Reparations owed to descendants of African slaves in America

¶ … Rogerian style arguing for the stand that reparation should be paid, or is owed by the United States Government for the African-Americans, the descendants of the African slaves. It has 5 sources.

Government should not pay or owe financial reparations to the descendants of African slaves for the impact of slavery. The stand taken by the writer is for the reparations that should be paid or are owed by the United States Government.

Taking only a brief glimpse on the painful history of the African slaves, a period spanning nearly two and half centuries from 1619 to 1865, more than 4 million people of the African descent were enslaved, bought and sold on the American continent similar to farm animals. Slavery thus was turned into an institution, and the beneficiaries were the white people of the same era, eventually making them millionaires and billionaires. Such was the practice of slavery that Africans and their children were forced to carry out such tasks as picking cotton, digging canals, building railroads, yet never getting paid for any work, not to mention the pain and labor put in by these slaves. Other industries that made common white people into virtual millionaires through enslavement of Africans included the steel mills, tobacco farms, and sugar and agricultural plantations that not enriched the white on the American continent, but those on other side of the Atlantic Ocean as produce from the hard labor and toil of the slaves were exported to the European continent and the element of profit in such transatlantic business need not be mentioned ['Reconciliation Through Reparations' 2003].

Reasoning

The painful aspect is not limited to the fact that these slaves were not paid for either their labor or pain, rather the fact that huge fortunes earned by the whites through slavery are enjoyed to this date by the descendants of the same white families, and what is more painful to learn is that even after the abolition of slavery in 1865, the people of African origin and the generations that followed continued to suffer at the hands of the white for the next more than 100 years. These exploitative measures included such acts as being bonded for life through sharecropping policies, lynching when and if protests were made or made advantage of the law if there was any, and the denial of vote. ['Reconciliation Through Reparations' 2003].

It is the list of such inequities against the African slaves that have prompted and generated a demand for reparations to be paid to the descendants of the African slaves who suffered at the hands of the white as stated above. The demands for reparations have a number of valid reasoning points behind them, but only two aspects will be mentioned here that more than convincingly supports the demand [Highet, 2002].

Conclusion

Having pointed out two of the important aspects as valid reasons for propagating for the rights of repatriating the descendants of the African slaves, the facts and statistics given above more than justify the grounds for demanding such reparations. As to the amount of reparation so demanded, the figures so calculated by the African National Reparations Organization in 1982, showed that more than U.S.$4 trillion was owed to the African people for stolen labor alone. This did not include figures for the amounts owed for colonialism, genocide, the exploitation of resources of the African people, their genius and talents. Neither does the figure of U.S.$4 trillion include the sufferings in the form of lynching, brandings, mutilations, mob violence, continued oppression, suppression of aspirations and the denial of basic human rights, the total of which may never be calculated [Highet, 2002].