An Unbiased Look at Reparations

It is no secret that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has committed a plethora of appalling and callous atrocities during its brief two and a half century lifespan. The history of the United States is marred with multiple acts of widespread methodical and systematic forced incarceration, enslavement, regional expulsion and genocide against different races that is completely unjustifiable, horrendous and ultimately utterly evil. Prior to and after the inception of this country, the native people of America were slaughtered by the millions, forced from their land and rounded up onto government designated plots of land When Europeans entered North America in the 1500's, there were 12 million Native Americans and by the 20^th century only 250,000 remained. The Native American population will never be what it once was before American involvement and centuries later is still dealing with the repercussions of the ignorant philosophy of Manifest Destiny.

Between the 1600's and 1860's, almost ten million indigenous peoples of Africa were unexpectedly hunted down and captured and then forcefully enslaved and shipped to the Americas. By the time the U.S. Census of 1860 took place, only four million slaves remained. It took a civil war in the 1860's to inadvertently bring slavery to an end and another one hundred years for the descendants of those slaves to receive even a percentage of the rights enjoyed by white Americans. Even after the civil war, blacks were discriminated against in the form of Jim Crow laws and numerous public lynchings by racist mobs.

During World War II, fearing reprisals and sabotage, 100,000 Japanese Americans were stripped of all of their possessions, money and freedom and forced to live in internment camps in the west until the end of the war. They had to sell off all of their property and had their bank accounts frozen. They were forced to live in hastily built internment camps or other facilities that were poorly retrofitted to handle the influx of people. Often times the living quarters of these captives were mere school gyms with cots or cramped rooms bulging at the sides from the overcrowding. Once the war had culminated, the Japanese Americans were freed from captivity but were unable to retrieve any of their possessions, property or money, a sum totaling into the billions. The government passed a law allowing the newly released Japanese to attempt to retrieve their belongings but there was a catch as the Japanese had to provide documentation noting the missing property. Because the previous years tax forms had already been destroyed there was no way to provide a duplicate and since all property was confiscated it was nearly impossible to prove what losses were incurred. Therefore out of the literally billions of dollars in businesses, property, money and not to mention freedom lost because of the internment, only 37 million dollars was ever remunerated.

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Guantanamo Bay Naval base was retrofitted from a camp holding Haitian and Cuban refugees to a detainment camp for "enemy combatants" who are primarily of Arabic or Persian descent. Over 1,000 "enemy combatants" have been housed there since 2001 without ever being charged of a single crime as the Geneva code isn't acknowledged there and habeas corpus has been suspended as it was during the Civil War and World War II. These "prisoners" were rounded up from around the world and accused of crimes against America or of being potential threats to America although nothing was ever substantiated due to the lack of even a single trial.

Mass discrimination encompassing an entire group of peoples has been a common theme during the history of this country and there hasn't been one century spanning the four centuries this country has either partially or wholly existed during, that some form of organized discrimination against an entire population of people hasn't occurred. From the first landing of European colonial settlers in America in the 1600's up through the 19^th century, Native Americans were persecuted. From the beginning of the slave trade in the 1600's up through the 19^th century Africans were ripped from their homelands and forced to work in cotton fields. During America's participation in World War II in the 20^th century, Japanese Americans were rounded up and forced into internment camps and during the 21^st century, foreigners and citizens alike have been imprisoned in a remote prison tantamount to a penal colony in Cuba without due process. Because of the aforementioned gross negligence of the American government, treaties and acts have been put into effect to try to counter act or recompense for the countless acts of baseless discrimination that have occurred in this country on the behalf of the government.

During the late1800's and 1900's over 250 treaties and agreements between the American government and Indian tribes took place resulting in the creation of a Native American trust fund overseen by the U.S. government as well as 55.7 million of acres of land. The trust fund is populated by monies accrued from land, mineral and timber rights on land once inherently owned by the Native Americans through indigenous habitation over thousands of years. The trust fund set up annually pays out $450 million dollars to the remaining Indian population and has given sovereignty to the 55.7 million acres of land to them as well. Although these payments of land and monies to the Native Americans in no way, shape, or form justifies or makes up for the centuries of Manifest Destiny driven atrocities, slaughter and genocide, it is a step in the right direction.

In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which formally apologized to the previously interned Japanese Americans and offered $20,000 to every surviving detainee. The total amount given out was 1.2 billion dollars and in 1992, President H. W. Bush amended the initial act and added to it 400 million dollars to be dispersed among the surviving detainees. A total of 1.6 billion dollars and two formal apologies have been given by the U.S. government but as is the case with the Native Americans, that doesn't make the systematic incarceration of 100,000 plus people a forgivable or permissible act. Although compensation does help, in all actuality this remorseful compensation is more or less just the repayment of monies, properties and freedoms stolen from the Japanese during the Second World War.

Even the "enemy combatants" who occupy Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have seen some relief of sorts. Because of the almost decade long incarceration of some of the prisoners, some of the prisoners have attempted to sue the American government for wrongful imprisonment as they have yet to be charged of any crime or even simply be told of what they were arrested for. Furthermore, many have been the victim of torture or extremely harsh interrogations with the hope of mining some form of advantageous information and have no way to protect themselves from these inhumane practices. Some of the inhabitants of this billion dollar fortress in the sand probably do deserve some form of penal incarceration for their actions, but it is impossible to decipher who is innocent and who is guilty when no trials are held and confessions to crimes are given only after years of incarceration and countless instances of torture or abuse. Because of this, the newly elected President Obama has put forth legislation to close the prison and release its inhabitants.

On January 15^th, 1865, Major General Sherman issued Special Order 15, which stated that all freed slaves were to be given a 40 acre parcel of land as well as a mule to be used in the tilling of the land. The original ideology behind this action was that there would need to be somewhere to put the massive amount of freed slaves now roaming the south and the land taken from the surrounding area of Charleston, South Carolina during the battles of the civil war was a perfect area. Furthermore, the U.S. Army now had an excess of mules it used during the war and found it would be easier and cheaper to distribute them to the freed slaves than transport them elsewhere. After the order was given, approximately 40,000 freed slaves were given around 400,000 acres of land in South Carolina as well as a mule for each family. This order stood until after the assassination of President Lincoln, after which time the incoming president Andrew Johnson reversed the order and gave all of the land back to the white southerners who owned it prior to the war. In 1867, a senator put forth a bill to have the promised land redistributed to the freed slaves but the bill never passed. Because of this promise by the U.S. Government as well as subsequent treaties with the Native Americans and Japanese, many Americans feel as if the government owes the descendants of slaves a monetary sum for the forced labor and profits reaped prior to the abolishment of slavery.

Although all four of the previously mentioned racial groups have all endured some form of inhumane act on behalf of the U.S. government, all three have seen or will see at least some sort of restitution on behalf of the government for its appalling actions. The only group and possibly largest, the African American community has seen no restitution, compensation or reimbursement for the 180 years their ancestors were enslaved and forced to labor on plantations and farms. In fact, it wasn't until 2008, over 150 years after the end of slavery, that the government finally officially apologized for slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow laws that soon followed. I'm not trying to gauge which of the four previously mentioned sustained atrocities is the most severe as I feel there is no way to properly do so and that all four are equally repulsive in nature and ramification.. I just feel that because of the precedents set by the government in previous similar cases as well as the broken promise of restitution to blacks after the Civil War, that the inclusion of reparation to African Americans is not only a necessary action but also the morally correct one as well. Studies have been done that show that during American slavery, over 100,000,000 man hours of unpaid labor were forced upon the slaves over the course of 180 years. Furthermore, statistics have been brought forth showing that with compounded interest and inflation factored in, those 100,000,000 hours of labor would equate to over 40 trillion dollars owed to the slaves and/or their ancestors. Those adjusted figures aren't even including the time from colonial America to the actual creation of our country and if were included, the statistics would jump to 222, 505,049 unpaid man hours and 100 trillion dollars of necessary restitution. Furthermore, these numbers account for only the lost wages of the slaves and not the monumental sums of money acquired and accumulated by the government and various companies in the form of profits from business endeavors whose products or services were the direct result of slavery. If those figures were added to the already colossal sum of money previously mentioned, the ensuing sum could effortlessly surpass one quadrillion dollars. Dozens of Fortune 500 companies have admitted guilt in profiting from slavery yet it took America a century and a half to do the same. America was founded on land stolen from the Native Americans and their ancestors are being compensated for it but America was built on the backs of slaves and their ancestor's haven't seen a penny.

I generally don't like when a specific group or race is singled out whether for good or bad because it could cause jealousy among races and eventual reprisal racism even if the result of the specificity is on a positive note. I personally feel as if reparations in some level of extent for all of the groups mentioned above, like Affirmative Action mentioned in a previous chapter are a necessary evil. I wish certain points in history hadn't occurred in order to necessitate or facilitate such policies but when such gross negligence is at play, it honestly takes an act of equal power to negate or right said negligence. My dilemma with reparations for blacks is two fold because I feel they are a necessary tool to attempt to right wrongs of the past but at the same time I struggle as to come to a conclusion on how to best positively affect the black community as well as how biracial peoples are to be included as they too feel the results of centuries of disenfranchisement of minorities and are the direct result of slavery as without slavery, there would have been no Africans in America and therefore no blacks in America and subsequently no possibility for blacks and whites to mix causing biracialism.

Although the obvious initial victims of slavery, the slaves themselves, are no longer alive, I think that slavery as an institution as well as subsequent racism such as Jim Crow laws brought about a vicious circle of oppression that hindered the black community as a whole. There is a disproportionate number of black and biracial peoples in prison, unemployed, or other wise uneducated past the twelfth grade level if that and although a lot of these are the result of poor choices and planning of the individual person, it is safe to say that the disenfranchisement of blacks brought about by the initial enslavement of their ancestors is the overall root cause and origin of the ills that inflict these communities now. Because of this, I feel as if the modern ancestors of the slaves should receive the due recompense of their predecessors in order to try and fund an internal restructuring of black communities and their ideologies and mentalities for the future overall betterment of their community. Furthermore, I believe that because of preceding laws such as the One Drop Rule, which designated that a person is considered black if they have any African ancestry also allows biracial people of black heritage to entitlement as they have endured their share of racism and disenfranchisement as well. A precedent to back this up would be the fact that Native Americans who aren't wholly 100% Native American are still entitled to recompense designated by a staggered scale of percentage of Native American ancestry.

Unlike the majority of Reparations supporters, I don't feel as if a lump sum of trillions of dollars would be the best avenue of approach to this quandary because simply put, America just doesn't have that much money. To remove trillions of dollars from the Federal Reserve would be disastrous to the American economy and thus detrimental to all of its citizens which would defeat the purpose of the equal advancement of all races within this nation. Literal lump sum payments to blacks would be a detrimental action as money depreciates in value and doesn't necessarily bring about advantageous results. If given a lump sum, once the money was exhausted, there would be no further betterment of the community therefore another approach is more plausible. It is my expressed opinion that the most sensible method of compensation would be in the form of government aid, as well as the creation of better inner city schools, the creation of community centers, etc. If trusts similar to the one set up for Native Americans were established for the sole purpose of funding such endeavors as free health care, college grant programs, day care, employment assistance, food distribution, etc., then the overall effect on the community would be researchable and it would eradicate any misuse of reparation money. This approach would benefit both minorities and America itself in multiple ways.

As far as the education sector is concerned, there are several ways to both improve the lives of minorities as well as improve America as a whole. For instance, setting up a trust fund for minority college students that awarded each student a fixed amount of money to be used towards tuition, books, and Room and board would alleviate a burden for the lower class families struggling to attempt to send their children to college. This would lead to less people in debt as well as higher rates of secondary education in America. Furthermore, a retroactive action would be loan forgiveness for previous minority students and this would positively affect their spending potential which would spur the economy. Building new schools and community centers in predominantly minority populated areas would not only create jobs but also increase the value of education received in the inner cities. This would lead to higher graduation a rate which subsequently leads to less crime, unemployment, etc. Better AIDS and teenage pregnancy prevention education, both of which are serious problems in black communities, would also greatly benefit the society at large.

As far as health care is concerned, free health care for minority children would also be a beneficial asset to America as it would increase the number of healthy citizens and in the long run lead to longer average life expectancies. Increased life expectancies would lead to increased national growth potential and would benefit all of America. Subsidized health care for uninsured minorities until they can find employment that provides health care would have the same effect, as would subsidized prescriptions.

Lower fixed rates on mortgages or tax breaks for minorities would stabilize the housing market as well as allow more people to own their homes. Free day care services would allow more minorities on welfare or other government aid the ability to rejoin the workforce as in some cases it is more advantageous for them to stay unemployed and receive welfare than to gain employment and pay thousands of dollars in day care costs. Employment assistance would decrease the number of people drawing unemployment as well as bolter the number of employed which could subsequently decrease the number of welfare recipients and uninsured.

Overall, the creation of a reparation fund for the ancestors of slaves would not only have a positive effect on those previously oppressed communities but would also benefit America as a nation in the long run. It would restore hope into the hearts of millions of minorities who feel as if literal equality will never be achieved. Most of the programs I propose both help minorities break free from the vicious cycle of poverty as well as prepare the future generations for productive lives. These programs would only help fulfill disenfranchised people's hopes of achieving the American dream.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery