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PART I
History and Reparations
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MOLEFI KETE ASANTE
The African American Warrant for Reparations: The Crime of European Enslavement of Africans and Its Consequences
Until lions have historians, hunters will be heroes.
āKENYAN PROVERB
In his 1993 monograph Paying the Social Debt: What White America Owes Black America, Richard America makes a forceful argument that reparations for Europeās enslavement of Africans in the United States is an idea whose time has arrived. Almost a decade before the powerful book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, written by Randall Robinson in 2000, America laid out the economic bases of the debt owed to African Americans. While the argument for reparations is a Pan-African one, we are most interested in this essay with the discourse surrounding the enslavement and its consequences in the American society. There are those who will immediately say that the people of the United States will never accede to reparations. I am of the opinion that the discussion and debate surrounding reparations has only recently occurred in any serious way; therefore, this essay is offered as an attempt to raise some of the philosophical ideas that might govern such a discourse.
Randall Robinsonās The Debt has been one of the most popular and important books written on the subject so far because he has captured the warrants for reparations in very clear and accessible language. What he has demonstrated is that while a national paralysis of will may exist at the present time, there is no lack of national guilt and interest in this theme. There is every reason for the United States to shape and frame the culture of reparations that shall become an increasingly powerful moral and political issue in the twenty-first century. The highest form of law exhibits itself when a system of law is able to answer for its own crimes. Nothing should prevent men and women of moral and political insight from making an argument for an idea whose legitimacy is fundamental to our concept of justice. We must act based on our own sense of moral lightness.
When Raphael Lemkin started in 1933 to gain recognition of the term āgenocideā as a crime of barbarity, few thought that it would soon become the language of international law. When genocide was adopted as a convention in 1948 with an international criminal court to serve as the home for judging genocide it was a victory for those who had fought to put genocide on the world agenda. My belief is that the current discussions about reparation undertaken by scholars, political activists, and the United Nations will advance our own plan to place reparations at the front end of the agenda for redress for African Americans.
THE GROUNDS OF THE ARGUMENT: MORAL, LEGAL,
ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL
The argument for reparations for the forced enslavement of Africans in the American colonies and the United States of America is based in moral, legal, economic, and political grounds. Taken together these ideas constitute an enormous warrant for the payment of reparations to the descendants of the Africans who worked under duress for nearly 250 years. The only remedy for such an immense deprivation of life and liberty is an enormous restitution.
When one examines the nature of the terms amassed for the argument for reparations it becomes clear that the basis for them is interwoven with the cultural fabric of the American nation. It is not un-American to seek the redress of wrongs through the use of some form of compensatory restitution. For example, the moral ideas of the argument are made from the concept of Tightness as conceived in the religious literature of the American people. One assumes that morality based in the relationship between humans and the divine provides an incentive for correcting a wrong, if it is perceived to be a wrong, in most cases. Using legal ideas for the argument for reparations, one relies on the juridical heritage of the United States. Clearly, the ideas of justice and fair play, while often thwarted, distorted, and subverted, characterize the legal ideal in American jurisprudence. Therefore, the use of legal strategy in securing reparations is not only expected but required by Africans receiving compensatory redress for their enslavement. The Great Enslavement itself showed, however, how legal arguments could be twisted to defend an immoral and unjust system of oppression. Nevertheless, justice is a requirement for political solidarity within a nation and any attempt to bring it about must be looked upon as a valid effort to create national unity. Simply put, no justice, no peace.
Recognizing that justice may be both retributive and restorative, it seeks to punish those who have committed wrong and it concerns itself with restoring to the body politic a sense of reconciliation and harmony. I believe that the idea of reparations, particularly as conceived in my own work, is a restorative justice issue.
The economic case is a simple argument for the payment to the descendants of the enslaved for the work that was done and the deprivation that was experienced by our ancestors. To speak of an economic interest in the argument is typically American and an issue that should be well understood by most Americans. Simply put, Africans in America are owed back wages for nearly 250 years of uncompensated work by their ancestors and another 130 years for laws and behavior that continue to affect them economically.
Finally, the political aspect of reparations is wrapped in the clothes of the American political reality. In order to insure national unity reparations should be made to the descendants of Africans. It is my belief as well as that of others that the underlying fault in the American body politic is the unresolved issue of enslavement. Many of the contemporary problems in society can be thought of as deriving from the unsettled issues of enslavement. A concentration on the political term for reparations will lead to a useful argument for national unity.
WHY REPARATIONS?
One of the ironies of the discourse surrounding reparations for the enslavement of Africans is that the arguments against reparations for Africans are never placed in the same light as those about reparations in other cases. This introduces a racist element into the discourse. For example, one would rarely hear the question, Why should Germany pay reparations to the Jews? Or, Why should the United States pay reparations to the Japanese who were placed in concentration camps during World War IT? If someone were to try to make arguments against those forms of reparations the entire corpus of arguments from morality, law, economics, and politics would be brought to bear on them. This is as it should be in a society where human beings respect the value of other humans. Only in societies where human beings are considered less than humans do we have the opportunity for enslavement, concentration camps, and gas chambers. It should be noted that when humans are considered the same as other humans no one questions whether compensatory measures should be given to an oppressed group. We expect all of the arguments for reparations to be used in such cases. This is why the recent rewarding of reparations to Jews for the Nazi atrocities is considered normal and natural. In Nazi Germany, Jews were considered inferior, and had Germany won the war, any thought of reparations to Jews would have been unthinkable. It is because Nazi Germany lost the war and other humans with different values had to make decisions about the nature of reparations that any were made at all. One can make the same argument for the Japanese Americans who lost their property and resources during World War II. A new reality in the political landscape made it possible for the Japanese to receive reparations for then-losses. Eminent African and Caribbean scholars such as Ali Mazrui, author of The Africans, Jamaican ambassador Dudley Thompson, and others have argued for an international examination of the role the West played in the slave trade and the consequent underdevelopment of Africa. This is a laudable movement and I believe it will add to the intensity and seriousness of the internal discourse within the United States.
A strong sense of moral outrage has continued to activate the public in the interest of reparations. In early 2001 a lawsuit brought against the French national railroad in the Eastern District of New York Court charged the Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer with transporting 72, 000 Jews to death camps in August 1944. The case was brought to the court on behalf of the survivors and heirs. In another case, a French court held that French banks that hoarded assets of Jews had to create a fund of $50 million for those individuals with evidence of previous accounts (New York Times, June 13, 2001, A-14). Similarly, on May 30, 2001, the German Parliament cleared the way for a $4.5 billion settlement by German companies and the government to survivors or heirs of more than one million forced laborers. This is in addition to much larger awards to Israel and the Jewish people for the Holocaust. The Swiss government has agreed to pay $1.25 billion to those Jewish persons who can establish claims on bank accounts appropriated during World War II.
Whenever people have been deprived of their labor, freedom, or life without cause, other man their race, ethnicity, or religion, as a matter of group or national policy, they should be compensated for their loss. In the case of Africans in the American colonies and the United States, the policy and practice of the ruling white majority in the country was to enslave only Africans after the 1640s. Prior to that time there had been some whites who had been indentured as servants and some native peoples who were pressed into slavery. However, from the middle of the seventeenth century to 1865, only Africans were enslaved as a matter of race and ethnic origin.1
A growing consensus suggests that some form of reparations for past injustice on a large scale should not be swept under the table. We have accepted the broad idea of justice and fair play in such massive cases of group deprivation and loss; we cannot change the language or the terms of our contemporary response to acts of past injustice. The recognition of reparations in numerous other cases, including the Rosewood, Florida, and the Tulsa, Oklahoma, burning and bombing of African American communities in the early 1920s, means that we must continue to right the wrongs of the past, so that our current relationships as citizens will improve through an appreciation of justice.
THE BRUTALITIES OF ENSLAVEMENT
Africans did not enslave themselves in the Americas. The European slave trade was not an African venture, it was preeminently a European enterprise in all of its dimensions: conception, insurance, outfitting of ships, sailors, factories, shackles, weapons, and the selling and buying of people in the Americas. Not one African can be named as an equal partner with Europeans in the slave trade. Indeed, no African person benefited to the degree that Europeans did from the commerce in African people. I think it is important to say that no African community used slavery as its principal mode of economic production. We have no example of a slave economy in West Africa. The closest any scholar has ever been able to arrive at a description of a slave society is the Dahomey kingdom of the nineteenth century that had become so debauched by slavery due to European influence that it was virtually a hostage of the nefarious enterprise. However, even in Dahomey we do not see the complete denial of the humanity of Africans as we see in the American colonies.
Slavery was not romantic; it was evil, ferocious, brutal, and corrupting in all of its aspects. It was developed in its greatest degree of degradation in the United States. The enslaved African was treated with utter disrespect. No laws protected the African from any cruelty the white master could conceive. The man, woman, or child was at the complete mercy of the most brutish of people. For looking a white man in the eye the enslaved person could have his or her eyes blinded with hot irons. For speaking up in defense of a wife or woman a man could have his right hand severed. For defending his right to speak against oppression, an African could have half his tongue cut out For running away and being caught an enslaved African could have his or her Achilles tendon cut. For resisting the advances of her white master a woman could be given fifty lashes of the cowhide whip. A woman who physically fought against her masterās sexual advances was courting death, and many died at the hands of their masters. The enslaved African was more often than not physically scarred, crippled, or injured because of some brutal act of the slave owner.
Among the punishments that were favored by the slave owners were whipping holes, wherein the enslaved was buried in the ground up to the neck; dragging blocks that were attached to the feet of men or women who had run away and been caught; mutilation of the toes and fingers; the pouring of hot wax onto the limbs; and passing a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the enslaved. Death came to the enslaved in vile, crude ways when the angry, psychopathic slave owner wanted to teach other enslaved Africans a lesson. The enslaved person could be roasted over a slow-burning fire, left to die after having both legs and both arms broken, oiled and greased and then set afire while hanging from a treeās limb, or being killed slowly as the slave owner cut the enslaved personās phallus or breasts. A person could be placed on the ground, stomach first, stretched so that each hand was tied to a pole and each foot was tied to a pole. Then the slave master would beat the personās naked body until the flesh was torn off the buttocks and the blood ran down to the ground.
I have written this brief description to insure the reader that we are not talking about mint juleps and Sunday-afternoon teas with happy Africans running around the plantation while white people sang and danced. Africans on the plantations were often sullen, difficult as far as the whites were concerned, hypocritical because they would smile on command and frown when they left the white personās presence, and plotting.
SOME NUMBERS
It became popular in the 1980s to speculate over just how many Africans were captured, marched, shipped, and sold during European enslavement. Henry Louis Gates of Harvard has placed the number between 10 and 12 million, as has Philip Curtin. It is not my intention to enter the debate over these numbers, although I find the numbers quite conservative given the estimates made by other scholars and given the fact that Curtin particularly has demonstrated a penchant for minimizing African agency in the struggle against slavery and colonialism in his widely read book The Atlantic Slave Trade. The figure has reached as high as 100 million in the estimation of some scholars, such as W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1920 book Darkwater. I believe that the numbers are only important to ascertain just how deeply the Transatlantic Slave Trade affected the continental African economic, social, physical, and cultural character. However, for purposes of reparations the numbers are not necessary since there can be no adequate compensation for the enslavement and its consequences. The broad outline of the facts is clear and accepted by most historians. We know, for instance, that the numbers of Africans who landed in Jamaica and Brazil were different from those of Haiti and the United States. Furthermore, the establishment of concrete numbers of those captured and enslaved throughout the Maafa* and in the United States, though difficult, will ultimately be achieved because of better data-gathering techniques and the lawsuits now emerging that will research such numbers. I believe it is necessary, however, to ascertain something more about the nature of the Africansā arrival in the American nation. At the end of the Civil War in 1865 there were about 4.5 million Africans in the United States, which means that there had been a steady flow of Africans into the American nation since the seventeenth century. These Africans and their descendants constitute the proper plaintiffs in the reparation case. Hundreds of thousands of Africans labored and died under the reign of enslavement without leaving any direct descendants. We cannot adequately account for these lost numbers, which include those who died resisting capture in Africa, those who died on the forced marches to the beach barracoons, those who died awaiting to enter the ships, those who died aboard ships, and those who continued to resist throughout 250 years of enslavement. We can, however, account for most of those who survived the Civil War and their heirs. In fact, some of the 187, 000 who fought in the Civil War did not survive, but their descendants survived. These also constitute a body of individuals (class?) who must be brought into the discussion of reparations. Thus, two classes of people, those who survived the Civil War and their heirs ...
