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 Roots to Rap
Rahiel Tesfamariam
Columnist Page
Friday, March 11, 2005; Page 20
Reparations for the African Diaspora
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), which was organized in late 1987 and early 1988, was established to broaden the base of support for the long-standing reparations movement for African descendants in the United States.
According to N’COBRA, “payment may include all of the following: land, equipment, factories, licenses, banks, ships, airplanes, various forms of tax relief, education and training, to name a few. A good academic exercise would be to develop a plan for how reparations could be used collectively to enable the African community to become independent from racist institutions and economically self-sufficient for at least seven generations.”
But let’s close our eyes and imagine for a moment: over four hundred years ago, African men and women were captured and brought to unfamiliar lands throughout the western hemisphere of the world in order to be used as slave labor. America among many other nations was the setting in which astronomical crimes against humanity would be directed at a group of people whose only wrongdoing was found in the shade of their skin. This was a dark hour in human history. But unlike Native American, Jewish, and Japanese victims of subjugation, the African diaspora has yet to receive reparations. What if it happened?
Would countries whose governments supported and benefited from ante-bellum slavery make the claim that they deserved to be compensated? Would biracial individuals who once refused to acknowledge that they “got a lil’ bit of soul in ‘em” be standing in line to cash in on their Black identity? Would our community be polluted by increased sales of alcohol and illicit drugs? Would every counterfeit Jacob watch and Louis Vuitton purse be replaced by an authentic one?
Pardon me for having more faith in those who ascended from the birthplace of civilization. I envision reparations for slavery funding the very efforts that our heroes died fighting for. It might give rise to scholars of academia, allowing great minds like that of Cornell West to be cultivated. Therein may be found the medication that will prolong the lives of HIV positive patients in sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps peasant children in South America whose ancestors were brought over in shackles will find themselves liberated from the constraints of poverty. Would it mean that the American dream would for the first time become a reality for the descendants of African slaves or would it remain just that- a dream?
The issue over the African diaspora’s “inheritance” has always been a controversial one and history proves that it will remain so for a long time.
According to the Journal of Black in Higher Education, “J.P. Morgan Chase established a $5 million scholarship fund for African-American college students in Louisiana after it publicly admitted that two of its predecessor institutions had accepted slaves as collateral on loans made during the early nineteenth century. Citizens Bank and Canal Bank of New Orleans accepted 13,000 slaves as collateral on a number of loans made during the 1831 to 1866 period. On several occasions plantation owners defaulted on the loans and the bank became the owner of 1,250 black slaves. The disclosure did not say what the banks did with the slaves once they became bank property. Presumably they were sold in one of many New Orleans' slave markets.”
Another fight in reparations is in relation to the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921. Many are still pressing forward to amend the devastation endured by the Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma during the destruction of “Black Wall Street.”
One thing is for sure in all of this, Europe and the United States cannot continue to sweep this issue under the rug; the time has come for substantive and ongoing dialogue about this issue.
For more information, visit www.ncobra.org and www.tulsareparations.org.
For Rahiel Tesfamariam send email to rahielt@washingtoninformer.com. |
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