The Case for Reparations

[diane]

What about an international court?

That didn't work for Native tribes (including Australia's), nor did going to the UN. If a very large and powerful nation does not like your cause, no matter how just it is it will not go anywhere. The issue of slavery in such a court would raise issues for other nations as well, such as China. The ripple effect of any judgements would be...well, interesting! That's why I sometimes wonder what the international courts and justice system actually means.

 

[5fish]

I found this great little site on reparation and has a time line about reparation efforts over the many, many years and decades of efforts to achieve the goal of reparations. Its and interesting time line most efforts seem to achieve little...

LibGuides: Reparations in the United States: Home

An Historical Timeline of Reparations Payments Made From 1773 through 2023 by the United States Government, States, Cities, Religious Institutions, Universities, Corporations, and Communities

guides.library.umass.edu

snip... it seem the court awarded restitution, once?

1878: In 1853, Henrietta Wood was a free black woman living and laboring as a domestic worker in Cincinnati when she was lured across the Ohio River and into the slave state of Kentucky by a white man named Zebulon Ward. Ward sold her to slave traders, who took her to Texas, where she remained enslaved through the Civil War. Wood eventually returned to Cincinnati, and in 1870 sued Ward for $20,000 in damages and lost wages. In 1878, an all-white jury decided in Wood's favor, with Ward ordered to pay $2,500, perhaps the largest sum ever awarded by a court in the United States in restitution for slavery. ("The Ex-Slave Who Sued, and Won" by W. Caleb McDaniel, The New York Times, September 5, 2019.)

snip...

1927: The Shoshones were paid over $6 million for land illegally seized from them (although it was only half the appraised value of the land). (Race, Racism, and Reparations by J. Angelo Corlett, 2003, Cornell University Press, p. 170.)

 

[diane]

This is a short squib on the 1972 case Indians of California vs The United States of America:

CALIFORNIA INDIANS SUE FOR $15‐BILLION (Published 1972)

Coalition of Indians on Sept 11 sues Fed Govt for $15‐billion in damages, charging that tribes were deceived in settlement of their claim to 2/3 of Calif land; contends that settlement reached between Indians' lawyers and Justice Dept gave them about 47c an acre for 64‐million acres, total of...

www.nytimes.com

This was a direct result of the occupation of Alcatraz Island by AIM and others. It came to 47 cents an acre, which was a very good deal for the state of California...especially since they didn't have to pay it. It was, one might say, on the order of reparations for termination of the rancheria system and this is one of the many pitfalls on the road to that end. It was a reaction to a well publicized action but it did not qualify as justice, nor do much to help remedy the problems California Indians faced. My family received $600 to split amongst us. Considering our aboriginal territory was a gigantic chunk of northern California, I'd say the government did well for itself. It took the Tillie Hardwick case to begin to right the wrongs of termination by restoring the rancherias eliminated by the Termination Act. The rancheria system, one might add, was a diabolical method of forcing impoverished and landless Indians into accepting membership into a dustpan of individuals of miscellaneous tribes, which would destroy tribal identity, culture, language and ultimately existence since the land was 'unwanted'. With good reason - our rancheria, for example, was a knob of granite far away on a lonely mountain top...no farmland, no water, no timber. Literally a rock. People were forced to leave to make a living - disintegration of what community there was.

My feeling is reparations for slavery should be about far more than a check in the mail. There are wrongs that cannot be righted with money, and some that cannot be righted at all.

 

[5fish]

Here an article its worth a look...

Why we need reparations for Black Americans | Brookings

Rashawn Ray and Andre Perry outline the history of reparations in the United States, missed opportunities to redress the racial wealth gap, and specific details for a viable reparations package for Black Americans.

www.brookings.edu

snip...

History of reparations in the United States
Reparations—a system of redress for egregious injustices—are not foreign to the United States. Native Americans have received land and billions of dollars for various benefits and programs for being forcibly exiled from their native lands. For Japanese Americans, $1.5 billion was paid to those who were interned during World War II. Additionally, the United States, via the Marshall Plan, helped to ensure that Jews received reparations for the Holocaust, including making various investments over time. In 1952, West Germany agreed to pay 3.45 billion Deutsche Marks to Holocaust survivors.

Black Americans are the only group that has not received reparations for state-sanctioned racial discrimination, while slavery afforded some white families the ability to accrue tremendous wealth. And, we must note that American slavery was particularly brutal. About 15 percent of the enslaved shipped from Western Africa died during transport. The enslaved were regularly beaten and lynched for frivolous infractions. Slavery also disrupted families as one in three marriages were split up and one in five children were separated from their parents. The case for reparations can be made on economic, social, and moral grounds. The United States had multiple opportunities to atone for slavery—each a missed chance to make the American Dream a reality—but has yet to undertake significant action.

snip...

40 Acres and a Mule

The first major opportunity that the United States had and where it should have atoned for slavery was right after the Civil War. Union leaders including General William Sherman concluded that each Black family should receive 40 acres. Sherman signed Field Order 15 and allocated 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land to Black families. Additionally, some families were to receive mules left over from the war, hence 40 acres and a mule.

Yet, after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed Field Order 15 and returned land back to former slave owners. Instead of giving Blacks the means to support themselves, the federal government empowered former enslavers. For example, in Washington D.C., slave owners were actually paid reparations for lost property—the formally enslaved. This practice was also common in nearby states. Many Black Americans with limited work options returned as sharecroppers to till the same land for the very slave owners to whom they were once enslaved. Slave owners not only made money off the chattel enslavement of Black Americans, but they then made money multiple times over off the land that the formerly enslaved had no choice but to work

snip...

To determine qualification, birth records can initially be used to determine if a person was classified as Black American. Economist Sandy Darity asserts that people should show a consistent pattern of identification. Census records can then be used to determine if a person has consistently identified as Black American. Finally, DNA testing can be used as a supplement to determine lineage. This is how Senator Booker, who first introduced a reparations bill in the Senate, learned that his lineage stemmed from Sierra Leone.

 

[5fish]

Here is Reparation Ray he pushed for years for reparations and his plan was a college fund of 40 billion and it his ideas in the bill before the house today. it sat in committees for 30 years...

Here a link and there a pro and con section in the article about reparation...

Teach Democracy

Reparations for Slavery? Today, even after the success of the civil rights movement, the black American population on average has higher infant-mortality rates, lower life expectancy, higher rates of unemployment, lower income, and higher rates of impris, Today, even after the success of the...

www.crf-usa.org

In April 1989, Council Member Ray Jenkins guided through the Detroit City Council a resolution. It called for a $40 billion federal education fund for black college and trade school students. About the same time, a conference of black state legislators meeting in New Orleans backed the idea of a federally financed education fund for descendants of slaves. Shortly afterward, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) drafted a bill calling for the establishment of a congressional commission to study the impact of slavery on African-Americans.

Rep. Conyers introduced his bill (HR 3745) in November 1989. The preamble of the bill declared its purpose:

To acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a Commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.

Here is Reparation Ray's Obit...

Raymond Jenkins - Obituary

View Raymond Jenkins's obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.

www.legacy.com

 

[5fish]

Here is the House bill...

House panel advances reparations bill that Conyers championed

The House Judiciary Committee advances legislation to study reparations for Black Americans that former Detroit Rep. John Conyers reintroduced in Congress for 30 years

www.detroitnews.com

snip...

It was the first time since the late U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. began offering the bill in 1989 that a committee voted on the legislation, known as H.R. 40. The vote was 25-17.

The legislation, which languished for decades with limited support even among Democrats, now has 176 co-sponsors in the House, including Michigan Democratic Reps. Brenda Lawrence of Southfield, Dan Kildee of Flint Township, Debbie Dingell of Dearborn, Rashida Tlaib of Detroit and Andy Levin of Bloomfield Township

Lawrence was referring to U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat who took over sponsorship of Conyers' bill after his resignation in 2017.
Jackson Lee called Wednesday's markup a "major step" toward the creation of a reparations commission, which she described as "long overdue."

 

[5fish]

Here is another good article about reparation for Holocaust and why not for slavery... worth a read....

The blueprint the US can follow to finally pay reparations

As activists revive the conversation around slavery reparations, examples from other countries may provide a better model.

qz.com

snip...

Last year, an Associated Press survey found only 29% of Americans supported the idea of cash reparations. But initial resistance isn’t necessarily predictive. In 1951, only 29% of West Germans believed they owed Jews restitution for the Holocaust.

snip...

For both the Holocaust and slavery, reparations could never measure up to the crime committed. In its 1951 diplomatic note to Allied governments demanding compensation from Germany, Israel acknowledged this. “There can be no atonement or material compensation for a crime of such immense and horrifying magnitude,” it read. But according to Judaism’s own religious and philosophical thought, “reparations are not punitive,” writes American rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, who makes the case for slavery reparations in Yes Magazine. “They’re restorative.”

snip...

Stuart E. Eizenstat negotiated Holocaust reparations with Germany on behalf of the US and the Claims Conference. He argued against slavery reparations in Politico last year, saying “reparations are complicated, contentious, and messy, and work best when the crime was recent and the direct victims are still alive.” “Trying to repay descendants of slaves could end up causing more problems than reparations would seek to solve,” he wrote

snip...

“Using distance and time as an argument” against reparations is damaging, echoes Thomas Craemer, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, “because it says if you commit a historical injustice and then you wait long enough, it doesn’t count anymore.”

snip...

But proponents of reparations in the US are less focused on the details than they are interested in securing political and societal support for the simple idea of debating the details. And with new tools like public genealogical databases, activists like Washington say the challenges underpinning such a program have never been more surmountable. All in all, he argues, “anybody who says it’s too hard or too complicated is just too damn lazy.”

snip...

Yet in spite of public opinion, Germany’s efforts at reconciliation didn’t stop at reparations. The country has engaged in vergangenheitsbewältigung—the process of “overcoming the past.”

 

[rittmeister]

vergangenheitsbewältigung

i'm normally a fan of deutsche welle but this is bollocks. we got nothing to do with the eichmann trial

 

[Wehrkraftzersetzer]

i'm normally a fan of deutsche welle but this is bollocks. we got nothing to do with the eichmann trial

at least the culprit was ....

 

[rittmeister]

at least the culprit was ....

read the link i'm talking about before you stat making silly jokes