African American

Le texte nous a été envoyé par le groupe de discussion The PAOC-USA auquel nous participons pour information sur le réveil de la mémoire et de l'Histoire pour la construction de l'Afrique et de ses fils déportés dans le monde par le système esclavagiste. Ce texte est en anglais, il est très instructif sur la question des réparations. A vous de voir !

In a message dated 8/22/2006 1:16:12 PM Eastern Standard Time, daudipembe@aol.com writes:

It seems to me that the emphasis should not be on financial compensation, but on changing the laws. That in no way means that a lot of money isn't owed to black people, but if we don't make legal changes many of the things we now suffer from will continue to dog us. I wrote a resolution for the Baltimore City Council, and sponsored by the late Bea Gaddy with just such a thing in mind. I don't know if this site receives attachments, so I will paste it here if anyone would like to read and/or discuss it. Thanx

This is an un official, introductory copy of the bill.
The official copy considered by the City Council is the first reader copy.
Introductory*

City of Baltimore
Council Bill
(Resolution)

Introduced by: Councilmembers Gaddy, Welch
A Resolution Entitled

For the purpose of encouraging the 106th United States Congress to hold hearings on the issue of reparations for African Americans; providing that the hearings should be focused on how the current condition of Africans in America was formed by the economic, cultural, and political disenfranchisement that resulted from 246 years of chattel slavery and 100 years of restrictive Jim Crow laws, how America s cultural and political institutions are continually used to unfairly limit the pursuits and aspirations of African Americans, how white Americans continue to be unjustly enriched by past and present racial inequities, and the type and nature of reparations that are necessary to guarantee equality and inclusion for African Americans.

Prior to the dawning of the industrial revolution, America was a great agricultural nation. The untold riches that were generated from America s agricultural dynasty were then used to fund the start-up of the industrial revolution. The vast majority of this great wealth was produced by kidnaped and enslaved Africans during the 246 year existence of that peculiar institution . Free from the burden of exhaustive physical labor and the need to support themselves financially, many white Americans were able to devote their time and energies to the development of the technologies that became the springboard for America s industrial revolution. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and a host of other industrialist were able to start their conglomerates by availing themselves of the ample capital available to white Americans. After emancipation, Jim Crow laws were used to continue to deny African Americans access to the capital generated by the industrial revolution, while enabling white Americans access to the capital necessary to create the technologies required to launch the current information age. The International Slave Trade was, for white Americans, a centuries-enduring, capital-building juggernaut and the genesis of the racial cast system that continues to permeate and influence every segment of American life and culture.

The opportunity to avert this culturally and politically driven racial cast system was squandered by the failed impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. President Johnson s refusal to provide the protections Congress requested for newly freed slaves led to a failed impeachment on some unrelated and technical constitutional charges. Had the impeachment of President Johnson been successful, government troops would have occupied the South after the Civil War to insure the safety, property rights, and political viability of blacks. The culture would have changed to reflect the immoral absoluteness of bigotry, and discrimination. Past and present political candidates would have understood that their political viability depended on their ability to include all Americans into the American family. America would have been spared 100 years of Jim Crow laws (used by William Rhodes as the model for South African Apartheid) and the ensuing Civil Rights movement. Instead, the impeachment failed, blacks were politically disenfranchised, property-less, subjected to violent mob rule, and forced to suffer the political ascension of persons such as George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Jessie Helms. Potential office seekers began to understand that their political aspirations could be realized by tapping into the cultural hatred and racism of the white electorate. It is instructive to note that George Wallace, after losing his initial bid to be Governor of Alabama, campaigned on enforcing segregation, and won. American political history is littered with both successful appeals to our baseless racial fears and prejudices and with dire political consequences of those who dare appeal to our better angels!

When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he said that Democrats would lose the South for at least a generation . Not only have Democrats lost both the south and the white male vote, but Trent Lott, Jessie Helms, and Strom Thurman, all of whom were Democrats, left the party and are now prominent members of the Republican Party. Thus, the enactment of legislation that sought only to guarantee basic freedoms for African Americans caused a region of the country, society s second largest and most powerful demographic group, and several (now prominent) politicians to leave the Democratic party. The political fallout resulting from the passage of the Civil Rights Act can be traced to the cultural forces unleashed by the non-removal of President Andrew Johnson. The political failure of the 1868 impeachment infused a tolerance for individual and systemic racism into our culture, and forever wove slavery s racial cast system into our national fabric.

Ethnic Europeans, like African Americans, were subjected to racism and discrimination, as was required by the dictates of America s racial cast system. These ethnic Europeans, many of whom did not come to America until after the Civil War, were discriminated against because they were not considered white enough by many American-born whites. While not relegated to the lowest cast position reserved for African Americans, these ethnic Europeans were still subjected to a position (cast) inferior to that of American-born whites. Those immigrants would have faced the centuries enduring cast limitations that continue to plague African Americans, but because European-born whites are physically indistinguishable from American-born whites, over time they were able to blend into the larger culture in a way that blacks still cannot. This gave them the political and economic breathing space needed to open businesses, gain access to capital, public and private education, enter the professions, have the freedom to live where they pleased and become indoctrinated in the politically and culturally ingrained practice of discrimination against African Americans. The criminalized condition of driving while black and the rest of today s racial (racist) profiling practices are the direct descendants of the Fugitive Slave Laws of the 18th, and 19th centuries. This current form of racism, much like its antebellum ancestor, is practiced under color of authority, by both the direct descendants of slave owners, and the direct descendants of post Civil War (now fully Americanized) immigrants.

Today, while white politicians fight against Hate Crimes legislation (as was done regarding anti-lynching legislation from Reconstruction to the early 1950s), they continue to pass the most inane, discriminatory, and draconian drug laws. Most African Americans live (and are incarcerated) in the region of the country overseen by the Fourth Judicial Circuit. While there have been a few African American nominees, there has never been an African American judge confirmed to serve in the Circuit where most African Americans live. Not coincidently, African Americans make up more than half of the 2 million inmates in America s prisons. More than half of these men are there for non-violent drug offenses, yet African Americans consume only 13% of the illegal drugs in America while whites consume approximately 74%. In Maryland, a recent study revealed that white drug use is 28 times higher then that of African Americans, yet African Americans are incarcerated for drug use at a rate 9 times greater then whites. The privatization of prisons, none of which are owned or operated by African Americans, has led to the rapid growth of prison industries (slave labor) with 30 new federal prisons, all with taxpayer- subsidized factories, and all with congressionally mandated preferences in federal contract procurement, scheduled to open this year. These new prisons are being constructed, almost exclusively, in segregated white rural communities. The thousands of black men held in these prisons are counted as residents of these counties by the census. The benefits that would have gone to their communities, benefits which may reduce crime, go to the communities which house the prisons. Finally, in an act of legislative dejavu, and as a condition of taking over the D.C. prison system, Congress has required that half of D.C. s inmates be housed in a new private facility built on the grounds of an old North Carolina (slave) plantation!

Recently, the top executives of the major television networks, in response to an allegation that they were conducting a network white wash , declared that they could not cast blacks as lead characters in their new programs because advertisers would not buy time on shows with black lead characters. How, other than as overt bigotry, can we characterize this phenomena? All of these executives are white men, and the industry they run is the most influential in our culture. Their veiled commentary on the social fabric of our country and the racial category to which they belong should be given the credibility and analysis they deserve. It is not that Friends would be less friendly with Tyra Banks as a co-star, but that the presence of non-white actors forces Hollywood script writers to deal with subjects or images that make white viewers uncomfortable. Rather than confront the realities of being non-white in America, the networks have decided to ignore that reality. This retreat from inclusion reveals the enduring interconnection between the general racist views of much of white America and business decisions made in furtherance of those racist views.

As was the case during the Jim Crow era, modern day politicians make business, and political decisions based on the racist leanings of their constituents (or their own) with regularity. They rejected statistical sampling for the Census, notwithstanding the clear support sampling received from the non-partisan Census Bureau. This was done under the guise of strict constitutional construction, but it was clearly an attempt to insure that minorities will continue to be undercounted and thus will not receive the benefits and representation they deserve. These traditionally undercounted and resource deprived communities are home to the poorest performing schools, the worst public health, the highest rates of crime, and abortion. The cynical attempt to ignore these near third world conditions in favor of some antiquated constitutional interpretation is a manifestation of government (politicians) continuing to act to the detriment of its African American citizens.

Politicians at the highest levels of government continue to maintain associations and memberships with racist organizations (Senator Trent Lott and the CCC) and ignore the overtly racist positions of perspective office holders (Chief Justice Rehnquist, who frequently sings Dixie , was confirmed by the all-white Senate despite his public criticism of the Brown v. Board decision, and now Dick keep Mandela in jail Cheney). Politicians have also used the instrumentalities of government to subjugate, or even kill African Americans. The Governor of Oklahoma, at the behest of Mayor T. D. Evans, ordered the National Guard to intercede in a riot started by a lynch-crazed angry mob of white citizens after a black man had allegedly touched the arm of a white women. Machine guns were used and bombs were dropped on Tulsa s black business district in order to quell the 1921 Tulsa race riot. Over 300 hundred African Americans were killed, and their prominent business district destroyed in what can only be described as an act of war by the US government against its African American citizens.

African Americans, while no longer held in captivity, are still denied the opportunity to share equally in the American dream. Their ancestors were forbidden by law to educate themselves, while their white contemporaries, unburdened by exhaustive manual labor, brutality, serial rape and restrictive laws, became educated and wealthy. With their superior education and wealth, they have been able to maintain political power and thus insure the political subordination, mis-education, poor health, poverty, and disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. As African Americans began to extricate themselves from the grip of restrictive Jim Crow laws, various groups began to organize to disrupt their progress and harass, persecute, prosecute, and even assassinate their leaders. Some of these groups proceeded with government acquiescence (KKK ), some with government participation (WCC or CCC), and some were government programs (the FBI s COINTEL- PRO, the Public Health Service s Tuskegie Experiment, the Agriculture Department. and black farmers). While it is clear that all those who were benefitted or burdened by this peculiar institution have long passed on, it is the maintenance of the economic (money never dies), cultural (hatred never wanes), and the resulting political relationships between European Americans and African Americans that validates the demand for reparations!

Not only has the government paid reparations to various ethnic groups for government wrongdoing (Japanese interned during WWII), but they have paid where individuals, rather than institutions, have caused the harm. In the late 1980s, the Savings and Loan collapse placed American financial institutions in jeopardy. Most of those who caused the collapse were politically well connected white men (e.g. Neil Bush), and many were prominent politicians (e.g. Frank Keating, John McCain). In order to protect the assets of investors and depositors, the federal government authorized the taxpayer financed bail out of these institutions. Estimates of the cost of this bail-out range up to $500 billion, or an average per family cost of between $5,000 to $10,000. All taxpayers were required to contribute to the bail out, even though most had no money in S&Ls (never owned any slaves), and African Americans were often denied access to capital (redlining) by the same institutions they were being required to rescue. Thus, the U. S. government determined that all taxpayers, regardless of culpability, had to contribute to a fund to repair these failing financial institutions.

The demand for reparations should not be viewed as a demand for individual or group paychecks. No amount of money could compensate for the horrors of the Middle Passage , centuries of savage brutality, family breakup, exhaustive physical labor, and serial rape. Also, simply giving African Americans money would provide a measure of temporary relief while leaving structural bias and racism unchecked. Money alone would provide no solution to racial profiling, redlining by financial institutions, environmental racism, and a host of other culturally, and politically embedded impediments to the development of the African American community. Any financial settlement would likely result in the mass purchase of items not manufactured by, and thus producing little or no benefit for the African American community, while also providing ammunition to those who want to end programs like affirmative action.

While the critics of reparations correctly point out that all slaves and slave owners are dead, they fail to address the cultural and political influence that peculiar institution continues to have on our country. The demand for reparations is based on the continuity between the antebellum origins of America s racial cast system and today s use by the government s of its public and private institutions to maintain that antiquated and immoral system. From the administration of George Washington to the administration of Bill Clinton, the institutions of the United States government have been continually used to subjugate, incarcerate, and impoverish African Americans. In 1868, the dark forces of bigotry and political expediency defeated the call of morality and justice. The Johnson presidency was saved, and America has yet to find its moral compass. The demand for reparations is a demand for the structural reform of our governmental institutions, the forgiveness of government loans, the development of community investment banks with full government funding, and free government provided higher education to all qualified African American students.

The structural reform of government institutions is an essential ingredient in the reparations recipe. As our experience with American history has taught us, where there is not a department in every government institution dedicated to safeguarding the civil rights of African Americans, their civil rights will be violated. In his first term, President Reagan decided that the Agriculture Department no longer needed its civil rights enforcement wing. This policy was continued in both his second term and the administration of President George Bush. Without a civil rights enforcement wing, many black farmers lost their farms due to unjustified delays in the farm loan payments so essential to small farms. White farmers received their government loans an average of 60 days prior to the granting of these loans to black farmers. As a result, many of these black farmers were unable to purchase seeds or grow crops, and ultimately saw banks foreclose on their farms. Most of these farms had been in their families for generations, and almost all of them have been resold to white farmers.

The experience of the black farmers is consistent with a long and relentless history that makes a compelling case that, when left to their own devices without a system to insure civil rights accountability, white men will violate the civil rights of African Americans. This strong presumption, while refutable, is mandated by the consistent and relentless weight of history, and to assume otherwise is to wage war on that history. In order to insure the civil rights of African Americans and to guarantee that the injustices of the past and present are not continued in the future, each government agency must contain a fully funded, and empowered civil rights watchdog division.

The federal government should retroactively relieve African Americans from any and all obligations to repay government loans. The Federal Government has used both the public and private institutions of this county to deprive African Americans of equal access and opportunity to this nation s great bounty and to equal protection under the law. Local police forces, all of which receive federal funds, routinely violate the civil rights of African Americans. Financial institutions, most of which receive federal deposit insurance, routinely deny qualified African Americans access to capital or offer capital at inflated prices. Although 135 of these financial institutions have been found guilty of laundering billions of dollars in drug money, a process without which most urban drug markets would wither away, the federal government has not revoked a single charter, and no bank executive has been incarcerated. Clearly, the federal government has not lived up to its constitutional obligation to African Americans, and it should be required to forgo any claim for payment based on any past (non-tax related) debts of African Americans.

The federal government should also be required to fully fund community investment banks to service the African American community. One of the major problems that limit development in the African American community is lack of access to capital. As a result, members of other ethnic groups own more business in the African American community than the African American residents. In order to reverse this trend, and make the African American community more productive and self sufficient, the government must insure that low coast funds (not subject to debt forgiveness) are available for investment and development in the African American community.

Finally, for approximately 150 years prior to the founding of this nation and continuing through the end of the Civil War, it was illegal for African Americans to learn to read and write. For the next 100 years, African Americans were legally relegated to substandard schools. While this injustice was ongoing, those against whom African Americans would have to compete were provided access to the best educational opportunities available. The government policy of relegating African Americans to substandard education initially codified by the Supreme Court in Plessey v. Ferguson, was re-codified 100 years later by the Supreme Courts decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. In San Antonio, which is still the law of the land, the court decided that local real property taxes were to be used to fund public schools. The court rejected the plaintiffs argument that societal segregation would relegate poor and non-white students to attend under-funded schools. Thus, while the language in Plessey differs substantially from the language in San Antonio, the implications of both cases regarding education are barely distinguishable. The post-antebellum Plessey decision and the more recently decided San Antonio case illustrate the continuity of government efforts to limit the ability of African Americans to receive quality educational and employment opportunities. Recognizing the devastating impact these unreasoned decisions have had on the African American community, the federal government should provide free post secondary education to all qualified African Americans.

It is important to note that while the federal government has been a consistent advocate against the interest of the African American community, racism and hatred are so thoroughly imbedded in our culture that African Americans have often been forced to rely on the federal government to protect them from large segments of our population and their private institutions. While the federal government has been both friend and foe, it is now called on to use its enormous power to begin to repair the damage that centuries of institutional and individual racism, bigotry, and hatred have visited upon the African American community.

Now, therefore, be it resolved by the City Council of Baltimore, That the Baltimore City Council encourages the 106th United States Congress to hold hearings on the issue of reparations for African Americans. The hearings should be focused on how the current condition of Africans in America was formed by the economic, cultural, and political disenfranchisement that resulted from 246 years of slavery and 100 years of restrictive Jim Crow laws, how America s cultural and political institutions are continually used to unfairly limit the pursuits and aspirations of African Americans, how white Americans continue to be unjustly enriched by past and present racial inequities, and the type and nature of reparations that are necessary to guarantee equality and inclusion for African Americans.

And be it further resolved, That a copy of this Resolution be sent to the Mayor, the Baltimore City Delegation to the 106th Congress, and the Director of the Mayor s Office of Council Relations.

he continuity of government efforts to limit the ability of African Americans to receive quality educational and employment opportunities. Recognizing the devastating impact these unreasoned decisions have had on the African American.

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The West is indebted to Africa and US should compensate African-
Americans
By Ali Mazrui

With regard to the benefits that the West has historically derived
from Africa, there have been at least three major phases.

The era of the labour imperative was when the West was interested
primarily in African labour, and was prepared to promote slave
raids, the Middle Passage and slave plantations to ensure that kind
of African labour. The industrial revolution in England was partly
stimulated by the triangular trade between Africa, the Americas and
Europe.

The epoch of territorial imperative was the period of colonisation,
when Africans lost their lands and their labour. Virtually the
entire continent fell under European imperial rule. Europeans
created African economies almost wholly designed to serve the
interests of Europe.

The era of the extractive imperative concerned the political economy
of Africa's minerals, many of which were fundamental to Western
industry. There was a period when Africa represented 90 per cent of
the world's cobalt, over 80 per cent of the world's reserves of
chrome, half of world's reserves of gold.

Should reparations to Africa be based only on the benefits that the
West derived from the imperatives of labour, territory, and
extraction across generations? In addition to assessment on the
basis of damage done to the victim, there is a case for assessment
on the basis of benefits obtained by the violator.

What really happened in the anti-colonial wars in places like
Algeria, Mozambique and Angola was a remarkable reversal of who
gained from the violence. The greater beneficiary of armed struggle
in Algeria was not Algeria but France. France was purified by
violence, not Algeria.

The Algerian War destroyed the Fourth French Republic and
inaugurated the more stable Fifth Republic. The war brought Charles
de Gaulle back to power in France and helped to push France into new
European and global roles. France emerged stronger after losing
Algeria than she was before. And yet Algeria itself continues to
bleed from post-colonial trauma. The anti-colonial wars in Angola,
Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau helped destroy fascism and political
lethargy in Portugal. Portugal had resisted every progressive
European force in modern history: the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, the Reformation, the legacies of the American and
French revolutions and Industrial Revolution. It took anti-colonial
wars waged by Africans to dislodge Portugal from its age-old
political lethargy.

Portugal's coup of April 1974 was as a direct result of the colonial
wars. Ironically, the coup turned out to be the beginning of
modernisation, democratisation and re-Europeanisation of Portugal.
And all this because African liberation fighters had challenged the
Portuguese fascist state in its imperial role.

In this context, the case for reparations becomes stronger than
ever. Even when Africans fought for their own freedom, the short-
term consequences were greater benefits to the imperial order than
to the former colonial subjects.

The anti-colonial violence was a cleansing force, not for the
original victim, but for the imperial villain. Angola and Mozambique
are still in desperate conditions while Portugal is experimenting
with modernisation and democracy. Algeria is struggling with
problems of instability and cultural conflict, while the Fifth
Republic in France remains relatively firm. Reparations should
partly be calculated on the basis of the suffering of the formerly
colonised person, the criterion of damage to the victim. But
reparations should also be on the basis of healing of the hegemonic
powers, the criterion of benefit to the villain.

It is an obscene irony of the history of slavery that emancipation
did result in compensation, but for the slave-owners rather than for
the slaves. In the British West Indies this was clear-cut. Those who
had slaves were regarded as property-owners. The forceful loss of
their property was regarded as worthy of compensation. Most slave-
owners, therefore, received reparations.

The ex-slaves were regarded as moving from a horrible condition to a
better condition, from bondage to emancipation. At that time there
were no major voices in Britain in favour of compensating Blacks for
prior racial degradation, humiliation and exploitation of labour.
Property was sacred, but labour apparently was not. Loss of property
demanded compensation; forced labour apparently did not. There is
indeed an unfulfilled moral debt yet to be paid to those whose
labour was plundered during slavery.

Emancipation in the United States once included a form of reparation
for each black slave - modest acres and a mule. But in the face of
centuries of enslavement, the effort at reparations in the United
States was honoured more in breach than observance. The unpaid void
remained horrendous.

From the 1990s African-Americans have been trying to reactivate the
reparation crusade, seeking out appropriate strategies for action.
In this case the demand is for compensating African-Americans as the
most immediate responsibility of the United States.

In 1992, African Heads of State appointed twelve of us to constitute
a Group of Eminent Persons to explore the modalities of a campaign
for Blacks' reparations, worldwide. We believe that the damage done
to Black people is here and the debt has not yet been paid.

The writer is chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture