Ta-Nehisi Coates offered a “Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic (6/14).
Big media have shown some interest since The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates made a case for reparations for African-Americans after centuries of enslavement and discrimination. Just recently, a Los Angeles Times story (1/12/16) offered it as an example of how “the post-Obama left” is being driven to “policy proposals [that] are so grand as to verge on the absurd,” and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders’ stance against the idea made fodder for CNN (1/21/16) and others tracking the opinions of black people vis a vis the presidential election.
But when, right on the heels of that, a UN human rights group released a report saying African-Americans face “systemic racial discrimination” and deserve “reparatory justice,” that was not so newsworthy. The UN’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent cited “the persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education, housing, employment and labor, and even food security, among African-Americans and the rest of the US population,” and pointed to police killings, zero tolerance policies in schools, the criminalization of poverty, environmental racism, discriminatory voter ID laws and schools’ insufficient teaching about the history of slavery as constituting a human rights crisis that must be addressed as a matter of urgency.
But corporate media didn’t agree. Jesse Holland, the AP‘s race, ethnicity and demographics reporter (and himself black), wrote it up (1/29/16); the Denver Post (1/31/16) ran a news brief, and the Christian Science Monitor (1/31/16) ran something online. Apart from that, it was mostly only African-American–focused outlets like Essence magazine (2/2/16) and independents like Democracy Now! (2/2/16) that saw any news in the news that an international organization thinks the idea of reparations for African-Americans is anything but silly. Black History Month, not off to a great start.
Janine Jackson is the host of CounterSpin and the program director of FAIR.
Right on – do it, but only taken out those that specifically made any gain from the injustice. My abused Irish ancestors were not involved, nor were those of native Indian nor of those of Chinese decent. It might be more realistic to place more grievous punishment to any ongoing like abuses when it happens today
Im white&believe in reparations. I’m tired of seeing the levels of hate and ignorance in our country. How would reparations work? If anyone died intestate, esp. in the South, funds could go to the poorest blacks.If more whites knew history & black people as individuals they’d support this idea.
If you want to increase racism and reinvigorate the KKK, then reparations are the way to go.
Bernie Sanders has a better way. First provide free college education to anyone who needs it. Second, toughen up on equality laws and fair labor laws. Third, provide single payer Medicare for all. Fourth, increase welfare. Fifth, provide housing assistance. All this will not only help African Americans, but every other minority group as well, including women.
Will reparations also be asked from the Arab countries? The Arab slave trade is still going on under the radar and has been going on for fourteen centuries. 18 million Africans have been (still are?) sold in the markets in Marrakech, Cairo, Mecca, Basra et al. and approximately 110 million Africans died in transit to these markets.
Europeans taking slaves from Africa across the Atlantic lasted only 350 years, from about 1500 to about 1850. The number taken was 15 million, 11 million of whom reached the Americas. Compared with the still-current Arab slave trade, the transatlantic one looks relatively small-scale and humane, no?
Google John Azumah Adembillah for further details. He’s a Ghanaian and has written a book on the Arab slave trade. There’s also a youtube video on the subject.
What a well meaning — but uninformed — idea. How in the world can anyone trace the ancestry of an individual African American back far enough to determine if they are in fact a bono fide descendent of a slave? Also, the original slaves were sold into slavery either by their own people or captured by Arabs and sold to the Portugese and English who had the ships to bring them to America. Should they be held financially responsible as well? Try convincing them!
TWO CLASS WORLD — SLAVE-DRIVERS AND SLAVES
Be it chain slavery or keeping the laboring-class enslaved by poverty, since the beginning of civilization planet earth has been a two-class world, with the upper half of society owning all the wealth and the laboring-class lower half kept enslaved by poverty.
Empire USA for example, for the upper-half of society owns all the wealth, no one of the laboring-class lower half is allowed to have free healthcare or free college education and when it comes to our foreign policy, be it Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq, we enable the dictators by carpet bombing and slaughtering only the laboring-class. Look at all the refugees now pouring out of the Middle-East, are they not 95% laboring-class and impoverished?
I have a better plan, to award survivors of Jim Crow laws. See my arguments at https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/crimes-violence/201406/reparations-african-american-survivors-jim-crow
This would be much easier to administer and many of the survivors are alive today.
I love how one of the members who wants the USA to pay reparations is french.
French west indies had 1,600,000 slaves.
France refuses to pay reparations.
http://www.thelocal.fr/20130510/france-refuses-to-pay-slavery-reparations
As reparations are a virtual non-starter (one need only read the first nine comments to sense the seething outrage that would appear should a serious attempt occur), a better approach might be to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, made up on eminent scholars from the social sciences, whose work would encompass the post-colonial crimes of the country, including
the continued theft and occupation of the land of the indigenous peoples;
the institution of slavery sanctioned and enforced by all three branches the “democratic” government;
the use of the charge of witchcraft to control females;
the theft of almost one-half of Mexico by the US invasion of 1846;
the continuous invasions of countries in Latin America by a Very Virtuous Christian Country which doubled down on its efforts by a decades long effort to train torturers and assassins at the School of the Americas and subsequently release them to ply their crafts in the repressive societies from which they emerged;
the war crimes committed by the US against the people of Japan with the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the two atomic blasts that were delivered against civilian targets without warning or cause;
the subversion of the 1956 plebiscite in Vietnam that was agreed to in the 1954 Geneva Peace Accords, and the twenty-year assault on the land and people of that country as well as Laos and Cambodia by the US, with tens of thousands of Agent Orange victims continuing to suffer hideous deformities and early death from the US poison warfare; and
the millions of people whose lives have been ruined in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, entered into through a claim of lies, and in behalf of the corporate ruling class.
In brief, there is no shortage of people to whom this government owes an apology and, potentially reparations, along with a written acknowledgement of the actual events of history–free of sugarcoating or artifice–including the government’s part in creating and then covering up the conditions suffered by so many, for so long.
It would be nice for the country to actually examine, acknowledge, confess, and publish the facts of this hidden history. Ignorance of our past ensures that we have learned nothing and that our claimed values are empty lies; that our attempt at creating a true democracy has failed. As Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
As a people claiming Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, we have much cause for reflection.
Important issue. Glad to see it covered in FAIR. “Policy proposals [that] are so grand as to verge on the absurd.” That’s rich coming from an establishment [rag] that has us on the brink of economic, environmental, military and social extinction on multiple fronts. Not that it matters, but I believe in reparations to black people because they built this country. Without black slavery there would never have been US capitalism. And because of the lingering, systemic racism that remains; what Michelle Alexander’s terms the New Jim Crow. My take on the case for black reparations is not that a chunk of taxpayer dollars would be distributed equally among black people, but that it would go to black institutions.
Steve I never said that I was for or against.
I just believe that its something that should be handled in house not by people from other walks of life. So please don’t lump me in with being against the idea, or for that matter for the idea.
I was just making an observation on one of the council members who feel that the USA should pay.
@Some Guy
My comments were not intended to be read as a response to yours. I can understand how you might interpret it that way, but I was simply addressing the issue as discussed in Ms. Jackson’s essay.
Making any equitable distribution of reparations to the families of people dead for over a hundred years is nigh on impossible. But we could at least talk about why the things we did then shouldn’t be done again–there’s no guarantee that a generation or two from now, they’ll start doing the same foolish and evil things empires always do, but with the idea that they’re the first to do so. Human folly never ends.
But I meant nothing personal toward you, and I apologize.
@Steve Quite alright, I just had been one of the top nine comments lol.
I do agree that IF the country starts to sway the way of a yes on this topic that it would indeed be near impossible to figure out who is owed what when the floods of people come in to collect, and talking about issues and why they should never be repeated is a great thing to do.
UN Human rights groups are a bad joke. There is one major human rights issue that eclipses concerns of privileged Americans who are largely from mixed ancestors. That issue is the ongoing catastrophes of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.
Many (note I did not say all) “abused Irish ancestors” were involved. For example, the hanging/murder of a free black man in NYC during the riots therein during the Civil War. Many Irish, at the bottom of the working class, supported slavery as they saw recently freed black workers as competition for jobs. Furthermore, in response to another post, white Europeans and Americans were directly involved in the capture and murder of black Africans. Read about John Hawkins and his cousin Sir Francis Drake, for example. Both were (white) English slave marauders who started the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 1560s. Both were personally involved in armed conflict to capture free men.
OUR WORLD HAS ONE PURPOSE
REACH CONCLUSION OF SLAVERY
Just look at the facts, for they are most absolute —
(1) World is an intelligence dictatorship. For intelligence is the speed at which you can rationalize a problem and take corrective action, the speed at which you can kill in combat and compete in capitalism, the speed at which you can enslave by chains or economics those less intelligent. And as intelligence like sex appeal passes from parent to child, the rich always stay rich and the laboring-class always stay deliberately enslaved by poverty.
(2) Lower-half of society are laboring-class slaves.
(3) Upper-half of society always owns all the land and wealth.
(4) Democracy is paradise for the upper-half of society, as they are the voting majority and always enslave by poverty the laboring-class lower-half.
(5) World is a liar’s paradise, as a liar uses an illusion of good to hid his intent to be enriched upon our misery. For the greater one’s intelligence, the greater their knowledge of good and ability to deceive by an illusion of good. Surely, no one lies to those more intelligent and gets away with it.
Instead of having Black History Month have White History Month. We didn’t put the black people into slavery, we got them out of it. They even have their own college, a lot of them need an English class, that way we can all understand each other. After all even the Mexicans have their day, where’s ours.
I think that reparations to African-Americans for the institutionalized enslavement of their ancestors is an excellent idea. What form should such reparations take? I would like to suggest that one way to make reparations would be to offer free DNA testing to all Americans of African ancestry. This would enable them to know more precisely their ethnic origins. Slavery stripped African Americans of their culture, language and ethnic identity. DNA testing will help to right a terrible wrong that has been perpetuated in the descendants of slaves to this day.
The UN once again proves its worthlessness. Reparations should be paid to lformer slaves (not their descendants) by their former owners (not the decendants or estates of those owners). The people who DID the harm should compensate those who THEY harmed! .
Hi, Pam,
We do have white history in our schools 12 months a year. But it doesn’t include the history of working class whites. I recommend Howard Zinn’s great book, The People’s History of the United States. One of my students at the college where I teach dropped it on my desk on the last day of class, saying, “Here, read this.” I did read it, and it opened my eyes to the discrimination against all groups in America by the upper class who try to play us against one another. Zinn’s book includes the history that doesn’t appear in books by the white upper class who write our history books.
When I was around seven years old, we neighborhood kids all played together. If any of us did something bad, a kid would go home and tell his mother. That mother would walk over to the offending kid’s house and have a talk with the offending kid’s mother OR the mother of the “victim kid” would call the mother of the offending kid and they would discuss what happened that was supposedly bad. News got around to the moms of our block pretty quickly, so just because none of the moms were watching what was going on while we played, if you did something bad, your mom would know before you came back to the house through the front door.
One day, one of the kids (the bully of the block) was being his nasty self again and I used some very un-kid-like language to tell him off. Instead of hauling off and hitting me (as I expected to happen), he started walking back to his house telling me that he was going to tell his mom what I said and that I was in big trouble (because it would get back to my mom in a nanosecond). I couldn’t let that happen. I would get a spanking from my mom and would get another one from my dad when he got home from work.
I ran towards the bully and caught up with him when he was about halfway back to his house. I pleaded with him not to tell his mother what I said. He stopped walking and turned around and asked “What will you give me so that I don’t tell on you?” I was only seven, so I didn’t have too many possessions, but my prize possession was my collection of little plastic soldiers, with jeeps, trucks tanks etc. I said “I’ll give you my Army Men.” He thought about it and said “OK.” So, we went back to my house and I gathered all of my Army Men and gave it to him. He smiled. I asked “You won’t tell, will you?” He said “No.” Then. He ran back to his house with my Army Men.
From then on, I had to be real nice to him all of the time, because I feared that if he ever got mad at me again, he would tell his mom the bad words I had said that one day. I walked on eggshells anytime he was around me.
That’s the way I feel these days, with certain groups in American Society that were wronged in the past wanting to have their “Day in the Sunshine” at the expense of others not directly related to the people that had wronged those groups in the past. Some of us are paying for the sins of our forefathers. Others are paying for the sins of the forefathers of other people. The receptors of past bad behavior (by others) is demanding a payment of Army Men in order to somewhat “keep the peace.” And, those that give up payment of Army Men are supposed to give them up in silence and walk on eggshells afterwards for fear that those receptors of past bad behavior do not up their ante.
F**k that. I’m not seven years old and I have done nothing directly adverse to you. I will not yield to the ransom-demanders of today. I will not modify my thought patterns, my speech or my beliefs in order to temporarily placate and satisfy somebody with an eternal chip on their shoulder. I will not surrender my God-given right to think and say what I want when I want to say it – even if it personally offends somebody else. So, it offends you? Do you really think I give a sh*t? No. Now, leave me the f**k alone and go bother somebody else.
I’m just being honest here.
@Gary Davis
I, for one, am convinced that, from what you’ve written, you don’t give a shit. Good job!
I’m sorry, but I believe reparations were already paid with the blood of a half-million plus lives during the civil war.