A Discussion on “Reparations”
By Dr. Rolando M
For years the topic of reparations in the U.S. due
to slavery, has been tossed around with little or no
results. Lately, it has surfaced again with more
strength and added potency provided by the current
political and social atmosphere. The slaves who,
during the Atlantic Slavery Period (16th
to 18th Centuries) were brought to the
United States mainly from West Africa, were taken
from their families and countries, and those who
survived the terrible trip, were forced to work
mainly as agricultural laborers.
As of June 1, 2022 the California Reparations Task
Force issued an interim 500-page report which was
announced by the state’s attorney general Rob Bonta
in his website. The task force is composed of nine
members: eight African Americans and one Japanese
American. There are four women and five men on this
panel. The panel’s recommendations are to provide
reparations for the group of African Americans, who
can claim to be descendants of those slaves, due to
atrocities perpetrated during and after slavery. The
panel’s recommendation also called for these
reparations to be applied, not only in California,
but in the entire nation.
According to Free Dictionary.com
(https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/reparations)
“Proponents of slave reparations maintain that the
U.S. government owesthe descendants of slaves a formal
acknowledgement and apology for the inhumanity of slavery.
They also believe that the government should seek ways to
provide some form of tangible restitution to slave descendants.”
The same website defines reparations as:
“The making of amends for a wrong one has done, by
paying money to or otherwise helping those who have
been wronged.”
Those of us who believe that slavery was a grave
injustice, could look at reparations as a way to
correct that injustice, but it is not that simple.
Nothing is! The more I thought about it and the more
research I did to educate myself on the background
and history of slavery, the more I realized that it
is a very complex situation.
Historically, slavery in Africa began centuries
before the Atlantic Slave Period when many countries
in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe were
buying and slavering the people of Africa. Slavery,
in most cases, was the principal source of income
for the many tribes who fought each other in order
to enslave those who belonged to the losing tribe.
Slavery was “Big Business” for the powerful tribes
and its rulers. Even though slavery is now outlawed
in most countries in Africa, it is still going on in
the 21st century.
When those in the New World needed manual labor,
they turned to Africa for slaves. The demand was
high and those who supplied the slaves, through
slave traders, captured the poor souls who were put
into ships and sent to the colonies in America and
many other countries in the Caribbean and South
America. The plantation owners in the colonies, the
majority of them of European descent, bought them
from the slave traders and exploited them under
inhumane conditions.
This process continued even after the United States’
Independence in 1776. The descendants of the
original European plantation owners, now Americans,
continued the practice until the end of the Civil
War, 1865, when the slaves were thereafter
emancipated. As a side note, the economy of those
African countries supplying the slaves suffered an
enormous decline after the abolition of slavery was
enacted throughout the civilized world. Some say
those African countries have never recovered.
In my mind there are three important questions that
need to be answered before a fair and impartial
decision can be reached:
Are direct descendants of those slaves entitled to
reparations?
Are direct descendants of those responsible for
slaving these poor souls responsible and accountable
for reparations?
Is the government of the United States and its tax
payers responsible for reparations even for the
descendants of those who became slaves in the U.S.
territory before its independence?
One can easily see how difficult it would be to
determine the facts in order to answer these
questions. The first two are almost impossible to
accurately determine. In the first question I would
answer, yes, but how do you know with certainty that
an African American living in the U.S. now is a
descendant of slaves? Not all African Americans are
descendants of the slaves who came during the
Atlantic Slavery Period. Many people of African
descent came to the U.S. after the emancipation as
immigrants, not only from Africa, but also from
other countries. What about those of mixed races?
In the second question I would answer yes also, but
this is even more difficult than the first one
because there were many links in the chain of
slavery who should be made responsible and
accountable for reparations:
·
The descendants of the tribal leaders in Africa who
slaved their people and then sold them.
·
The descendants of the slave traders who bought
them.
·
The descendants of the ship owners and captains who
transported them.
·
The descendants of the European and American
plantation owners who bought them and exploited
them.
·
The countries that had laws permitting slavery.
How are we to find the descendants of all these
people? If reparations are to be fair, they must
include the descendants of the entire chain of
slavery and not only the last link. How much money
should the reparations be? How could one distribute
the amount of the responsibility and accountability
of reparations among all of these five (links)
groups?
After one determines the answers to the first two
questions, if one could ever do, the third question
could be addressed. It would be obvious that the
descendants of those slaves who came during the time
England, Spain, and France dominated the territory,
would have to seek reparations from these three
countries’ governments. The rest, descendants of
those who came after the U.S. independence, should
receive some sort of proportional reparation from
the U.S. given the unjust laws which were in place
during that time. Can all these facts be obtained
and validated?
There is legal precedent which does not exactly fit
this case, but could be used as a guide. During
World War II, after the attack at Pearl Harbor and
as a precaution fearing a Japanese invasion of the
U.S., the U.S. incarcerated approximately 120,000
people of Japanese ancestry (77,000 American
citizens and the rest legal aliens) Those
individuals lost their jobs, businesses, and many
possessions. These camps, where they were kept in
very poor conditions, were closed in 1946.
According to Free Dictionary.com
(https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/reparations)
“For 40 years Japanese Americans sought reparations for their
wartime imprisonment and loss of property.
The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (50 App. U.S.C.A. § 1989b) amounted to an apology from the U.S. government for the
wartime internment of Japanese Americans. The act established
a $1.25 billion trust fund for
paying reparations.
Each of the approximately 60,000 surviving internees
received $20,000 tax free.”
The recipients of these reparations were actual
sufferers of the unjust treatment and not the
descendants. The incarceration was a questionable
decision made during the time of war and confusion,
not to be compared to slavery.
Another angle to consider has to do with the
historically high infant mortality rate in
Sub-Saharan Africa. This area carries the world’s
highest infant mortality rate even now, after many
years of modernization. In 2004, 101 of 1,000 live
births died. West Africa was even worse with 114 of
1,000 live births died. These compare to 57 for the
World, 9 for Europe, and 7 for North America
according to The International Bank of
Reconstruction and Development of the World Bank. In
2011, 38% of the Global neonatal deaths occurred in
Sub-Saharan Africa. 1 in 9 children died before the
age of 5 in Sub-Sharan Africa while 1 in 152 was the
average of children dying in developed countries in
2011. I could imagine that during the time of the
Atlantic Slave Period these numbers were a lot worse
in West Africa.
You are probably wondering why am I giving these
statistics and what do they have to do with
reparations?
At the risk of sounding cynical and not sensitive to
the horrors of slavery, I would like to propose the
following counter argument to reparations.
If slavery in the U.S. and the Atlantic Slave Trade
would have never happened, most of the descendants
now living in the U.S. would have not been born
because their West Africa’s ancestors would have
died at birth or would have not lived to be 5 years
old. In essence, the horrible experience of slavery
gave these descendants the opportunity to be born,
to live, and multiply as they did.
Looking at all these different factors, I see
slavery as an unfortunate and terrible episode in
the history of mankind and of the U.S., but like
most events, it has some positive results. Even
though African Americans have suffered
discrimination and persecution for many years after
the emancipation, things changed for the better in
the 1960s due to the efforts of Martin Luther King
Jr. and others. Affirmative Action executive orders
enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and many
other legislations have provided, not a perfect
situation, but one where the descendants of the
slaves had and have the opportunity to live in the
freest country on earth and where there are
opportunities for everyone who is willing to work
hard.
Many of those descendants of slaves, have taken
advantage of these opportunities and are now very
successful professionals, doctors, lawyers,
teachers, college professors, business owners,
entertainers, sports figures, politicians, judges,
high-ranking military officers, and hard-working
decent people represented in almost every type of
job and activity.
Maybe this is the reparation. African Americans took
advantage of these opportunities and earned better
living conditions than they would have had in West
Africa with their effort and hard work. In my
opinion, hand-outs would likely diminish the dignity
of many African Americans.