Reparations for 250 Years of Slavery: Too Much to Ask? Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Granma International Digital, September 6, 2001 http://www.granma.cu The United States and Racism: ARE REPARATIONS FOR TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES OF SLAVERY TOO MUCH TO ASK? The issue of financial compensation to all descendants of Africans who were victims of slavery is gaining force in the United States. Racial problems in that country can never be solved if there is no compensation offered to the victims of the "massive crime of slavery." by Jean Guy Allard WHERE racism is concerned, the United States suffers from a great aversion that has nothing to do with Zionism, the official justification for its virtual absence at the Durban conference. In fact this aversion is associated with a much less publicized issue but one that is none the less present in the conference documents, that of reparations for the victims of slavery. That sentiment is likewise shared by other former colonial powers such as Germany, Belgium, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands and Portugal, all of which are refusing to beg amends for slavery. All of this has occurred despite an energetic call from Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who declared that there must be a collective realization of the terrible exploitation and violations of human rights and crimes against humanity committed in the past, a comment strongly applauded by participants at the conference in South Africa. The issue of "reparations" or, in other words, financial compensation for all the descendants of the millions of African victims of slavery--without any doubt the biggest crime against humanity ever committed--has gained force in various sectors of the African-American community over the last few years. More and more citizens from this minority group, constantly oppressed by so much injustice, are demanding it. Among other works that have aroused the will to demand reparations, Randall Robinson's book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, has had particular impact. In his investigation, published last year, Robinson reaches the conclusion that U.S. racial problems can never be resolved unless compensation is offered for the "massive crime of slavery." The author recalls that the U.S. government demanded 100 slaves to build the Washington Capitol building, an alleged symbol of freedom and democracy. The owners of those slaves received five dollars per month for each forced laborer. Subsequently, forced labor helped to clear the land for the rest of the District of Columbia. The principle of reparations was recognized in 1865 by William Tecumseh at the end of the War of Succession. The military leader confiscated land from confederate slave owners in order to divide it up into 40-acre lots, which he granted to former slaves. Each land concession was accompanied by a mule. This valiant gesture of social justice was short-lived. After the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln his successor Andrew Jackson hurriedly vetoed the measure and returned the properties to the wealthy landowners. Contrary to what the White House would have everyone believe, those who defend the idea of reparations are not only motivated by the suffering of hundreds of thousands of slaves who were exploited in the State of the Union but also by the current victims of the legacy of that infamous period in history. According to David A. Love, producer of the Pacific Radio program Democracy Now!, in 1996, 39.5% of U.S. children of African origin were living in poverty, and the infant mortality rate in African-American communities was more than double the figure in white communities. He also stresses that racial inequality is obvious, more than anywhere else, within the prison population, where there are eight times more African-Americans than whites. After the brief recognition of 1865, the principle of reparations was sidelined and received little support until 1989, when the Democratic representative for Michigan, John Conyers Jr., introduced a bill for the creation of a commission to evaluate damages of any kind resulting from slavery, with the aim of supporting eventual claims. Since then, Conyers has repeated the gesture every year. Although that legislative proposal never succeeded, as can well be imagined, the idea gradually gained force within the African-American community. Now various progressive groups have given their backing to the idea of demanding governmental reparations as well as compensation from corporations that used and abused the slave labor force. One national organization, the Washington-based Reparations Coordinating Committee, plans to file a legal claim against the U.S. government. That committee is headed by Charles Ogletree, a legal professor at Harvard and Randall N. Robinson himself, author and founder of the TransAfrica lobby group. According to a recent article in The New York Times, heightened interest in the subject has been illustrated recently on several fronts. . A law currently operating in the state of California requires insurance companies to search through their files and those of their legal predecessors and inform the state of any life insurance policies sold to slave owners for their hands. . In March, a committee in the state of Oklahoma set up to investigate the bloody riots of 1921 recommended compensation payments to the survivors and descendants of that tragic event in which thousands of whites attacked a prosperous black area, destroying houses and businesses and killing more than 40 people. . The multi-million Aetna insurance company formally apologized in March 2000 for having drafted policies for slave owners on the lives of their slaves. Three months later The Hartford Courant, which had run a front-page article on Aetna's apology, published a front-page apology of its own for having run advertisements for the sale and capture of slaves. The New York daily points out that the idea of reparations is rejected by a wide majority of whites, but is currently being supported by a surprising number of African-Americans. All the large organizations representing this minority group are backing the claim. FIVE BILLION USD In December 2000, leaders from Germany, Eastern Europe and the United States signed a historic agreement to compensate to the value of five billion dollars for Nazi slave laborers and their families. Madeleine Albright, secretary of state during the Clinton administration, welcomed the agreement as an initial attempt to compensate "those whose labor was stolen or coerced during a time of outrage and shame." The agreement was signed under heavy pressure from the United States. Thus, many African-Americans asked themselves: If this country could pressure others in this case, why doesn't it pressure itself and consider the issue of slavery on its own territory? This question is yet more poignant when one considers that in the recent past the Washington government paid reparations to Japanese-Americans interned in World War II as well as to some American Indian communities. The reasoning is just but the absence of senior representatives from the Bush administration at the Durban conference, precisely convened on an issue so fundamental to the United States as racism, leads to an evaluation of how the White House perceives such a debate. The African-American struggle for authentic reparations is far from being over. Copyright (c) 2001 Granma International Digital ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-09.07.01-05:58:26-28697