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What America Owes African Americans

Efforts to develop a national campaign for black reparations have gathered steam in recent months. Increasingly, city councils are considering resolutions calling for compensation to the contemporary victims of American slavery and the century of de jure racial discrimination that succeeded it.

Below is a draft resolution that we are asking city council members around the country to consider for introduction and adoption. Please give a copy of this resolution to your local councilmembers, many of whom I have already contacted.

I hope this meets with your full support. In order to provoke the national debate that this issue warrants, we will need to build a broad chorus of demand.

Sincerely, Randall Robinson - webguru@thedebt.net

============================================================ RESTATEMENT OF THE BLACK MANIFESTO

I. Statement of Facts

1. Whereas the United States government has never acknowledged or taken responsibility for its role in the enslavement of Africans and the promotion of white supremacy;

2. Whereas the experience of enslavement, segregation, and discrimination continues to limit the life chances and opportunities of African Americans;

3. Whereas African Americans have sought repeatedly to improve their educational attainment, economic condition, and living situation and have been held back by lawless white violence and official indifference thereto;

4. Whereas African Americans have sought repeatedly to obtain reparations in the courts of the United States and through appeals to its government ever since the de jure end of slavery and have been unjustly denied relief ;

5. Whereas all Americans and the United States government have benefitted enormously and continue to benefit from the unjust expropriation of uncompensated labor by enslaved Africans, the subordination and segregation of the descendants of the enslaved, as well as from discrimination against African Americans;

6. Whereas the United States government has acknowledged and taken responsibility for its role in the unjust internment of Japanese Americans during the second World War and has undertaken to pay reparations to the internees and their successors and to apologize for the unjust abrogation of their rights;

7. Whereas the principle that reparations is the appropriate remedy whenever a government unjustly abrogates the rights of a domestic group or foreign people whose rights such government is obligated to protect or uphold has been internationally recognized;

8. Whereas the United States government has acceded to and approved the aboved stated reparations principle on the basis of treaty obligations and through its numerous actions in support of reparations on behalf of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their successors;

9. Whereas individual states of the United States have undertaken to pay reparations to portions of the African American community within their jurisdictions who have suffered specific harm due to white violence and official inaction to prevent or correct such harm in a timely fashion or to punish the perpetrators;

10. Whereas the harms inflicted on the African American community as a whole and the debt owed to African Americans is susceptible to exact proof; let it be hereinafter resolved:

II. Statement of Positions

First, it's not too late. It is neither too late in the sense that the claim of reparations for African Americans is stale, nor is it too late in the sense that there is noone or nothing left to compensate. It is never too late to seek justice. Reparations for African Americans are justified by the legal doctrine of unjust enrichment: unjust enrichment of a person occurs when he has and retains money or benefits which in justice and equity belong to another. A person or group should not be permitted unjustly to enrich himself or themselves at the expense of another, but is required to make restitution for property or benefits received, retained or approriated, where it is just and equitable that such restitution be made. Slavery, the expropriation of the labor of another without compensation, is a paradigm instance of unjust enrichment. Through intergenerational transfers (inheritance) the ill-gotten gains continue to accumulate to the greater impoverishment of African Americans and their descendants and the greater support of white supremacy. The denial of a fair forum in which to seek redress cannot evaporate the legitimacy of African American claims on their ancestors stolen legacy.

Second, the government bears responsibility. The denial of a fair forum in which to seek redress is part of the burden that American civilization must carry along with its responsibility for creating the context in which slave trading could be carried on as ordinary commerce, slave ownership could be protected by the fundamental law of the land, segregation could be enforced, and white supremacy could thrive. However, because any beneficial program of reparations for African Americans should occur with the aim of positive improvement and healing of and for every member of American society, private individuals and groups shall not be held responsible for any returns constituting reparations. In this sense, built into the fabric of the reparations process is an intercommunity absolution that resolves the hopeless and divisive arguments over blame, guilt and responsibility. With these contemporary roadblocks removed, the reparations process can occur in a guilt-free environment of earnest interest in the further repair and just inclusion of African Americans in American society. The United States government is the party that must make restitution to African Americans for abrogation of their human rights. Regardless of what private parties may have chosen to do in the exploitative, white supremacist context created by the government, it was the force and application of the law that fundamentally enabled their ability to excercise their choices. It is true that most Americans did not own slaves or engage in slave trading. However, the claim of reparations for African Americans is not directed at those who bear no guilt, but to the party who does, the United States government. The United States government sanctioned violations of the human rights of African Americans with the imprimatur of law. In order to redress the injury, the United States government must provide a fair forum for redress, and pay the debt it owes to African Americans.

Third, the injury survives the death of victims. Among the many injuries inflicted by the enslavement of African Americans, poverty ranks as fundamental to the system and enduring in its consequences. The stolen legacy of African Americans' ancestors ensured that each succeeding generation would have that much less in wealth and resources with which to compete in a fiercely competitive world. Although all those who were enslaved are dead, their posterity lives on to combat daily the disabilities caused by the theft over many generations of a birthright. Furthermore, the shift from slavery to freedom was more partial than whole as the ensuing 75 years witnessed the governmentally supported exclusion or systematic segregation of African Americans from virtually every quarter of American society. Deprivations within the sphere of labor, finance, housing, education, social and cultural institutions bear a direct and formative relationship to the economically, socially, and educationally sub-qualitative facts of African American life today. Thus the existing generations of African Americans are far from lost from the experience of slavery, but remain captured within its chaotic and deprivation-sustaining aftermath. It must be understood that [t]he injury to the African American community survives the death of individual victims. The injury survives in the overrepresentation of poverty, and all the pathologies it spawns, within the African American community. Not least of such pathologies is self-hate, lack of confidence, and lack of self-understanding. Thus, many African Americans must be educated to understand the justification and legitimacy of their own claim to reparations.

III. Conclusion

Therefore, hearings should be held in the Congress of the United States to establish the basis for reparations to African Americans, and to determine the amount of such reparations; whereinafter, a private trust should be established for the benefit of all African Americans...

 

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