Slavery's terrible cost
Can reparations make amends for the suffering Blacks endured to help build this country?
By Jennifer Dokes The Arizona Republic
Sept. 01, 2002
Any American who says Blacks, and society as a whole, should just "get over" slavery has no understanding of U.S. history, no regard for the social devastation of that crime against humanity. And probably no soul.
A society built on freedom and guaranteed rights of equality doesn't simply get over - forget, negate, excuse away - that kind of evil. It faces it. It sees the mistake in both past and present contexts. It moves forward, ideally leaving no one behind.
It pays for its mistake. But not through reparations. The idea is disgusting on principle, with certain whorish qualities about it. You can't cash out - or cash in on - centuries of savagery and stolen liberties.
You also can't buy pride and shame, at least not the kind that helped shape my destiny. A check for reparations cheapens my birthright and the American experience in its full glory.
I am not damaged goods. I was not born a victim of slavery's legacy. I wasn't raised in racial oppression. And in those respects, I am much like my mother, her parents before her, their parents before them and also their parents.
I grew up believing the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the rights of the Constitution applied to me because nothing in my experience proved the contrary. The problem for America is there aren't enough people like me.
I was blessed, this is true. But I wasn't lucky. My experience was by design, commitment and the unimpeachable values of my community's long-established culture of civility.
In my mother's childhood memories are vague stories of lynchings in some far-away place called "down South." More vivid are happier, prouder moments growing up in a small Ohio town.
She was about 7 when townspeople put an end to Ku Klux Klan gatherings, not that they ever amounted to much to begin with. Klan members in full regalia were dancing around a burning cross one night when some folks crashed the party and exposed their neighbors - the town doctor and dentist among them - to a bright light of shame.
An Italian immigrant's boy was Mom's "husband" when playing house. Hungarians, Poles and Greeks were also her playmates. Their families shared suffering during the Great Depression.
My grandfather, mother and sister had the same teacher for third grade. She must have been good. The town generally didn't settle for anything but excellence in education.
Smithfield, Ohio was settled in part by abolitionist Quakers. It was a stop along the Underground Railroad. It saw integration as the natural course of American life.
My grandfather was born into that culture in 1901, my mother in 1930. I came along in 1961. Generations since have known little else and are strong and fully invested in our society because of it.
It is obvious - painfully and shamefully so - that not every Black family shares my experience, even though American laws and ethos say they should.
I might see reparations differently if I lived another common Black American life.
I didn't grow up in the segregated South, where it took 100 years after the Civil War to begin to establish real freedom and constitutional rights to Black Americans. That's a time of recent memory, not ancient history.
I didn't grow up in any of the nation's rotting urban neighborhoods where many isolated Blacks today still try to eke out an existence with poor housing, no jobs and a terrible education system.
Inner-city decay is a lot about institutional abandonment, segregation and discrimination. And it's not too difficult to connect the dots back to the pre-civil rights movement and then back to that era's obvious links to slavery's injustices.
But a check for reparations doesn't fix that. A heavy investment in American promises equally applied would.
Direct money to inner-city kids who suffer poor instructional leadership. Make housing available that is safe and affordable with the eye toward building sustainable communities in the richest sense of the word.
See people as people.
If every Black American had what I had growing up, we probably wouldn't be talking about reparations today. But just as it is impossible to determine an accurate dollar figure for reparations, you can't buy what I have and what I'm passing on to my daughter - which, in a word, is pride.
The American dream is not for sale. You can create and practice it, as my forefathers did. You can inherit its privileges.
But the American dream can't be bought - or bought off.
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