REPARATIONS

It’s funny how reparations to descendants of the enslaved are not discussed, even during Black History Month. America has paid reparations to Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and Holocaust survivors. America indirectly assisted Japan in rebuilding its economy after World War II. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on Humanitarian, Developmental, Military, and Economic Assistance to foreign countries. Still, America cannot bring itself to right a wrong that it embraced as an expedient means to birth a nation allegedly based on personal and religious freedom.

America would have been a failed ideology if it were not for the strength and knowledge that the enslaved brought with them from Africa.

Reparations would not be hard to do, but America does not have the will to do it. Paying reparations would be acknowledging all the lies that America has told itself. The truth about the founding fathers, the distortion of religion, how racism and classism work to maintain the status quo, etc.…. The U. S. Government used slaves to build the White House and other federal buildings. The government also used slaves for canal improvements. Every area of American life benefitted from slave labor. Banking, shipping, railroads, insurance, textiles, universities, etc.....

Reparations should be paid by the families that accumulated generational wealth from slavery but also from the government and institutions that made money off the broken bodies, hearts, and spirits of people torn from their homelands and worked to death on American plantations. Reparations to the descendants of the ones that survived the beatings, near starvation, rapes, separation once again from familial ties, and the denial of basic human dignity. These are the truths that reparations would acknowledge and begin to right a devastating wrong.