REPARATIONS
PAST. PRESENT? FUTURE!
This is not an argument for or against reparations to make amends for the atrocities of slavery committed by America, yet a teenager of a nation when it was established.
What gives me pause, nay, takes my breath away, is the fact that slavery is alive and thriving in our world today. How then, when this is not first, second or even third in the debate, does one talk of rendering justice for the past, ignoring this ‘present’, and thus, the future. Addressing the past without regard for now does not lend itself to imagining the end to slavery and true justice. Yes, it operates in a different form. First, hidden, in plain sight, should one care to see. In current times, it is often referred to as “human-trafficking” involving people from many countries, perhaps on both sides, perpetrator and victim. Then we must add its’ institutional, systemic nature.
It is our present that should shatter the silence with screams over the debate about reparations. While not an expert on these current crimes, one need not be. Convict leasing is a most common form within our prison system that is one key factor of the new Jim Crow America. If you are not aware that prisoners were ‘hired’ to fight California fires for $1 for a very long and dangerous day, you are not paying attention. That is only a high profile example enslaving American citizens. Most egregious, however, in any current place, is child trafficking, perhaps as much as the enslavement of peoples, again of all ages in many nations, for sex crimes, some call ‘tourism’. This too, looms large within our Jim Crow prison population.
Then we must include the other ‘elephant’ in the hallowed chambers where reparations were discussed, so many years delayed but finally spoken. This was the infant America that grew as it stole the continental lands of Native Americans from coast to coast with unspeakable brutality and endless deceit. What is to be done in the name of justice to remedy this? Were minor bits of land called reservations where stats reflecting the worst of living in America, redress? justice? Most ironic and entirely catastrophic, is the fact this continent, and the planet, is now on the edge of annihilation. This is sometimes referred to as “omnicide” or the killing of everybody. Is this by way of capitalism that is cannibalizing the world for the wealthiest of the rich?
So tell me please, how we speak of reparation when little seems to have changed and doom haunts those in the know? Pay attention and look larger than reparations for crimes that were horrific but arguably not the worst as we teeter to the edge of existence. This is not to say one crime is not worthy of remedy when measured by another; but when our world, all nations, all peoples is at stake, we must look past, present and future; a future, if there is one.