ON HISTORICAL CONTINUITY, SLAVERY, AND JUSTICE

BY MICHAEL WALTERS

ABSTRACT: As of early March 2019, three American Democratic presidential candidates advocated reparations for descendants of American slaves. 1 On July 20, 2017, The New York Amsterdam published “Europe replies to demand for reparations," 2 referring to a 2013 lawsuit filed by fourteen Caribbean nations against the United Kingdom, France, and The Netherlands. Thus, the request for compensation for ancestors’ free labor is now transnational.

KEY WORDS: REPARATIONS, NORTH AMERICA, BRITAIN, FRANCE, SLAVERY, QUAKERS, EMANCIPATION, TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE, CARIBBEAN, HAITI, SAINT DOMINGÜE, JACOBINS, GIRONDINS, CIVIL WAR, ABOLITIONISTS, BRAZIL, CUBA, LINCOLN, NAPOLEON, REP. WILLIAM JAMES CONNELL (R NEBRASKA), AUDLEY ELOISE MOORE, REPARATIONS COMMITTEE FOR THE DESCENDANTS OF AMERICAN SLAVES. JAPANESE AMERICANS, CORNELIUS JONES, NATIONAL EX-SLAVE MUTUAL RELIEF, BOUNTY AND PENSION ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. CALLIE HOUSE, **JOHN DICKERSON, SIOUX NATIVE AMERICANS, MARTIN LUTHER KING JR, JAMES FORMAN, ANA LUCIA ARAUJO, RANDALL ROBINSON, TA-NEHISI COATES, ELIZABETH WARREN, KAMALA HARRIS

The First?

In 1775, former slave Belinda, freed when revolutionary authorities confiscated her loyalist master’s property during the early struggle for American independence, did receive three years of compensation, £30, as directed in her former master’s will. Then the payments stopped. Evidence shows that Belinda moved to Boston, where she “lived in poverty." 3 Belinda, though, knew her value. Her February 14, 1783 suit against the estate of deceased owner Isaac Royall Jr. read that denying her financial redress would be “pouring bloody outrage and cruelty on all who dare to be free.” Belinda won £15 yearly from the Royall estate. After one year, the payments stopped. The former slave sued three more times in the face of the resistant colonist aristocracy. The government ruled that the payments should continue. In lawsuit filings, Belinda became Belinda Sutton, taking the last name of her former owner’s widow. “Although only partially successful, Sutton was the first known case of a freedperson who obtained financial reparations for slavery." 4 The political situation inspired freedom, and one woman agitated a fledgling nation for change. In early America, simultaneous to publicity of Belinda Sutton in American and British newspapers, Quakers began freeing slaves with remuneration. Still, “Reparations to former slaves were never seriously discussed in the public sphere during this early era of emancipation in North America." 5

Extreme Conditions

France, one nation currently targeted for economic redress by the Caribbean Community, more commonly known as CARICOM, decided to charge former colony Saint Domingüe 60,000,000 francs, after Haitians won independence. The original amount, 180,000,000, demanded at cannon point, was reduced under a more liberal monarchy. The West’s second nation, Haiti, named to honor Hispañiola’s Precolumbian Arowaks, succeeded in defeating three European powers, the French, the British, and the Spanish. The Spanish controlled the eastern part of the island since the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, and the British never ruled out expanding their domain to include Saint Domingüe, the jewel of all Caribbean colonies for its sugar. However, political and military leadership of Toussaint Louverture, military leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the influence of revolutionary fervor in France stemming from the French Revolution inspired Haitian freedom. One factor that caused the final stages of the Haitian Revolution, though, was Napoleon Bonaparte’s intention to reinstitute slavery in French colonies. Toussaint Louverture never got the opportunity to directly respond, having been arrested by Napoleon. Dessalines did, leading Haiti to independence.

The January, 1793 execution of French King Louis XVI, four years after French poor stormed The Bastille in the French Revolution, alongside a failed mixed race revolt in Saint Domingüe, set the stage for emancipation of colonial slaves. The mixed-race revolt in 1790-91 failed, in large part because the biracial Saint Domingüe residents would not ally themselves with the 500,000 slaves. The same year the king was beheaded in France, French planters voted in royalist governor Thomas Galbaud du Fort, who would not have enforced French decrees to extend more rights to mixed race residents and improve conditions for slaves, given that du Fort himself was a landowner. French commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax, future ally of Toussaint Louverture, had du Fort imprisoned on a French ship, to prevent the new governor from leading royalist forces against French forces. Still, chaos ensued. Mystery remains as to how the prison doors opened and slaves were armed. However, the least likely scenario is that the royalists armed the slaves. While it is highly unlikely that Sonthonax wanted to create a nation borne out of revolt, if he indeed armed the most oppressed in Caribbean history, such is the journey he commenced. Out of political and military desperation, to defeat the royalists, Sonthonax found allies in Saint Domingüe slaves, whose treatment at French hands included various barbaric tortures: examples included tying slaves’ arms and legs to posts, and lighting gunpowder in slaves’ buttocks. Most probable is that expediency encouraged the Jacobins to unite with future revolutionaries. The tortures inflicted upon the black men, women, and children taken to French Saint Domingüe, and their children who survived the brutality, at first played little to no part in inspiring even the most leftist French person from liberating human chattel.

In February 1794, the French National Convention welcomed three Saint Domingüe representatives: Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former slave and current French soldier, biracial Jean-Baptiste Millsand Louis Dufay, a white man. The February 3, 1794 Convention meeting greeted Belley, Mills, and Dufay with intermittent bursts of applause.

In the aftermath of Louis XVI’s execution, French government conventions were led by Jacobins and Girondins, both parties wanting to export revolution to assist other oppressed worldwide, to seek freedom. On February 4, Belley spoke, “pledging the blacks to the cause of the revolution, and asking the Convention to declare slavery abolished.” Deputy Levasseur apologized for ignoring the plight of blacks born into bondage. “Posterity will bear us a great reproach for that. Let us repair the wrong – let us proclaim the liberty of the Negroes," 6 Applause ensued; a black female regular at convention meetings fainted, but was ushered to sit next to President Marc-Guillaume Alexis-Vadier, once the business of legislating began. Deputy La Croix demanded that naval efforts be used to inform the colonies of the February 4, 1794 decree. “The National Convention declares slavery abolished in all the colonies. In consequence it declares that all men, without distinction of color, domiciled in the colonies, are French citizens, and enjoy all the rights assured under the Constitution." 7

Chattel slavery will never return to Haiti, birthed January 1, 1804. The politics of the era and French nation, seeking redefinition after executing its final monarch, facilitated freedom, yet “There were no public debates or collective demands to provide reparations to the newly freed populations." 8 While Haiti’s first few decades were tumultuous politically, the nation splitting into two from 1807-1820, on the world stage it was impeded in growth by failure of other nations to diplomatically recognize a country borne out of slave rebellion. The largest culprit was its northern neighbor, the United States of America. With slavery legal in the South, unless the Civil War had been fought earlier, there was no chance for America to officially recognize Haiti, making regulated trade difficult, thus slowing economic growth. Chaos in Saint Domingüe, leading to Haitian separation, indirectly increased slave territory in the U.S. With France funding a war which they would lose, to retain their most prized colony, Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to United States in 1803, under President Thomas Jefferson. While not all of this territory was developed or populated, areas that were did house French human property, which maintained and cultivated French wealth.

Delaying Freedom

Events in Haiti inspired swift action, unlike how the French planters approached their human chattel. After slave-owning President Thomas Jefferson executed the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, rumors of the Point Coupée cabal surfaced, causing slave owners to request arms from governor William C.C. Claiborne, the objective being to suppress any possible replay of the Saint Domingüe revolution. As some Haitians could travel to the United States, no talk of slaves attaining their freedom would be allowed in the new American territory. In 1806, the American Louisiana territory banned Haitian blacks. 9 While the legal slave trade to the United States had ended by 1810, the American Constitution protected the property of the slave holders. Nearly all who opposed slavery or its extension west could not envision financial redress allocated for freed beasts of burden, viewed as racially inferior by the majority, even by many abolitionists. “Therefore, although acknowledging slavery as evil, all further proposals to abolish slavery in the new independent country included some kind of financial compensation to the slave owners, but no reparations to the former slaves." 10 By 1822, England, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden had officially recognized Haiti, but French military threats to dictate Haitian acceptance of the originally draconian independence tax force Haiti into subservience. This compounded internal political issues, as northern and southern portions of Haiti reunited in 1820. Reparations would have made a difference in young Haiti’s economy. Two centuries later, on December 6, 2017, Forbes magazine advocated that France return Haiti’s independence tax, implying agreement that France did not need to extort from colonial revolutionaries. Most tragically, however: “Reparations for slavery continued to be an unachieved project at least to the great majority of Haiti’s descendants of slaves." 11

Given that the United States had fought a war in the 1810s, whether America could have or would have interceded on Haiti’s behalf against the French is an open question. Therefore, even if the United States had been in lock step with Haiti in 1824, the tax would have been part of Haiti’s economic burden. As it was, the United States refused to even recognize Haiti’s existence. Doing so would have been political and economic suicide for the slave owning South, and the North benefited economically from the free labor tilling southern lands, and serving the American landed aristocracy.

While American slavery ended only after war, other colonies saw de jure freedom come to their black labor over the 19th century. In 1888 Brazil became the last nation to end slavery. The South American nation had attained independence from Portugal in 1822. Brazilians awarded freedom from bondage found that landed interests demanded justice, after having perpetrated and perpetuated injustice for centuries: “In the decades that followed emancipation, Brazil’s freed people did not receive any kind of financial and material reparations. Moreover, unlike in the United States and Cuba, former planters and slave owners avidly persisted in seeking claims for their alleged moral and material losses." 12

In the United States, upon the North’s victory in the Civil War, there was hope. Some freed slaves even wrote to their former masters asking for back pay. However, “In a society where white supremacy and deeply rooted racism ruled, many former slaves remained in a position of social and economic exclusion. 13 New citizens still rose, thanks in some part due to the Freeman’s Bureau which distributed land to some 40,000 formerly perceived beasts of burden for landed southern wealth. Land redistribution stopped as Andrew Johnson took over the presidency, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In its beginnings, Reconstruction had goals of creating equal citizenship, though in Louisiana for example, previous prejudices created divisions in society that would remain, up to today. As slaves did in Saint Domingüe, former slaves in the American allegedly free South could bargain their way to becoming small landowners. However, “Land ownership was not the result of land reform to redress inequalities developed during slavery, but acquired through their own abilities to fight for it and negotiate working conditions. Ultimately, these hindrances prevented the social ascensions of freed populations, and contributed to perpetuate two distinct groups. Freed African Americans, with limited mobility, became wage workers at sugarcane plantations, whereas whites, with access to land ownership, became farmers." 14

Undaunted

A June 24, 1890 bill proposing pensions for freed slaves, proposed by Rep. William James Connell (R Nebraska), failed to pass, though it was supported by “both black and white individuals." 15 Others then carried this torch for pensions, but multiple attempts never passed Congress, 16 all white men until 1917.

The next most prominent attempt at earning pay for bondage labor was the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the United States of America. Founded by Callie House, born into slavery in 1861, and John Dickerson, a black minister and teacher, it was targeted by multiple government investigations for fraud. The goal of the organization was to inspire former slaves to petition government representatives – some even wrote presidents – for pensions.

A lawsuit filed by association attorney Cornelius Jones, the first African American attorney to argue before the Supreme Court, sued for the cotton tax from 1862 to 1868. Though after the war southern senators wanted to reallocate this $68,073,388.99 back to former slave owners, Jones argued that this was a time for freed former American slaves to receive deserved redress. “The claim stated that the federal government owed the entire amount of taxes collected from 1862 to 1868 to former slaves, who cultivated and harvested the taxed cotton without remuneration. This litigation became the first class action demanding reparations for slavery in the United States." 17

Word spread to other former slaves; meanwhile, a postal fraud investigation led to two trials for Jones and no convictions. Jones’ social standing immunized him from further prosecution. House was not so fortunate, sentenced to a year in prison for allegedly defrauding free blacks for their membership fees. 18

Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, more commonly known as the UNIA, mentioned reparations, but he too was convicted of mail fraud, and sentenced to prison. President Calvin Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence, and the controversial figure died in England in 1940. 19

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s writer’s project to interview former slaves brought attention to the plight of many former slaves, and revealed some stories of benevolent former masters and some black success stories. 20 “Aunt Adeline,” of Fayetteville, AR, 89 in 1940, recalled that her former master did give money to his former slaves, calling it an “exceptional gesture.” However, “Several of the former slaves lived in extreme poverty.”21

What many Americans see as the Civil Rights Movement commenced with the 1955 Birmingham bus boycott, led by Martin Luther King Jr. Soon thereafter in 1962, Audley Eloise Moore, whose activism resulted in her stature as “Queen Mother Moore,” became president of the Reparations Committee for the Descendants of American Slaves, Only reparations will bring about equality, Moore’s group said, adding this, which to many Americans is still, a controversial statement. It should not be: “The unpaid labor of African slaves laid the foundation for the accumulation of the wealth that ultimately made the U.S.A. the richest country in the world.”22

In 1969, after the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member and then current Black Panther party member James Forman delivered a manifesto demanding $500,000,000 in reparations from Christian and Jewish religious institutions for their participation and support of the slave trade. This yielded $300,000, inspiring noted atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair to support Forman. O’Hair, a staunch advocate of separation of religion and state, said “the amount requested to the churches was too low in relation to their actual wealth.”23 Responses to this demand ranged from support, to attacks, alleging that if descendants of slaves were compensated, so should descendants of dead Confederate soldiers.24

In the 1970s and 1980s, both the Sioux Native Americans and Japanese Americans received reparations: the Sioux received theirs for land confiscation, first by the American military; Japanese Americans, many still alive, received theirs for being interned in camps during World War II. In 1951, West Germany provided $1.5 billion to assist survivors of attempted genocide.25 As all African Americans do not support reparations, not all Jewish survivors of World War II supported receiving German reparations. However, surviving victims attained compensation. In the case of the Sioux, their nation was stolen; Japanese Americans were accused of disloyalty and often had to start their lives again after the war, and Jewish survivors resettling around the world had economic foundations, all at least partly due to reparations.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, in 1988, the centennial of abolition, a new constitution was adopted, calling for land reforms that might be “interpreted as material reparations for slavery.”26 Currently Brazilian politics include a far right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and a surge of black women running27 for office, in the wake of Rio de Janeiro Councilwoman Marielle Franco’s death.28 In the United States, Barack Obama’s presidency followed by Donald Trump’s unlikely election, and a midterm election seating the most diverse House of Representatives in American history have coalesced in a focus on race and to some extent reparations. Brazil’s culture and history diverge from the U.S., but comparisons can be made.

Transformative Texts

Ana Lucia Araujo’s 2017 book, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: a Transnational and Comparative History, was a necessary text because “all over the Americas, and especially in Europe and Latin America, many social actors and even academics adhere to the idea that the first demands of reparations for slavery were only initiated as a result of United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.”29 Directly vital to the current political discussion of reparations is Ta-nehisi Coates’ June 2014 Atlantic report “The Case for Reparations.” One topic addressed therein is housing, a focus in sociologist Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book, The Color of Law. Both Coates’ report and Rothstein’s analysis earned Sidney Hillman awards, yearly cash prizes for authors creating journalism for the public good. Coates’ report is a historical inquiry describing how no effort has been made to address the collective financial disadvantages created in a people subjugated by human bondage and racism, both imported by European colonists. Rothstein takes Coates’ implication a step further, stating that there’s no such thing as de facto segregation in the United States, using evidence including housing by-laws and zoning laws to make his case.

Long Time Coming?

Some may ask why it has taken so long for prominent American presidential contenders to propose reparations. Any previous advocacy aside, Prof. Don Marshall of the University of the West Indies, Barbados, blames economics’ coalescence with history: “Materialist world history privileges the history of empires and countries rather than explorations in connected history.”30 Marshall’s article builds upon the scholarship of Frantz Fanon, who studied black psychology, noting self-hatred in landmark book Black Skin, White Mask. Fanon died before the American Civil Rights Movement.

Perhaps the most controversial statement in Marshall’s article is that descendants of enslaved Africans are not the only people who are entitled to reparations. While arguing blackness lies at the bottom of world racial hierarchy, echoing Fanon,31 Marshall cites an article from Starbroek News, by Hilbourne Watson and Trevor Campbell – “Reparations Campaign Distracts from Challenges Facing Caribbean.” The message from the history of world capitalism, Marshall argues, is that assisting the descendants of slaves may be just the beginning. The workers, creators of wealth throughout time, in all “societies – slaves from antiquity, serfs, peasants, and workers – could justifiably make a claim for reparations, equally with the descendants of enslaved Africans.”32 World economics did not have to evolve as they did, according to Marshall. “Slave labour was rationalized as the commonsense solution both in terms of white supremacist arguments and profit maximisation imperatives. The invention of chattel slavery in these circumstances was therefore, neither historically inevitable nor foreseen in the early rivalry stakes among European powers.”33 Since slavery did become a part of world history, however, many scholars, including Dr. Blair Kelley of North Carolina State University, will state the obvious, of which many Americans are unaware: that America’s vast wealth is such only because of an early historical dependence on free labor. Looking ahead from the end of the Civil War to today, the debate on immigration is as such because undocumented labor is at a discount, and fairness as to how resources are allocated is still a threat to super wealthy who feel they cannot have enough. Often these beliefs in class superiority are buttressed by white supremacy, when considering the idea that descendants of slaves merit compensation for the free labor of their ancestors. Brazil’s story is comparable. Marshall’s critique of capitalism indicates that reparations are a threat to the most prominent economic system, though many capitalist countries are grafted with some form of government safety net.

However, reparations have been awarded previously, to the aforementioned Japanese Americans and the Sioux Native Americans, and in 1994 to African Americans killed in the 1923 Rosewood massacre.34 In 2000, Victoria Barnett, a white writer, wrote on how she could not avoid noticing the effects of historical and then present systemic discrimination upon many of the people with whom she worked. As a rule, Barnett wrote, “A central factor is that whites tend to view slavery’s legacy of racism, poverty and injustice as social problems ‘out there,’ not as inherent components of our own lives as citizens of this society.”

Barnett formed her support of reparations from dropping out of college temporarily in 1969 to work with community programs in Racine, WI. She returned to college, graduated, and only saw Racine again in 1985. Little to nothing had changed. While it is possible to internalize stereotypes blaming African Americans for their own plights caused largely by systemic and structural discrimination created by American history, Barnett never internalized such hierarchies.35

Citing Randall Robinson, author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Barnett wrote: “We have not as a collective confronted the nature of the crime of slavery and its ongoing legacy.” Effects of systemic discrimination against blacks in America, nearly all of whom are descended from slavery “permeate society; no one is untouched. The dividing lines that result – religious, ethnic or economic – warp public and private relationships.”36

As the phenomenon of mass incarceration was growing, later exposed in The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, Barnett referred to “infant mortality rates, unemployment,” and “incarceration rates” as areas which financial reparations could address.37 While Alexander, a civil rights attorney, does not address reparations in her renowned analysis of race and criminal justice, she does indicate how the criminal justice system has been more stacked against black Americans over the past few decades than at any time in American history, perhaps adding to the case for African Americans’ receiving financial compensation work of chattel ancestors.

Barnett suggests that many white Americans who say they are “color blind” really just choose not to see. “I saw things in Racine years ago that continue to haunt me, for they were outrageous, and showed that many people in our democracy are viewed and treated as less than human.” Though in favor of reparations, Barnett does not say how they should be distributed, but instead states that their acceptance will be the beginning of a discussion, and not only a monetary transaction. “The demand for reparations calls us to think in a different way about the enduring legacy of racism and to articulate possible solutions in ways that are both relevant and reasonable to individual citizens. Where successful, this process can create a foundation for reconciliation.”38

Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University professor: “Reparations go much beyond granting freedom and civil rights, and can take various forms that stand independently. A first step in the reparatory process requires that those who benefit from the wrongdoing offer an apology to those they victimized. Other measures include redressing the original situation as it was before the offense, and offering payment for possible damages.” Araujo states that slave society wealth continues to reign supreme, even after alleged abolition: “It is worth remembering that the study of slavery and its legacies in former slave societies remains a rough terrain full of quicksand spots and imbricated in power structures.”39

Given the publication date of Barnett’s article, in 2000, it is reasonable to believe that more avenues for such communication are open, especially given Barack Obama’s election to the White House. One fact undiscussed by too many historians is that slaves built the residence where both Barack Obama lived from 2009 until January of 2017, and where Donald Trump currently resides. Victoria Barnett did mention this,40 as did Michelle Obama, while her husband was the first president of color in American history.

Recent American history includes colleges renaming buildings previously named for slave owners, controversy over how to address Confederate monuments and the defeated Civil War flag, and companies having to answer for their collaboration and profit from the slave trade. In 2006, a 2002 lawsuit against J.P. Morgan was revived, asking the investment bank to compensate descendants of 1250 slaves whom they took ownership of, after their debtor could not pay back an antebellum loan. “Aside from J.P. Morgan, there are numerous other U.S. institutions with ties to slavery including Aetna, New York Life, AIG and FleetBoston Financial Group. African-Americans nationwide are seeking apologies and financial compensation from the government and multi-national corporations,” wrote Claudio Cabrera in the October 19-25 edition of the _New York Amsterdam News41. Seven years later, fourteen Caribbean nations sued Britain, France and The Netherlands for their roles in infecting the allegedly postcolonial world with sociological, cultural, and economic effects of slavery.

Though slavery ended in the Great Britain in 1833, it is remembered on every 23rd of August in the United Kingdom. In 2010, at an international gathering, British Communities Minister Andrew Stunnell “appeared to dismiss the clamour for slavery reparations,” even though England “is widely acknowledged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the slave trade.” Instead of compensating descendants, Stunnell, who is white, said the priority was to combat slavery in its various modern forms – for example human trafficking. “We don’t believe that reparation is a way of tackling the issue of slave trade.”42

While the last ten years may have transformed minds not only in America, but also worldwide, Claudio Cabrera wrote in 2006: “As with most race-related issues in this country, Blacks and whites sit far apart on reparations.”43 Cabrera and Ana Lucia Araujo collectively imply that ending slavery did not end the discriminatory structures dictating de jure bondage. Alongside such, only reparations and a dialogue, as occurred in South Africa, cited by Barnett, can create racially and ethnically egalitarian societies.44 “The arguments in favor of or opposed to reparations carried similar elements in societies where slavery existed,” Araujo wrote.45

Even among African Americans, who can claim Belinda Royall, who later, after being freed, became Belinda Sutton, as the first to attain reparations, support for financial redress is not unanimous,46 just as not all Jews surviving the Nazi Holocaust wanted German reparation.

As Democratic presidential candidates Julián Castro, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and the lesser known Marianne Williamson all endorsed reparations for black Americans, perhaps a moment has come. Ta-nehisi Coates has said that because of an individual meeting she had with him, that Elizabeth Warren is indeed serious about her intentions to attempt to implement slavery reparations, if elected president.47 Still, however, a majority of Americans has to agree that reparations are necessary to heal a divided nation – fractured by race since formation. To ensure real understanding of the issue, in America and abroad, Howard Professor Ana Lucia Araujo suggests that all, even the privileged, question how history is attained when approaching the reparations debate: “Historians and readers should question who collects historical data, who controls historical records, who regulations the publication of conclusions resulting from academic research on slavery, and how this research has been made available or kept inaccessible to larger audiences.”48

As several authors concluded, there is a relationship between the need for labor and a capitalistic economy. However, Don Marshall still argues that slavery did not have to occur, implying that what American southerners called their “peculiar institution” resulted from white supremacy, born in Europe. When explorers and colonists traversed the Atlantic, resulting in direct genocide of native Tainos or Arowaks, or thirteen British colonies, Europeans with visions to expand their national empires brought discrimination with them – often accompanied by brute force. When colonies became nations, either through violent strife, or by other means, implicit white supremacy remained, especially in the United States and Brazil, the last two countries that ended slavery. Ana Lucia Araujo’s Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: a Transnational and Comparative History, largely addresses Brazilian and American history, because these are the nations that have a unique need for reparations, given how long they took to end human bondage.

On Labor and Capitalism

It is totally justifiable to critique capitalism; many American presidential candidates are also proposing various ways to regulate capitalism for all Americans, to address income inequality. Still, addressing the injustices faced by freed slaves and their descendants directly has never been a priority in any nation. Instead, politics and the power of the former slave owners dictated that the most subjugated, previous human chattel, would never have equal economic footing, because they would never be paid for the hours they toiled, often hopeless to attain freedom.

It is justifiable to say that the entire world would be better if there were no capitalism – no exploitation of labor. However, every society has some aspects of economic competition; the economy is globalized more than ever before in human history. Therefore, to give slaves’ descendants a chance to overcome systemic, structural, and overt discrimination, the time has come for individual countries, or groups of sovereign states, to facilitate reparations. Privileged people transnationally understanding that their status was not earned will be vital in this process, which could heal chasms in national outlooks of diverse ethnicities, most specifically in Brazil and the United States, but also globally. While economic justice is not the only form of justice, in a globalized economy it is essential.

  1. Lockhart, P.R. “The 2020 Primary Debate Over Reparations, Explained.” Vox, 11 March 2019.https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/11/18246741/reparations-democrats-2020-inequality-warren-harris-castro(Accessed 16 March 2019). ↩︎

  2. Wilkinson, Bert. “Europe Replies to Demand for Reparations.” The New York Amsterdam News, 20 July 2017.http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2017/jul/20/europe-replies-demand-reparations/ ↩︎

  3. Araujo, Ana Lucia. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, p.50. ↩︎

  4. Araujo, pp. 49-50. ↩︎

  5. Araujo, p. 50. ↩︎

  6. James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins. New York: Random House, 1963, p. 140. ↩︎

  7. James, p. 141. ↩︎

  8. Araujo, p. 57. ↩︎

  9. Holmes, Jack D.L. “The Abortive Slave Revolt at Point Coupée, Louisiana, 1795.” The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 1.1 (Autumn 1970), pp. 358-359. ↩︎

  10. Araujo, p. 47. ↩︎

  11. Araujo, p. 88. ↩︎

  12. Araujo, p. 112. ↩︎

  13. Araujo, p. 91. ↩︎

  14. Araujo, p. 93. ↩︎

  15. Araujo, p. 96. ↩︎

  16. Araujo, p. 97-99. ↩︎

  17. Araujo, p. 104. ↩︎

  18. Araujo, pp. 105-107 ↩︎

  19. Araujo, pp. 122-124. ↩︎

  20. Araujo, pp. 124-128. ↩︎

  21. Araujo, p. 125. ↩︎

  22. Araujo, pp. 139-140. ↩︎

  23. Araujo, p. 151 ↩︎

  24. Araujo, pp. 149-151. ↩︎

  25. Araujo, pp. 129-130. ↩︎

  26. Araujo, p. 155. ↩︎

  27. Caldwell, Kia Lilly. “Sexism, Racism, Drive more Black Women to run for office in both Brazil and U.S.” The Conversation, 4 Oct. 2018. https://theconversation.com/sexism-racism-drive-more-black-women-to-run-for-office-in-both-brazil-and-us-104208 (Accessed 16 March ↩︎

  28. Freelon, Kiritiana. “The Assassination of a Black Human Rights Activist has Created a Global Icon.” Quartz, 18 March 2018. https://qz.com/1231910/brazils-marielle-franco-murder-has-made-her-a-global-human-rights-icon (Accessed 16 March 2019). ↩︎

  29. Araujo, p. 8. ↩︎

  30. Marshall, Don D. “Whose and What World Order? Fanon and the Salience of the Caribbean Reparations Endeavour.” Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies (August/December 2016), p. 176. ↩︎

  31. Marshall, p. 177. ↩︎

  32. Marshall, p. 174. ↩︎

  33. Marshall, p. 175. ↩︎

  34. Barnett, Victoria. “Racism, Reparations, and Accountability – Payback?” The Christian Century, 25 Oct. 2000, p. 1070. ↩︎

  35. Barnett, p. 1070-1071. ↩︎

  36. Barnett, p. 1071. ↩︎

  37. Barnett, p. 1070. ↩︎

  38. Barnett, pp. 1072-1073. ↩︎

  39. Araujo, p. 5. ↩︎

  40. Barnett, p. 1073. ↩︎

  41. Cabrera, Claudio E. “Chasing Reparations.” The New York Amsterdam News, Oct 19-25, 2006, p. 6. ↩︎

  42. Eze, Merce. “Slavery Remembrance Day Observed.” The New African, 28 Oct. 2010, p. 28. ↩︎

  43. Cabrera. ↩︎

  44. Barnett, p. 1072. ↩︎

  45. Araujo, p. 8. ↩︎

  46. Araujo, p. 183. ↩︎

  47. McGrane, Victoria. “Ta-nehisi Coates Believes Elizabeth Warren is Serious about Reparations. Here’s Why.” The Boston Globe, June 1, 2019. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/06/01/nehisi-coates-believes-elizabeth-warren-serious-about-reparations-here-why/dmeW6Yw9DSOjGXzUIbzzDI/story.html ↩︎

  48. Araujo, p. 5. ↩︎