The Hartford Courant
Editorial
Nov. 23, 2006

The nationwide boycott of Aetna over slavery reparations announced recently is misguided and ill-founded.

The leader of the boycott is a woman named Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who heads the Restitution Study Group, a small nonprofit in Hoboken, N.J.

Ms. Farmer-Paellman has been on this case for some time. When she first made a claim for reparations in 2000, Aetna acknowledged evidence in its archives that the company had insured two dozen slaves, and issued a public apology.

In 2002, Ms. Farmer-Paellmann sued Aetna and two other companies in federal court. The suit and more than a dozen like it were dismissed last year, but the plaintiffs have appealed. The boycott against Aetna health insurance is to pressure the company into creating a trust fund to benefit the descendants of slaves. To succumb to this pressure would be to endorse bad public policy.

Slavery, as should be obvious to all, was a great evil. There most certainly is a continuing obligation to address racial discrimination and other residual effects of slavery wherever they linger.

The question is how best to do it. Reparations only make sense when it is possible to identify the victims and the perpetrator. For example, the 60,000 Japanese Americans who won reparations in 1988 for their internment during World War II were the actual survivors who had been sent to camps.

When the identities of the parties attenuate, as they will over a century and a half, reparations become a highly imprecise remedy. The task of identifying the descendants of slaves is staggering in itself, because skin color alone will not work. The Aetna Inc. of today is only tenuously connected to its ancestor, Aetna Insurance Co., which insured slaves in the 1850s. What of current shareholders whose ancestors escaped or fought against slavery? Who gets to share in the trust fund?

The better response to the legacy of slavery is to engage the issues of today, and Aetna has done this. Long a strong employer of city residents, Aetna has aggressively addressed racial and ethnic disparities in health care and supported minority investment programs and many community initiatives. This year the company announced it will invest $50 million to $100 million in minority- and women-owned businesses over the next four years.

Perhaps Ms. Farmer-Paellmann should sit down with Aetna's chairman and chief executive, Ronald A. Williams. He is African American.