0415blog
Where is the Outrage?
There would be a worldwide explosion of the harshest criticism if the leadership of the German government changed and the new regime decided to withhold billions of dollars in reparations that former leaders had promised to Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust.
That’s exactly what happened after this country’s Civil War only it wasn’t money but rather “40 acres and a mule” that was promised to thousands of African American families in reparations so that they could start new lives on land that had been seized from their former slave masters. It was justice but very short lived. After Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, President Andrew Johnson cancelled the order and the land that was given to Black families was returned to White Confederate land owners. Talk about reparations has been revived periodically through the years and always roundly rejected by Republican Party political leaders and many Democratic leaders, as well. Most recently, the House Judiciary Committee vote to create a commission to study reparations and to offer a “national apology” for centuries of discrimination but too much dust has collected on too many commissions through this nation’s history.
There was no explosion of criticism when “40 acres and a mule” was cancelled and it’s unlikely that many people today even know what it was about.
It takes this country a very long time if ever to deal with injustices that have been systematically meted out to African Americans throughout the nation’s history. It wasn’t until 2018 when the Congress finally made it against the law to lynch an African American, and that came after 4,743 people were killed at the end of a rope between 1882 and 1968.
For the record, World War II ended in 1945 and since 1952, the German government has paid more than $70 billion in Holocaust reparations to more than 800,000 survivors. It took seven years for the post-war government to decide on reparations. Between 1942 and 1945, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were held in 10 federal internment camps in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. In 1988,43 years after the war, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granted reparations to Japanese Americans who were interned. In the U.S., reparations for African Americans are back up for discussion in Congress, 156 years after the Civil War ended.
The delays, false-starts, cancellations and every other kind of dance to avoid paying reparations is simply part and parcel of the nation’s overall history of racism. Periodically, the topic of reparations is brought up with suggestions including direct cash payments to interest-free loans for blacks to buy houses to free college tuition. There has never been a vote by Congress.
Compare the holocaust, which claimed 6 million Jews and slavery, which put an estimated 10.7 million Africans in bondage from 1525 to 1866. Yet, the holocaust is rightly studied and commemorated every year so that humanity will “never forget” the crime against humanity. Efforts to even have African American studies taught in schools is a relatively new phenomenon.
Much has been written about the banality of evil that permeated the German people and allowed the holocaust to grow. That same banality of evil surrounded slavery where white people simply accepted that millions of Africans were enslaved and shipped to the U.S. It is difficult to believe that the average German was not aware that Jews were being murdered in the concentration camps and it is equally baffling to think that the average southerner did not know that slaves were bound in chains, savagely beaten and often sexually abused.
There are so many wrongs that all people should be outraged about and yet so few are angered. The U.S. has the highest percentage of imprisoned people of color. The incarceration rate for young black men 20 to 39, is nearly 10,000 per 100,000. During the period of apartheid in South Africa, the prison rate for black male South Africans, peaked at 851 per 100,000.
The United States has the highest prison and jail population (2,121,600 in adult facilities in 2016), and the highest incarceration rate in the world (655 per 100,000 population in 2016). The rate in the People’s Republic of China was 118 per 100,000 (as of 2015).
Where is the outrage?
An unarmed black man suffocates while a white police officer applies all of his weight to the man’s neck. A young motorist is shot to death by a white police officer who thought she was using her stun gun. States move to pass laws that make it harder and harder for African Americans to vote while racists attack the capitol, hoisting flags that praise the KKK and members of congress apologize and minimize the harm. The veil has been ripped off the American hypocrisy and it has uncovered something really, really ugly.
Where is the outrage?
President Biden has proposed the government spend billions to invest in Black farmers, business owners, neighborhoods, students and the poor and to bolster child support and food assistance. His $4 trillion jobs bill would rebuild the economy and broaden the safety net to allow many to find work. But if Biden and the Democrats are defeated in 2024, will it be the modern equivalent of cancelling the 40 acres and a mule promise? There is no reason to believe it wouldn’t happen with a power shift to those who have supported growing racism in the country and who are horrified at the prospect that whites will soon no longer by the majority race in the U.S.
Where is the outrage?