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Let’s first outline the problems that will be
immediately associated with reparations. The first big
problem will be Herr Trump and the GOP.
You know and I know that if there is any serious
discussion on the national scene regarding reparations,
Trump and the GOP will typecast it as socialistic, racist
and, above all, a budget breaker.
There would not be a better way for Trump to galvanize
his “deplorable” base than to spawn dozens of moronic tweets
indicating that black Americans are still wanting a hand out
and they are playing the race card with the issue of
reparations.
You can imagine the vitriolic discussions in the
national media if reparations were a plank in the Democratic
Party platform; and reparations was affirmed as being an
issue worthy of being presented as a bill in Congress.
If you think that Trump has unleased the racial
hounds of hell into the public discourse, the idea of white
America being on the hook for hundreds of billions of
dollars (or more) to black folks will nigh cause a societal
uproar that will have the National Guard on alert!
Reparations, just the mere discussion of that
volatile topic, is both an emotional issue intertwined with
ideas of what is just and fair.
It is an emotional one due to the fact that millions
of Americans are labeled people of color and unknown
millions of white Americans have “black” blood coursing
through their veins even if it is only the proverbial racist
view that if you have just “one drop” of “black” blood in
you, you were/are considered to be a Negro!
That was and is how racially fearful White America was
at one time and how just “one drop” could cause your skin to
be butterscotch in complexion and your hair “kinky”, your
nose wide and flat and your lips being “ample” in shape.
So, in any computation of how to calculate any
financial benefits to people of color, do you or must you
also include white Americans (only those willing to come
forth and admit that in their family tree, there are people
of color, acknowledged or unacknowledged) who show any
remote physical semblance that their father or mother were
engaged in race “mongrelization” at one time or another.
I will not even try to guess the number of black women
who were sexually assaulted and who had children who later
married into another ethnic grouping or simply, “passed” for
white. Do they need to be counted also?
Remember the two old films, Pinky and
Imitation of Life?
White America’s sexual dalliances with people of color
for hundreds of years has produced a hodgepodge of people of
various hues that it will be seemingly nigh impossible to
tell, who is who.
I mean, will it take a nationwide but voluntary
sampling of DNA to verify “who is and who ain’t” a black
person for people to qualify for any benefits of a
financially-based reparations package?
Or, would the mere discussion of reparations and the
attendant social issues of racial rape, lynchings,
discrimination and slavery be so acrimonious that any
affirmative movement on this issue will be so toxic as to
render it stillborn?
Also, what do you do with the issues of black
Americans who went back to Africa or to the Caribbean
Islands hundreds of years ago after escaping slavery. Do
they also count into the mix of they or their progeny being
qualified for reparations?
Consider also the escaped slaves that were adopted by
friendly Native Americans (aka: Indian Tribes). Do they get
consideration for reparations?
And, where is the cut-off line for determining when
slavery ended in America? Was it when Abraham Lincoln freed
the slaves or, do we continue to count the slights and
insults and deprivations up to the current date including
the black people who have been (and still are) being
wrongfully incarcerated as another form of slavery? (See the
great reads: Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A.
Blackmon and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander).
And what algorithm or famed mathematician could even
begin to calculate the infinite money losses of black people
not being given monetary awards for their inventions, stolen
artwork, patents, music, businesses being taken from them,
trademarks, farm land being stolen, lives lost; and being
mentally and emotionally scarred by slavery and its enduring
aftermath?
Do not the millions who lost their lives in the
passage from Africa to these United States, do they not
count in the calculation of human life snuffed out or their
lives stunted when they were forced to work, without wages,
for hundreds of years in the cotton fields and other
industries by which their free labor was the critical mass
of wealth that enabled America to become the capitalistic
country that it is? (Read the book: The Half Has Never
Been Told).
Without batting an eye, a sum of $10 trillion would
hardly dent the claims of economic losses that millions of
people of color could present as their due and owing
payments against the US Treasury.
It seems that to offset such claims, the issue of
reparations would have to include intangibles such as grants
for higher education, interest free loans, monies for
housing, cash grants and monuments erected to memorialize
the incredible losses and sacrifices that people of color
made that allowed America to become the global financial
behemoth that it is.
On a smaller scale, the US government awarded
reparations to the Japanese-Americans who were wrongfully
interned in guarded camps during WWII. Thus, the concept is
not new.
It is just a larger issue that would or could deepen the
current racial divide; and it being derisively labeled by
its antagonists as an illegal demand on the US Treasury.
Just like when there is a catastrophic accident (The
BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico), the government
appointed a master who was able to gather the pieces
together, take testimony and subsequently awarded damages to
the aggrieved and economically injured parties.
Well, the issue of reparations could be stylized in
the same method or manner but with the understanding that
any such award of damages, due to its size, would have to be
paid out over 10 to 20 years; and the country would have to
sell US Treasury bonds in order to raise some or all of the
funds.
Slave-holding states would also be liable for their
complicity in the slave trade and their budgets would have
to be tapped in order to help pay for the catastrophic
damages done.
America had a choice before they imported people from
Africa and decided to enslave them, treat them as mere
chattel; and then create an artificial racial fiction about
they are people of little or no value.
In this discussion, we must not forget to include the
original settlers in this country, the Native American
Indians who were shamefully robbed of their valuable lands,
minerals and oil rights.
They were nigh practically wiped out by calculated
genocide, disease and their placement on ghetto like
reservations.
White America chose to do evil and if they are held to
account for their egregious social sins, they must do the
right thing, pay up and apologize.
Contact Lafe Tolliver at
tolliver@juno.com
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