What about the Bailout for Blacks – Reparations?
January 11, 2009 by Staff
Filed under News, Weekly Columns
(Akiit.com) As he takes office as the 44th President of the United States Barack Obama still declines to discuss Black reparations.
But it is a question Obama will have to address sooner or later. Claims for reparations for being held in slavery haven’t reached a U.S. president’s desk since that of Obama’s idol, Abraham Lincoln.
Reparations for slavery is a proposal that some type of compensation be provided to descendants of enslaved people in consideration of the labor provided for free over several centuries, which has been a substantive and influential factor in the nation’s development. The prospect of payment is not new.
In 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15 granting each freed family forty acres of tillable land in the Georgia Sea Islands and around Charleston, South Carolina for the exclusive use of black people who had been enslaved. The army gave mules to settlers. President Andrew Johnson reversed the order after Lincoln was assassinated and the land was returned to its previous owners.
Black slaves built America for free, including the nation’s Capitol and the White House. It’s important that the nation’s 44th President do what the 17th President did not do to properly atone for the ills of slavery – A system that gave rise to poverty, landlessness, underdevelopment, as well as to the crushing of culture and language, loss of identity, inculcation of inferiority among blacks, and the indoctrination of whites into a racist mindset – all of which continue to this day to affect the prospects and quality of Black People’s lives.
America, and its companies, were “unjustly enriched” by a system that enslaved and exploited blacks. The Wall Street banks, and its investors, that the nation is writing checks to built America’s infrastructure on the backs of blacks. The number of legal claimants for compensation is undetermined, but Obama could consider a $10,000 annual “slavery tax credit” to Americans who can show themselves descendents of slaves. Some two dozen members of Congress are co-sponsors of legislation to create a commission that would study reparations – that is, payments and programs to make up for the damage done by slavery.
The bill, US House of Representative Resolution 40 “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act” should be addressed so that such a commission will address who, what and how much is due. The NAACP supports the legislation. Cities around the country, including Obama’s home of Chicago, have endorsed the idea, and so has a major union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The old dog-eared adage that “the nation couldn’t afford to pay” has been eliminated with the Wall Street buyouts.
If Obama has the confidence to think outside the box, he’ll realize what economic stimulus reparations payments would be. The question has always been about how America would raise money to pay reparations, but if they can bailout the infrastructure’s entrepreneurs to save America, what about bailing out the people who built it?
Written By William Reed