Reparations Blunders and the Continued Mistreatment of All Humans
The world is blundering and fumbling with the concept of reparations for the transatlantic slave trade.
To say that many people, whites, Asians, Latin people, or whoever do not like Blacks and Africans across the globe is not hearsay, but an established fact. There is a whole scholarly literature on anti-Blackness that confirms this. There is a whole discussion about maltreatment of Black people that supports this assertion. But even in whites, Asians, and Latin people’s dislike for Blacks, there is a still a need to understand that the issue of reparations for African Americans stands well beyond feelings and emotions of like and dislike. Reparations is a matter of human justice and one with far-reaching consequences.
The United States, the very society that committed the most vile and horrific acts of brutalizing and trading in humans, has state officials who trumpet discourses against recourse for gross injustices. In doing so, it sets a dangerous precedent for the mistreatment of other groups.
Even on the so-called liberal side of the aisle, whites like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, part-whites like Kamala Harris, and Latin people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignore the reparations issue or they try to bend it to their favor. Failing to address the true matter at heart and in its core, these politicians are doing a gross disservice to the human rights for all people.
Recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is a representative of United States politics, mentioned support for: a reparations for all minorities and all who have suffered injustices, with a long list of causes to push within her agenda. This was a huge blunder for the young politician. She coupled reparations for African Americans with issues to support anyone and everyone—ranging from tuition-free public colleges, to healthcare improvements, to addressing white men’s addiction to drugs—and in doing so, she inadvertently made a huge mistake.
This mistake it not one of which she and other people are unaware, because they have intentionally framed their language of reparations in this way from time immemorial. Yet it is a mistake, because it will assure that the United States will never be respected as a nation; this brief era of white European rule will never be recognized in the ranks of great civilizations, much less as a civilization at all. When people refuse to atone for their egregious violence, their history will never be written in their favor. They will forever be remembered as a barbaric people who were wholly satisfied, smug even, in their fanatical commitment to barbaric acts.
Moreover, and perhaps more pressing for the present day, allowing the issue of reparations for African Americans to go unaddressed and unresolved has the immediate effect of chilling responses to any gross acts of mistreatment and injustice that occur in the current moment. The lackadaisical reaction to reparations sets a precedent for nonresponse to other issues of human rights: So people are being kidnapped and trafficked… So people are being detained at borders and split up from their children with no rights to legal counsel… So people are being labeled terrorists and executed without trial…
The world has turned a blind eye to hundreds of years of the transatlantic slave trade in which white Europeans and Americans ran amok with human lives and the lives of human posterity. And there has been absolutely no reaction or recourse to this injustice. The world today will continue to ignore the gross injustices that occur now, unless a precedent is set that human rights matter. There is no issue on this planet that will emphasize this agenda more than resolving the reparations debate.
If any honest person spends some hours studying the era of the transatlantic slave trade and what African Americans during that era endured; If any honest person spends some hours browsing photographs of emaciated people with little food and water whose dark skins have darkened further from coerced labor under squelching summer heat; If any honest person spends some days reading the meticulous documentation white Europeans and white Americans kept on human beings who they fancied not as humans but as their inventory; If any honest person spends some nights putting themselves in the shoes of those captives, shackled by wrist, waist, and ankle, packed like sardines, on slave ships, nauseated by the acrid smell of human feces, salt water and a rocking ship; If any honest person spends some time wincing at images of welted backs, forged by white European and European American hands and their violent whips; If any honest person reads the accounts of white European and European American male and female rape, molestation, sodomy, and cannibalism of African American men, women, and children; If any honest person comes to terms with generations upon generations of African Americans having endured this pain and horror, this terror for hundreds of years, and still comes away with nonchalance for human dignity, then only the reality of the pervasive inhumanity and monstrous barbarism in the world today, which is rooted in an Anti-Blackness, can explain away that peculiar proclivity.
The reparations discussion is not at all a debate—or at least in any civilized world, it would not be. It is the most pressing human rights issue of our time. If this gross injustice and mistreatment will continue to go unresolved, unpunished, and unaddressed… If this gross injustice and mistreatment will be swept under the rug and thrown under the bus… Well, so be it for this period of humankind. It cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with other eras. It will only be remembered for this irredeemable barbarism. So be it, for its largest blunder will be the standard by which all other issues should be similarly and willfully disrespected.
There is no mistaking that if we do not fiercely advocate for atonement via reparations for African Americans, we set the stage for the same or worse to happen elsewhere without sympathy or recourse. No matter the personal feelings of like or dislike, no matter the selfish desires to advance one group of people over another, ultimately the rights for all humans today will be measured by this single action or inaction.
Your contention that everyone “does not like blacks and that is a fact” is not a fact. The fact is that ignorance comes in all colors. We are one with differences in many different colors as well as other attributes, but ignorance is more rampant than all disease. Yes the world needs an adjustment; A NEW ENLIGHTENMENT BASED ON HUMAN RIGHTS, NOT IGNORANCE AND STORYBOOKS.
” ignorance is more rampant than all disease.”
I agree and you seem to be very ignorant
Fred F. Jones, many scholars have written countless tomes about Racial Ignorance. It is a straw-man argument. It is beating about the bush. Let’s all commit crimes of inhumanity towards one another and let’s all point to Racial Ignorance as the culprit. How about that?
When you make Racial Ignorance as a culprit, what then is the solution? A book? What book? Education? What education? It seems as though only non-Black people seem to be woefully ignorant about the equal humanity of Black people around the globe. What that means is simple: they are Racist!
Ignorance is a nothing straw-man to obfuscate the issue, to confuse and confound those who refuse to see and listen. There’s no such thing as Ignorance when you are violent. What? You don’t know that raping a woman is wrong? You need to learn that in school? You need an education? Yet we entertain the idea of Ignorance as the reason for white peoples monstrous inhumanity towards Black people. It’s beating about the bush. It means, absolutely, nothing!
Chelle Adorno lol! Chelle, you may be right !
Narmer Amenuti perhaps i do not explain myself well enough. There is an Objective Truth that is based in the scientific method. That truth states that there is only One Race of Homo Sapiens on this rock and that axiom does not change with all the intellectual dancing done by scholars, religions, or activists. The answer is a New Enlightenment spread throughout the world based on Human Rights. Your continued generality of white = bad is sad. Has the history of the world been skewed in favor of lighter skins, yes, however there have been and continue to be atrocities by ALL colors. The ENLIGHTENED MUST STAND TOGETHER and do all that we can to enlighten our family.
Fred F. Jones: So you say that “the history of the world been skewed in favor of lighter skins, yes…” What way has this been accomplished? By the shaking of hands? World history is skewed in “favor of the lighter skins?” Absolutely!
So, it is not that you haven’t explained yourself “enough.” The problem is that you have, yet you refuse to understand, or rather may I say appreciate the fact that in order for world history to have been “skewed in favor of lighter skins [white],” others (darker skinned people, aka Blacks) have had to endure centuries of monstrous acts of violence against them. Then you proceed to say that my “continued generality of white = bad is sad.”
Are you not indulging in a contradiction of contradictions? You cannot say that “whites” have been violent towards “Blacks” , for centuries if I might add, and yet denounce my categorical statement of that same fact as “sad”?
At which point does this contradiction become an ignorance? Would this also require a book? An education of a sort?
Narmer Amenuti in the history of the world there have been as you point out many claims of superiority based on skin color and many other divisions. Culture, religion, tribe, etc. Muslim vs Christian, etc. All of those divisions were and are based on ignorance. If one understands the axiom of one family then one can begin to form better systems to go forward . If one continues to be unwilling to give up their hatreds or fears they are condemned to perpetrate an ignorant world based on violence.
Fred F. Jones, no one is disagreeing with you that the idea of racial supremacism is bad. Of course. The point here is that white people, European peoples have used their peculiar ideas about white supremacism to terrorize Africans/Blacks, for at least half a millennium.
If your point is that we should stop talking about it, then I suggest you stop reading it. However, if your point is that it doesn’t matter, then you fall into a much more insidious ideological well of injustice. The particular injustice against African Americans ought to be repaired, whether the white people like or not. Else, they will continue to be viewed from this perspective as the Anglo-Saxons before them have always been viewed, as a patently barbaric peoples.
That’s all. No fuss, man.
Narmer Amenuti, why waste your precious time? Gee…
Narmer Amenuti i agree with reparations but i want more. A world wide system that recognizes our One family and their Human rights would go a long way to ensure fewer atrocities in the future.
There is blood on the hands of all colors.
Fred F. Jones. Serial Killers are just Ignorant. If we could just give them a proper education. Smile!
Besides, I have no idea why some people are woefully bullied into accepting hideous ideas in white apologetics!
Dade Afre Akufu “bullied”? Aahh.
Exactly!
The Europeans and Americans did it for a few centuries. How about the Arab Muslims who did it to us for millennia even though Prophet Mohammed(pbuh) had forbidden jihad in Africa because we had provided asylum, refuge and sanctuary to all Islam’s prophets and their families (especially his own)?
Ebenezer Nii Amu First-quao, so here we go! “A few centuries/” Really? Over four hundred years is just a few centuries? Come on man!
Arabs? What Arabs? Please specify. When you use the word Arab, it’s like using the word Semites today. You need to be very specific. The prophet Muhammed (pbuh) himself would not identify as an Almoravid today.
Which brings me to one more sentence before I turn it over to you: The Almoravids, for instance, would still be classified as “white” or even perhaps “Libyans” (Same thing) in ancient KMT. They were not a particularly enlightened group of people. They were barbarians, just like the Anglo-Saxons of the time, way up North.
Narmer Amenuti Axum Empire, the Kingdom of Ghana, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Ethiopian Empire, the Mossi Kingdoms and the Benin Empire. We all has atrocities and blood !
Emperor Armah of Axum was the Ethiopian who saved the family of Prophet Mohammed during the Hejira when he fled from Mecca to Medina. That’s why he banned jihad in Africa!!!!
Donald Trump is going to get some corrupt officials in WHO.
Anti-blackness is real, even among Latinx of African descent. I love the idea of looking at other supremacist regimes but we have got to deal with the West’s hegemony right here, right now. White supremacy is real too
It has taken me until now to read this article. As someone who bothers on “woke” and METHA, I am very surprised with the honored Nefetiti for still reasoning with America for REPARATION. I don’t think it will happen now and for a long time. Agreeing to the Reparation call is like the Christian confession. YOU HAVE TO REPENT (REGRET) BEFORE YOU ASK FOR FORGIVENESS. Mosquitoes don’t have any regret because they see humans as their food. The same applies to all pathogenic bacteria and viruses. When did the TERRORISTS (quoting Narmer Amenuti) consider you as capable of pain and dignity? When did they realize or know you are even human capable of pain to compensate it? They are the offspring of the original homo sapiens, in other words, Black men but they are not humans anymore. They will deny and prevent the respect of a blackman and reparation WITH THEIR LAST DYING EFFORT. Not all of them, granted, but what is the difference if the few are just condescending. To fight for reparation and succeed in 202 does not depend on the unrepentatant terrorists. To me, it depends on the force of demand. How powerful are the demanding force? Nefertiti, are you depending on the METHA, the Christians who treasure are stored in the heaven of the White man’s god or the Muslims who have to spend our last education fund money to aid them to visit and run around the Kaba thus giving millions of tourism money to Saudi Arabia, or our present leadership who think the size of our cathedral will determine our salvation after we die or the many African American Church goers who collect millions of dollars every Sunday as Church collections and tithes and deposit that in white banks to be loaned to white businesses. The same banks that consider Blacks are not qualified for loans of their own deposits. The very money whites use to buy out black property and make them propertyless? REPARATION IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN EVER, because the one deserving it is in mental bondage and worshiping the slave owner you are talking about. The slave owners excuse has always been the awareness of the abused or the “liberated” slave.
It appears the ‘oppressed is in league with the oppressor’, methinks.
Emmanuel Amevor The oppressed is too heavenly minded to remember it is on earth