CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2020, OR THEREAFTER
BY
THOMAS D. ELIAS
“REPARATIONS FOR SLAVES’
DESCENDANTS?”
Reparations, claimed a commentary in
California’s largest newspaper, are the answer to Black protesters’ demands for
racial justice.
Nonsense, responded many others, in
letters to the editor and online comments. Modern whites, Asian-Americans and
others had nothing to do with slavery, which ended long before anyone alive today
was born.
It’s a subject so potentially consequential
that Gov. Gavin Newsom, in one of his quieter moves of the fall, signed a new
law creating a nine-person state panel to study the concept.
This was because there can be little
doubt that many consequences of more than 200 years of black chattel slavery
live on today. Whenever academic performance is measured, blacks trail far
behind whites at every grade level. The number of black children born out of
wedlock tops all other racial and ethnic groups in this nation. And so on…
What does all this have to do with
slavery? The new state task force might find connections – or not.
For sure, there is plenty of precedent
for the federal government paying reparations to groups against which it discriminated
in the past. The Office of Redress Administration, set up under President
Ronald Reagan in 1988, paid $20,000 to each Japanese-American person sent to
internment camps just after Pearl Harbor. If actual prisoners in those camps were
no longer alive by then, their heirs got the money.
Long before Reagan’s administration
carried out those reparations, Japanese-Americans during 1948 and 1949 received
more than $37 million in federal compensation for lost property. The payments
were similar in kind, if not quantity, to the $89 billion Germany has paid
since World War II to compensate murdered Jews and their heirs. Germany still funds
home care and pensions for elderly Holocaust survivors around the world.
How discriminatory was the Japanese-American
internment? Virtually all Nisei were interned, but no group punishment or other
scheme interfered during World War II with the lives of German-Americans.
This was pure racial discrimination:
While not a single Japanese-American was ever implicated for anti-American activity,
plenty of German-Americans promoted Nazi goals in this country. The recent
Showtime series Penny Dreadful depicted some of their activity in
California.
Meanwhile, no American government has paid
reparations to former slaves or their heirs. Nor has there been a formal
apology for slavery. Not even for the fact that African Americans stem from the
only major immigrant population to arrive in America against its will.
Descendants of slaves may still be paying
for some deliberately cruel slaveholder practices. If modern blacks perform
worse academically than whites, might that be because literacy was forbidden to
most plantation slaves in the antebellum South? Learning to read was punishable
by whipping and sometimes death.
Many slave owners also tried to
prevent development of strong family ties among their chattel. Parents were
frequently sold away from their children. Married couples were often sold
apart. Both disasters could strike the
same family.
Slave owners were trying to prevent any
education ethic from arising among their property, while also working to
prevent development of strong families.
Despite this, many Black families have
developed constructive traditions of their own while creating a Black middle
class.
If these values are not universal
among Blacks, might that be the direct product of deliberate policies
maintained for centuries?
Germany paid reparations to its Jewish
victims and other formerly enslaved laborers who made up one-fourth of its work
force during World War II. So it’s fair to ask why the USA has never recognized
its own sins.
One mission of the reparations task
force should be to determine as much as possible the effects of slavery on
modern African Americans, and to separate those factors from things for which
people can be held to individual account.
California – which entered the Union as
a free state – should never attempt to take on this entire responsibility. But consideration
of reparations must start somewhere, and the California task force can at least
build a body of evidence for or against the need for and justice of reparations.
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Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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