In God We Trust

A Discussion on “Reparations”  

 

By Dr. Rolando M. Ochoa

For years the topic of reparations in the U.S. due to slavery, has been tossed around with little or no results. Lately, it has surfaced again with more strength and added potency provided by the current political and social atmosphere. The slaves who, during the Atlantic Slavery Period (16th to 18th Centuries) were brought to the United States mainly from West Africa, were taken from their families and countries, and those who survived the terrible trip, were forced to work mainly as agricultural laborers.

As of June 1, 2022 the California Reparations Task Force issued an interim 500-page report which was announced by the state’s attorney general Rob Bonta in his website. The task force is composed of nine members: eight African Americans and one Japanese American. There are four women and five men on this panel. The panel’s recommendations are to provide reparations for the group of African Americans, who can claim to be descendants of those slaves, due to atrocities perpetrated during and after slavery. The panel’s recommendation also called for these reparations to be applied, not only in California, but in the entire nation.

According to Free Dictionary.com

(https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/reparations)

“Proponents of slave reparations maintain that the
 U.S. government owes
the descendants of slaves a formal
 acknowledgement and apology for the 
inhumanity of slavery. 
They
 also believe that the government should seek 
ways to
 provide some form of tangible restitution to slave descendants.”

The same website defines reparations as: “The making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”

Those of us who believe that slavery was a grave injustice, could look at reparations as a way to correct that injustice, but it is not that simple. Nothing is! The more I thought about it and the more research I did to educate myself on the background and history of slavery, the more I realized that it is a very complex situation.

Historically, slavery in Africa began centuries before the Atlantic Slave Period when many countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe were buying and slavering the people of Africa. Slavery, in most cases, was the principal source of income for the many tribes who fought each other in order to enslave those who belonged to the losing tribe. Slavery was “Big Business” for the powerful tribes and its rulers. Even though slavery is now outlawed in most countries in Africa, it is still going on in the 21st century.

When those in the New World needed manual labor, they turned to Africa for slaves. The demand was high and those who supplied the slaves, through slave traders, captured the poor souls who were put into ships and sent to the colonies in America and many other countries in the Caribbean and South America. The plantation owners in the colonies, the majority of them of European descent, bought them from the slave traders and exploited them under inhumane conditions.

This process continued even after the United States’ Independence in 1776. The descendants of the original European plantation owners, now Americans, continued the practice until the end of the Civil War, 1865, when the slaves were thereafter emancipated. As a side note, the economy of those African countries supplying the slaves suffered an enormous decline after the abolition of slavery was enacted throughout the civilized world. Some say those African countries have never recovered.

In my mind there are three important questions that need to be answered before a fair and impartial decision can be reached:

Are direct descendants of those slaves entitled to reparations?

Are direct descendants of those responsible for slaving these poor souls responsible and accountable for reparations?

Is the government of the United States and its tax payers responsible for reparations even for the descendants of those who became slaves in the U.S. territory before its independence? 

One can easily see how difficult it would be to determine the facts in order to answer these questions. The first two are almost impossible to accurately determine. In the first question I would answer, yes, but how do you know with certainty that an African American living in the U.S. now is a descendant of slaves? Not all African Americans are descendants of the slaves who came during the Atlantic Slavery Period. Many people of African descent came to the U.S. after the emancipation as immigrants, not only from Africa, but also from other countries. What about those of mixed races?   

In the second question I would answer yes also, but this is even more difficult than the first one because there were many links in the chain of slavery who should be made responsible and accountable for reparations:

·         The descendants of the tribal leaders in Africa who slaved their people and then sold them.

·         The descendants of the slave traders who bought them.

·         The descendants of the ship owners and captains who transported them.

·         The descendants of the European and American plantation owners who bought them and exploited them.

·         The countries that had laws permitting slavery.

 

How are we to find the descendants of all these people? If reparations are to be fair, they must include the descendants of the entire chain of slavery and not only the last link. How much money should the reparations be? How could one distribute the amount of the responsibility and accountability of reparations among all of these five (links) groups?

After one determines the answers to the first two questions, if one could ever do, the third question could be addressed. It would be obvious that the descendants of those slaves who came during the time England, Spain, and France dominated the territory, would have to seek reparations from these three countries’ governments. The rest, descendants of those who came after the U.S. independence, should receive some sort of proportional reparation from the U.S. given the unjust laws which were in place during that time. Can all these facts be obtained and validated?

There is legal precedent which does not exactly fit this case, but could be used as a guide. During World War II, after the attack at Pearl Harbor and as a precaution fearing a Japanese invasion of the U.S., the U.S. incarcerated approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry (77,000 American citizens and the rest legal aliens) Those individuals lost their jobs, businesses, and many possessions. These camps, where they were kept in very poor conditions, were closed in 1946.   

According to Free Dictionary.com

(https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/reparations)

“For 40 years Japanese Americans sought reparations for their
 wartime 
imprisonment and loss of property.

The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (50 App. U.S.C.A. § 1989b) amounted to an apology from the U.S. government for the
 wartime internment of Japanese 
Americans. The act established
 a $1.25 billion trust fund for paying 
reparations. Each of the approximately 60,000 surviving internees 
received
 $20,000 tax 
free.”

The recipients of these reparations were actual sufferers of the unjust treatment and not the descendants. The incarceration was a questionable decision made during the time of war and confusion, not to be compared to slavery. 

Another angle to consider has to do with the historically high infant mortality rate in Sub-Saharan Africa. This area carries the world’s highest infant mortality rate even now, after many years of modernization. In 2004, 101 of 1,000 live births died. West Africa was even worse with 114 of 1,000 live births died. These compare to 57 for the World, 9 for Europe, and 7 for North America according to The International Bank of Reconstruction and Development of the World Bank. In 2011, 38% of the Global neonatal deaths occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa. 1 in 9 children died before the age of 5 in Sub-Sharan Africa while 1 in 152 was the average of children dying in developed countries in 2011. I could imagine that during the time of the Atlantic Slave Period these numbers were a lot worse in West Africa.

You are probably wondering why am I giving these statistics and what do they have to do with reparations?

At the risk of sounding cynical and not sensitive to the horrors of slavery, I would like to propose the following counter argument to reparations.

If slavery in the U.S. and the Atlantic Slave Trade would have never happened, most of the descendants now living in the U.S. would have not been born because their West Africa’s ancestors would have died at birth or would have not lived to be 5 years old. In essence, the horrible experience of slavery gave these descendants the opportunity to be born, to live, and multiply as they did.

Looking at all these different factors, I see slavery as an unfortunate and terrible episode in the history of mankind and of the U.S., but like most events, it has some positive results. Even though African Americans have suffered discrimination and persecution for many years after the emancipation, things changed for the better in the 1960s due to the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Affirmative Action executive orders enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and many other legislations have provided, not a perfect situation, but one where the descendants of the slaves had and have the opportunity to live in the freest country on earth and where there are opportunities for everyone who is willing to work hard.

Many of those descendants of slaves, have taken advantage of these opportunities and are now very successful professionals, doctors, lawyers, teachers, college professors, business owners, entertainers, sports figures, politicians, judges, high-ranking military officers, and hard-working decent people represented in almost every type of job and activity.

Maybe this is the reparation. African Americans took advantage of these opportunities and earned better living conditions than they would have had in West Africa with their effort and hard work. In my opinion, hand-outs would likely diminish the dignity of many African Americans.