Hello, Hamjatta,
I also believe that not only black people in America should receive reparations, but Africans as well. Why not? It only seems logical to me, since I feel that the European countries which colonized Africa benefited greatly from Africa, at the expense of the Africans who lived there.
It could be argued that Europe, and America, as well, were made rich by Africans and in the case of America, African slaves and their descendants.
Not only that, as the article states, at one point, black people in America not only had to deal with slavery but also had to deal with another 100 or so years of racial segregation and second-class citizenship.
I do not see 30 yearsof affirmative action in this country as "compensation" for the 400 or so years in which black people were ensalved, and Africa was colonized.
I think that if others such as Jewish people and Japanese Americans are receiving reparations for wrongs don to them, reparations for descendants of slaves should definitely be considered.
Ginny
----- Original Message -----
From: Hamjatta Kanteh
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 2:20 AM
Subject: Reparations For Black Slavery/Holocaust?
This is from The New Republic. It seems reparations for Blacks at any rate in America is finally finding a voice in mainstream America and within the political class albeit the snail pace as the piece below from TNR Online suggests. Anyway, i found The New Republic article not only very interesting and promising, but equally and egregiously dismissive, complacent and relaxed in a subtle manner about the very idea or indeed plausibility of reparation for Blacks. Coming from The New Republic - a journal that fought tooth and nail for reparations for the Jewish Holocaust and Jewish-interst-politics leaning -, it would be that rare avatar of richness. I hope you guys do find it a good read as i did and if there is any way that you can fight for reparations, please do join the fray.
Above all, i hope they give US our money. I mean not only Blacks in America. But Blacks in Africa who also suffered half as much as those who were carried away. Hey, make no mistake about it, i might not have been directly affected by the physical and psychological traumas of slavery but i suffered too at any rate economically, politically, and culturally. And those trillions of dollars being mooted do not belong to only Blacks in America but arguably and indeed, emotionally to Blacks in Africa as well. The Kunta Kintehs' they carried off to America were bread winners and left families home who depended on them who not only lost out emotionally but financially because of their forced absence Callous but logical. The logic as it is, is sui generis. So the argument is this: If decescendants of Kinteh in America like the Haleys can claim compensation for slavery, why not the Kinteh branch in say, Juffureh? Or where ever they happen to be now.
A wry humour here: Since Sidi looks forward to career change as another Bakary Simon Bojang in the US, i hope you take up your seat early enough to be able to stress the case for reparations for Black victims in Africa as well who are still lanquishing economically, politically, socially and above all, psychologically from the effects of slavery.
Good Day Everyone,
Hamjatta Kanteh
******************************************
ON THE HILL
Debt Relief
by Michael Crowley
Post date 10.26.00 | Issue date 11.06.00
Sam Anderson, a gaunt man with a large, frizzy gray beard, is holding up a copy of his documentary comic book, The Black Holocaust for Beginners. Before a small but enthusiastic audience, Anderson, a leader of the Black Radical Congress, rails against the "Western imperialist, capitalist powers and corporations that have benefited from slavery." He is followed by a man from something called the Center for Constitutional Rights, who furiously names names: "Barclays Bank, Lloyds of London-all of these companies come directly out of the surplus property generated by the slave trade." Adjua Aiyetoro of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) denounces white doctors who ignore the health complaints of their black patients and attributes this and countless other evils to the legacy of slavery. "They robbed and raped Africa like they robbed and raped all the ancestors who came over here," says Aiyetoro, filling the room with a shout of well-honed indignation. "We will win reparations! We won't give up!"
Welcome to the epicenter of the slavery-reparations movement. After languishing for years on the far margins of political debate, the question of whether the federal government should compensate blacks-either through direct cash payments to descendants of slaves or through broader social programs or trust funds-may be coming soon to front pages near you. For while Aiyetoro's rants sound like the sort of futile venting you'd find at a Nation of Islam rally or an Afrocentric college, he uttered them last month on Capitol Hill, in the decorous hearing room of the House Judiciary Committee.
How can that be? Don't conservative Republicans like Henry Hyde and the House impeachment managers run the Judiciary Committee? Yes, but its ranking Democrat is Detroit Representative John Conyers, who, like many unabashed liberals waiting quietly offstage, will become a powerful committee chairman if Democrats win back the House in November, as many political oddsmakers expect. Last month's event was informal; Republicans would never allow such a hearing to occur officially on their watch. But if Conyers, who has quietly championed reparations for years, does become chairman, he will use his committee platform to take the issue mainstream. "I can assure you that he will take this [issue] up" if Democrats prevail, says Conyers staffer Cynthia Martin. "There will be action."
That's good news for the growing number of black activists, intellectuals, and politicians who believe the federal government should pay massive reparations to the descendants of African slaves. Whether it's good news for American race relations is another matter. Racial politics are more placid today than they have been in years, if not decades. The current presidential campaign has been almost entirely unblemished by Willie Horton-style demagoguery. Affirmative action and political correctness no longer raise tempers the way they did in the early '90s. Crime, welfare, and unemployment rates have plunged, bringing white fear and resentment down with them. Perhaps the calm simply masks white complacency and black cynicism, and public debate about the ugliest chapter in American history might produce a deeper healing. But, given that even a mere presidential apology for slavery remains unutterable and white support for affirmative action is grudging at best, it could also spark a tremendous white backlash and leave America's peaceful and moderately progressive racial consensus in tatters.
onyers himself isn't new to the reparations cause. Since 1989 he's repeatedly filed legislation calling for a national commission to examine the possibility of reparations and the form they might take. But he says the cause has lately acquired a new credibility. "Even a dozen years ago this was a marginalized issue," Conyers says. "[But] I see a great sea change going on.... Now people are beginning to say, `Yes, Congressman Conyers, this does deserve to be taken out and considered and resolved."
Conyers is probably right. Long a hobbyhorse of Louis Farrakhan and his various deranged acolytes, the slavery-reparations movement has gained substantial momentum and academic credibility of late. Black leaders have watched with growing resentment as other wronged groups received apologies or paybacks from various governments. These include Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, who were awarded $20,000 apiece in 1988; Jewish Holocaust survivors, who have collected nearly $60 billion from the German government and are successfully seeking the return of looted wealth from the Swiss; and American Indians, who this summer received an apology for maltreatment from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Korean comfort women (from Japan), Aborigines (from Australia), Inuit (from Canada)-the list could go on and on (and, in the literature and on the websites of reparations activists, it does). Historical research has also made it easier for the descendants of slaves to trace their heritage and thus determine what their families might be owed and by whom. And the recent political and legal attacks on affirmative action have forced black politicians and activists to link racial preferences more explicitly to slavery, thus forming the intellectual foundation for reparations.
As a result, the slavery-reparations movement now enjoys the formal support of 48 members of Congress, including nearly every member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the naacp, where a spokesman calls Conyers's bill "a legislative priority." The city councils of Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington have passed resolutions urging Congress to compensate the descendants of slaves, and Jesse Jackson urges payments from insurance companies tied to the slave trade. This February Harvard's Charles Ogletree and Henry Louis Gates Jr. said they were considering a class-action lawsuit to win reparations (Harper's magazine reports that Ogletree has been in contact with Johnnie Cochran's law firm). Indeed, reparations have become so prominent an idea in black America that NAACP officials report a rash of scams around the country in which blacks are told they are already eligible for reparations and asked to pay a fee to process the phony claim.
Two books published this year are also gaining widespread attention in black political circles. Conyers himself cites The Guilt of Nations, by Claremont Graduate University Professor Elazar Barkan, who says reparations are part of an "evolving international norm of group and individual rights." More widely influential is The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, by the prominent foreign policy lobbyist Randall Robinson, a hero of the U.S. anti-apartheid movement. Robinson's book--which calls for massive federal reparations on the grounds that "No race, no ethnic or religious group, has suffered so much over so long a span as blacks have, and do still, at the hands of those who benefited, with the connivance of the United States government, from slavery and the century of legalized American racial hostility that followed it"--has garnered effusive praise on the left. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, Jack Beatty notes that "Randall Robinson's eloquent book-The Fire Next Time, perhaps, for this generation-could help to turn a mood into a movement." The Nation calls Robinson "a worthy heir to W.E.B. Du Bois." Black media outlets like Emerge and Essence magazines have similarly applauded the book, and Robinson says it has been the number-one best-seller in bookstores catering to blacks.
As black and left-wing elites have embraced reparations, they have downplayed some of the loonier numbers produced by their more radical colleagues (for instance, N'COBRA's figure of $8 trillion). "People seem to me to be moving away from the position of financial remuneration," Conyers says. "People are thinking of more permanent things that can be done: education, health care, job opportunities, housing-things that are less tangible but in the long run might really help make us whole." Robinson suggests a trust fund that would pay for the education and economic development of black America. Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, the Judiciary Committee's number-two Democrat, adds that money may not be involved at all: "I think the role of hearings ... would be quite frankly to generate support for appropriate affirmative action." Or, as Barkan writes: Through reparations "the identity of the victims is validated and given a political boost."
But even if the reparations movement shifts away from the idea of federal checks and simply tries to use slavery as a more fundamental and compelling justification for vastly expanded affirmative action, its supporters miss a basic political reality. Part of the reason for America's current racial calm is precisely that affirmative action has been scaled back-often replaced by race-neutral programs such as those that admit the top ten percent of high school seniors regardless of race. For many white Americans, 30 years of affirmative action was reparations for slavery, and they now feel preferences should be gradually scaled back.
When asked about reparations in his primary-season debate with Bill Bradley in Harlem, Al Gore said as much, pointing to affirmative action and his plans for education spending as compensation enough. And more conservative whites will likely see a serious push for broad reparations as the kind of kooky identity politics that chased them away from the Democratic Party in the 1980s. One hostile posting on the N'COBRA website reads: "You should pay reparations to the ancesters [sic] of union troops who died to secure your freedom. My great grandfather being one of them. So send me your checks today." Even Democratic Representative Tony Hall of Ohio, who has been pushing for a formal congressional apology for slavery, notes that some members who privately support some kind of reparations "are a little bit afraid of it and don't want to deal with it right now.... The country hasn't moved far enough toward the issue to bring this up right now."
But if Democrats win the seven seats they need to regain the congressional majority-and pollsters increasingly believe they will-Judiciary Committee Chairman Conyers and his allies will bring it up nonetheless. At last month's forum, Representative Carrie Meek recalled how she used to plead with the last Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Texas Representative Jack Brooks, to hold hearings on the subject. "I begged him to do something about reparations," Meek said. "But guess what? He isn't here anymore. Look who's in his seat." In the coming years, a more polarized America may be looking as well.
MICHAEL CROWLEY is an associate editor at TNR.
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