16 - 22 August 2001
Issue No.547
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 August 2001 Issue No.547 |
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Sins of the fathers
"No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet, a price can be placed upon unpaid wages...I am proposing, therefore, that just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America could launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged: our veterans of the long siege of denial," suggested Martin Luther King in the 1960s. King touched upon a thorny subject which, even today, 168 years after the formal abolition of slavery in America, causes consternation, anger and resentment.
The United States has threatened to boycott the United Nations Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, scheduled to take place in the South African port city of Durban later this month if the question of reparations for slavery is raised.
The African world -- Continental Africa and the African diaspora -- is closely watching Washington's handling of the question at the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). The West -- and not just the US -- is being asked to collectively pay Africa $7 trillion within five years in reparation for enslaving Africans while colonising the continent.
Slavery was outlawed in 1865 in the US, but its painful legacy still haunts the descendants of slaves in America today. Passionate debates on the continuing impact of slavery on African- Americans and those they left behind on the African continent after they were so brutally snatched, are as stirring as ever. Slavery has left an indelible mark on Africa and the African Diaspora.
The United States government has, in the past, issued formal letters of apology and $20,000 per victim in reparations to Japanese Americans interred during World War II. It has never done so to its citizens of African descent. The Japanese- American ordeal was terrible. But it was only at a time when Japan was a key US ally in Asia, and the Japanese economic boom in full swing that the US government apologised. Must African-Americans wait until Africa's is as strong an economy as Japan's?
Congressman John Conyers' reparations bill has been languishing since 1989, mainly because Americans of European descent refuse to shoulder the blame of their forefathers. But, in the words of Professor Richard America, of Georgetown University, Washington, "Reparations is not about making up for the past, but about dealing with current problems." America estimates that the US should pay at least $10 trillion in reparations to its citizens of African descent.
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