The United States had no problem paying other groups the restitution they were due for the racist atrocities enacted against them.
To the impoverished Jewish-Holocaust survivors living in this country, the Obama administration paid $12 million.
For putting hordes of Japanese-Americans in internment camps, the U.S. paid an estimated total of $2.9 billion.
And to 17 indigenous tribes in the country, America agreed to pay $482 million.
Reparations is not a foreign concept to America. So why haven’t Black people received any restitution for the suffering we experienced during the centuries-long horror known as American slavery? Jim Crow? Mass incarceration?
We’re not the only ones who think this is inequitable.
A United Nations group released a report in recent years stating that the United States owes Black people reparations for the devastating oppression we continue to experience today.
The report states that reparations are the only way to even come close to making up for the “racial terrorism” and disadvantages generated by two and a half CENTURIES of using racist policy to sell our bodies; of suppressing our civil rights through cruel violence; of ruthlessly dehumanizing us since the moment we were bound in captivity.
Many historians agree that America would not be as wealthy as it is without the labor of enslaved Africans, but the government refuses to admit it. Because that admission would entitle millions of descendants at least some form of financial recompense.