Forcing upon people the option of work or death is more than just slavery. It is assuming the role of God. However, people are not God. Therefore, racists embrace one of the highest forms of wickedness possible and violate God’s First Commandment.
What racists in 1619 (and now) do not grasp is this: Their hearts are evil and their minds dwell in delusion. Reparations counter that evil and undermine the delusion by returning what was wrongfully taken from innocent people, namely, their blood, sweat, body, mind, years, and tears.
Intellectually and historically, we are “beyond” debating the properness and overdue nature of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans. The correctness of reparations is evident in the following acts which recognized the need to “make whole”: payment to Japanese Americans interned during World War II; payment to victims of the Nazi Holocaust by Germany; post-Civil War legislation activated in 1865 providing 40 acres and a mule for formally enslaved Africans; and in 1989, U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ House of Representatives Bill 40 to establish a commission to develop proposals for African American reparations.The bill continues to be introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Sen. Cory Booker).
The arguments against reparations appear to be based on a lack of knowledge about America’s history, not appreciating the centrality of justice in America’s judicial system, some notion of difficulty in identifying descendants of enslaved Africans, or some personal aversion to making the wronged “whole” when the wronged are descendants of enslaved Africans. All such arguments fail on historical, legal, practical, moral, justice, or/and knowledge grounds.
Arguably, the premier scholarly work on reparations is William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kristen Mullen’s published work “From Here To Equality” (Second Edition, 2020). The history and research in this work are second to none. It proves that the labor from enslaved Africans is the reason for America “as we know it.” Consider the following: Slave-grown and slave-harvested cotton was more than just a profitable crop, it was America’s currency; the lawsuit filed by the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association revealed that the U.S. owed the freedmen $68 million based on the amount it collected from the sale of slave-grown and slave-harvested cotton; Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain and Belgium depended on slave-grown cotton by the end of the 18th century. The majestic words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” were written by Thomas Jefferson. Historian David McCullough wrote this about Mr. Jefferson’s reliance on slaves: “It was not just that slaves worked his fields; they cut his firewood, cooked and served his meals, washed and ironed his linen, brushed his suits, nursed his children, cleaned, scrubbed, polished, opened and closed doors for him, saddled his horse, turned down his bed, waited on him hand and foot from dawn to dusk.”. The economic beneficiaries of Black slave labor and destroyed Black lives are the North, newspapers, railroads, steamboats, insurers, bankers and brokers, textile industries, clothiers like Brooks Brothers, ivory production, the building industry, and America’s great universities like Harvard College, Brown University, College of William & Mary, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, and Columbia University; Black lives were the price paid for the foundation, existence, and continued success of America.
Finally, the remains of the “slavery mindset” continue to plague America. In study after study, Black skin or voice has produced unemployment and lower wages even when Black people were more educated, attended more prestigious universities, and held “squeaky clean” backgrounds compared to whites (even when some whites had criminal records).
In fact, the intense efforts to hamper Black economic growth and prosperity amount to something unbelievably un-Godly. Nonetheless, reparations are due and owed to the descendants of enslaved Africans, and while a lack of historical records make it difficult to accurately calculate an amount for reparations, the racial wealth disparity is an excellent indicator.
With certain adjustments for Black and white household sizes, the disparity reveals minimally $350,000 per individual as a good starting place to make the wronged “whole.”
The Rev. Rickey Nelson Jones is president of the NAACP for Anne Arundel County.