United Nations Suggests Reparations for African Descendants
posted by Ja'Shawn Steward-Johnson | February 24, 2017 | In NewsLast year, a United Nations panel of human rights activists suggested that the United States government pay reparations to the descendants of Africans who were brought to the U.S. as slaves.
The UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent’s preliminary report was released after an eleven-day tour that included meeting with Black Americans and other citizens across different cities in the U.S. The report warned that Blacks in the U.S. were facing a “human rights crisis,” as the report came at a time of heightened racial tensions that saw the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The string of killings of mostly unarmed African-Americans by police “are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynchings,” said the report. The experts voiced concern over the unresolved “legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality… There has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent,” the report declared.
Speaking at a press conference in Washington, D.C., the panel said that Congress should pass the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, establish a national human rights commission and publicly acknowledge that the Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity. The group also railed against the lack of strict gun control, mandatory minimum sentences, stand your ground laws, voter ID laws, as well as the lack of a national system to track killings by law enforcement, among many other laws and initiatives.
Mireille Fanon Mendes-France, the working group chair, has said that she isn’t in favor of individual payments, but instead she is in favor of reparations in the U.S. being funneled through the financing and “full implementation of special programs based on education, socioeconomic, and environmental rights.”
Last December, President Obama, was quoted in an interview as saying “Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps [between whites and blacks]” while also admitting that reparation is a good idea but is not politically feasible.
The basis for reparations is centered around the promise made by Union Army General William Sherman at the end of the Civil War that slaves would receive 40 acres and a mule. Afterward, Sherman signed Field Order 15 that set aside 400,000 acres of land confiscated from Confederates to be divided up amongst 10,000 slaves. However, after President Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman’s order and returned the land back to its former Confederate owners. Thomas Craemer, a researcher at the University of Connecticut recently published an estimate of that valued U.S. slave labor at around $5.9 trillion today.
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