Steven Hale
2 min readJan 3, 2024

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I agree that the retrenchment known as Reconstruction was probably more injurious than enslavement itself in that it enshrined discrimination within the Constitution as most people interpreted it after the Civil War. We still see government figures (especially on the Supreme Court) minimizing the effects of constitutionally approved racism today.

As for reparations made by the US, here are two more:

(1) Monetary payment to victims of Japanese-American internment camps in WWII. These were made rather late, without much in the way of an apology, but they were moderately appropriate compared to other reparations.

(2) Reparations made to victims of nonconsensual medical experiments conducted by federal, state, and private institutions. The most famous reparations / apology were probably to the subjects of The Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (aka the Tuskegee Experiment). The half-hearted apology was late (after exposure in the popular press--the medical community knew about the racist experiment since its inception) and the financial compensations were insulting. If such a study had been conducted in the past few decades (and exposed today), the compensation to victims and their families would have been in the billions. Remember that the deliberately untreated men in the study may have exposed their spouses and children to syphilis. Most of the researchers were not rewarded financially for their "research" (as far as I know) but it's likely that they received academic credit / prestige for their publications in standard medical journals from the 1930's-the 1960's.

Although African Americans were not the sole victims of other nonconsensual experiments, they were often among subjects, sometimes disproportionately to the number of Blacks in the general population.

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Steven Hale
Steven Hale

Written by Steven Hale

Music: Discovering the lost and forgotten. Politics: Exposing injustice. Screenwriting: Emotional storytelling.

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