Linking Juneteenth to Reparations
It is really absurd for Black people to say that we are not owed anything from this society and it is equally insulting for a White person to tell us we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps as if that is what they are doing and have done in the past.
The below excerpt was taken from the blog "The Assault on Black Sanity".
As Dr. Marimba Ani has said:“the trade in Afrikan lives and the enslavement of Afrikan beings by Europeans constituted the most thoroughly destructive act ever to be perpetuated by one group of people upon another.”
Since this Holocaust was both a destruction of humanity and a crime against humanity, there are unresolved issues from this historical period which still impact us today that we must resolve. There are legal and economic issues which need to be resolved. There are cultural and psychological issues which need to be resolved. If we continue to ignore these issues we will be coming here, celebrating Juneteenth for the next ten years, while our basic condition—powerlessness—remains unchanged.
If one group of people stops committing a crime against another, that does not mean that the legal issues are over. In this particular case the criminals were never charged or punished for their crimes against Afrikan humanity which included the theft of Afrikan labor. Sometimes, I don’t think we grasp the enormity of the theft of Afrikan labor. For example the US Gross Domestic Product per capita for 1865 was $2606.00. The per capita GDP is an index of the economy’s average output per person and is closely related to the per capita income. Thus 4 million enslaved Afrikans times $2606 would equal $10.424 billion of economic output. So our ancestors were robbed of over 10 billion dollars in 1865 alone, and this robbery went on for 246 years.
Not only were our ancestors robbed, the wealth generated from their economic output, instead of being passed from one generation of Afrikan Americans to another, was passed from one generation of European Americans to another. So we were robbed of our potential inheritances. Money from our ancestors which should have gone into our pockets went into the pockets of others and we are simply supposed to forget about this. No way! Reparations are due for these crimes. This issue of reparations must be planted in our frontal lobes. We cannot truly celebrate until we resolve this issue.
