll through a lot of radio talk. The topic of reparations for slavery appears to be a frequent one on an African-American talk-show channel called, “The Power,” one I’ll catch every now and again.

It’s an interesting case, this notion of paying millions of black Americans for the forced labor of their forefathers. Some estimate that slaves pumped $8 billion into the U.S. economy and received none of it when they were freed.

During these debates on The Power I can’t help but think of Union soldiers, the ones who died or were injured in freeing the slaves. Shouldn’t they get in on this?

After all, what’s worse, being a slave and seeing the shackles cut, or fighting against slavery and having your head blown off?

There are many angles in this reparations debate.

And there are precedents of sorts, too.

A few years ago, the German Parliament passed legislation to govern a $5-billion fund for Nazi-era slave workers and other Holocaust victims.

Here in the United States, we provided reparations in 1988 for the Japanese-Americans who were interred during World War II. Native Americans haven’t been provided with the best deal, but at least they have legal gambling houses to recoup a fraction of the continent that was once theirs.

So what about the descendants of slaves? Shouldn’t they be compensated?

Following the Civil War, the U.S. government promised slaves a settlement of “40 acres and a mule.”

Congress passed a reparations bill, but President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, vetoed it.

Then there’s the question of whether the U.S. government should be the sole target of those in the reparations movement.

Several German companies paid reparations to Holocaust victims and their families for the forced labor Jews performed under the Nazis.

Why should American companies who profited from slavery get a pass card?

States successfully have sought billions in “health reparations” from tobacco companies, which many believe plotted to “hook” people on smoking.

If companies can be linked to slavery, that is a sin far worse than anything the tobacco companies have done, and the slave-connected businesses should be held responsible.

But the government?

Taxpayers in general?

That’s another story.

So many Americans did not play a role in the horror of slavery.

Take Carroll County, where I live, for instance. Many of the initial settlers came from Germany after the Civil War, and if they were here in the 1860s, they were fighting for the Union, putting their lives on the line for the freedom of African-Americans.

Why should any Carroll County tax dollars go to pay for the sins of others?

About 75,000 Iowans served in the Civil War or 54.7 percent of the male population of “military age.” Teenagers and senior citizens served in the war. Of those Iowans who served the Union cause, 13,000 died.

There are other problems with government reparations, too.

How would people prove their lineage? Are we going to have a nation of Alex Haleys running around spending thousands to authenticate their roots?

And most troubling is this question: If you say you support reparations for the descendants of slaves, then how much are you going to shell out? How much is one life worth? Do you base it on how much a free black man would have made sharecropping in the South or as a doctor in the North? Do you base it on how much an Irish immigrant made hacking it out in some sweat shop in New York?

That would surely be an ugly debate.

And once the descendants of slaves were paid, it would quickly spark resentment among other races, while providing an easy excuse to avoid tackling diversity issues. You can hear the arguments ringing from the suburbs now, “Hey, we paid you. You don’t need affirmative action. Now you blacks can quit complaining about all those random police searches in New York City. It’s not racism. We paid you for that.”

Moreover, African-Americans weren’t the only “immigrants” mistreated by American industry. What about the West Virginia coal miners or the Chinese who built the railroads?

What about the children U.S.-based multi-national corporations exploit today?

America’s past and present are littered with victims who have strong claims to financial relief — and everybody wants to get paid.

There is no statute of limitations on the slavery issue. To be sure, we still aren’t right with this one.

But if the descendants of slaves get to go to the financial well, they should, in my mind at least, be second in line, behind the families of Union soldiers who lost life and limb. CV

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.