What's Wrong with Reparations?

Google defines Reparations as the making of amends for a wrong done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have wronged. Reparations are not a new concept in modern history and can be acknowledged in many ways. For Example. The United States Government publicly recognized its wrong doing for its role in Japanese citizen internment in 1942. The United States has also issued a Reparations package to the Native American population of this land. Lastly, for now. The German government provided reparations to the survivors of the Holocaust.

The general population agrees reparations are a just solution in regards to these events. There should be no way a governing world group should get away with dehumanizing, capturing, torturing, and all out traumatizing another group of people for generations to come. At least the events mentioned above have been publicly shunned and apologized for by the respective perpetrators.

There is a certain event that happened on United States soil. These events are common knowledge, but the facts are starting to get deflected and manipulated. What I'm referring to is the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. The slave trade lasted for hundreds of years and shaped a system in America where a free fortune was made off the backs of enslaved Africans. A war had to be fought just for enslaved people to gain their freedom.

The United States population can generally agree that slavery was a bad thing to happen. But when the conversation of reparations comes to surface the people cannot find a common ground. The normal rebuttals include sayings like, "No one alive now was a slave, all the slaves are dead!" Or "Black people wouldn't know how to spend the money!" Sometimes I hear, "Get over it, and stop looking for a handout! Slavery was so long ago!" There are dozens of theories on why the black community doesn't deserve, or qualify for respiration.

Some of these statements are objectively correct. As of 2023. It is impossible for any one who was legally enslaved to still be alive. Therefore there will be no one to reward reparations to like the examples given above. But let's not forget about Special Field Order 15. In early 1865 General Willam Tecumseh Sherman issued an order that gave 400,000 acres of confederate land to freed slaves in forty acre increments. Allowing at least ten thousand families sovereignty and asylum after slavery and the Civil War. After Abraham Lincon's assassination, Andrew Johnson became President of the United States. Johnson was a Confederate sympathizer, and eventually gave them the land back. Causing the black people to be displaced and at the mercy of the country that holds such blatant biases towards them.

This fact of overlooked history directly goes against the "All the slaves are dead" argument. Which is true for 2023, there are no slaves to reward. This was not true in 1865. Where the Government didn't do right by at least ten thousand families.

"Slavery was so long ago" is also an objectively true statement. I was born in 1993 and it's impossible that I could have ever been subjected to the terrors of slavery. The people who make this argument seem to miss out on the fact that slavery was a system that shaped the country's history. It is overlooked how that system continued to uphold biases that held freed slaves back. It is forgotten that slavery was the blueprint for the Jim Crow Era, redlining, the mass incarceration system, and many other documented events that held black people back in America. Wouldn't it be fair to repair what was damaged via the system? My father was born in Birmingham Alabama nine years before civil rights became a legal entity. It may not have been slavery, but was his family not victims of a system whose goal was to keep him behind?

I may have not been a slave, but my family remembers how the world operated when the system of slavery was grinding its wheels. The ninety year old man reading this article from his desk at work was not a slave, but I guarantee he remembers the uphill battle to find his way in this country.

The more we forget, the more the history will be altered and swept under the rug. Causing this conversation to be looked at as nothing more than a silly, desperate cash grab in the future.

Do I believe that American descendants of slaves should be given reparations for the systems and history placed against them? Yes I do. Do I believe that we're ever going to get it? Not in my lifetime. My only goals are simple. I want to live with the cards I've been dealt, and win as much as the game as I can. I also want the United States of America to ask themselves this one simple question. What's wrong with reparations?