The Many Reasons For Reparation

I often wonder if I'll be around to see compensation paid for the slavery that my ancestors endured. Well its good to see that there are other folks out there that feel very strongly about reparation for African Americans.



"Stop living in the past and move on after slavery!" This is what we often tell African Americans. Well we certainly forced them to move on. We moved on to Black Codes, Jim Crow, lynching, de facto segregation. We moved on to White knights hiding behind ghosts of themselves while religiously lighting crosses in praise of a Satan they were fooled into thinking was God. We moved on to the cities of Tulsa, St. Louis, and Rosewood where we, apparently, were unaffected by the burned and seared flesh of Black people.

We moved on to laws that upheld racial oppression over and over again. We moved on to the many Black men placed on death row because they fit the description. We moved on and made sure that Emmitt Till would not be the last fourteen-year-old Black child whose unrecognizable corpse was the price paid for supposedly whistling at a White woman. We moved on to exclude African Americans from rights of democracy by blocking avenues to employment, education, housing, and civil rights.

In the final decade of the last century the slow, consistent racial apocalypse started showing signs of even more things to come when a Black man's head was seen rolling behind a pick up truck in Jasper, Texas. By the time we racially profiled our way from Texas to New York we find a city plagued with plungers and forty-one bullets. Every time Black people have tried leaving the shackles of slavery behind, we find that we were the ones that couldn't stop living in the past.

How dare our own racial arrogance say that reparations are too much of an apology for the Black lives we've tormented. How dare we simultaneously declare that the statue of limitations has expired for African Americans yet is limitless for other people in the world whom are non-Black. Half of the nations in this world are in the midst of fighting long and hard battles to get justice for things that happened in the past. Some of these battles have roots that go back further than the birth of the United States.

African Americans' quest for justice is looked down upon in comparison to ethnic groups like Jews and Palestinians. Black people would be ridiculed as unrealistic and outlandish if they were to ask for a piece of land like the Jews and Palestinians have done and are doing. Unlike the Jews and Palestinians, at least African Americans are asking rather than forcing us through the barrel of a gun to take responsibility.

The international stage has taken issues of reparations much more seriously than we have. The Jews received statehood as a form of reparations for their brothers and sisters who were exterminated. Coincidentally, many Jews who immigrated to Israel and benefited from reparations were not even close to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau. Although millions of those whom the reparations were intended for died, that didn't mean that their death equaled an expired statue of limitations for their descendents who were left to deal with the psychological consequences and the nagging fear of what it means to be hunted down and collectively violated because of ethnicity.

Jews even went on to win further reparations through lawsuits against corporations such as banks. Again, these demands for justice were instigated by a generation of Jews whom had never even lived in Germany, let alone been there during the Holocaust. The Jewish experience serves as a prime example as to why reparations for African Americans are not unrealistic and outlandish.



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