Reparations Movement Looks to Gain From Bush's Gore Island Slip

¶ … President Bush's admission in Senegal that the United States was mindful of the past wrongs it had committed in enslaving stolen people from Africa, Carrillo (2003) explores the possible gains for the reparations movement. However, Carrillo does more than simply focus on the "residual value" gained by the reparations movement from what she terms as a slip on President Bush's part.

For, she also takes great pains to place in context the significance of Goree Island's notorious "Door of No Return." Carrillo achieves this through descriptions that bring alive the horrors of a place that had witnessed, "human beings .. delivered and sorted and weighed and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return." Indeed, Carrillo is unsparing in her efforts to describe the anguish suffered by slaves in societies that prospered by their unpaid labor, while remaining indifferent to their plight.

Interestingly, Carrillo's article can be directly correlated to Robinson's The Debt since the latter, too, focuses on the massive injustice of defrauding "the laborer of his hire." Robinson drives home his point through the simple device of showcasing a letter written by Jourdon Anderson, an ex-slave, in the year 1865. In his letter, Anderson asks his former owner to recompense his family for years of unpaid labor: " .. our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars ...

If you fail to pay us for our faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future ...." Thus, taken together, Carrillo and Robinson's articles succeed in eliciting reader sympathy for the current reparations movement, which has filed a class action suit against 19 blue-chip corporations for slavery reparations, on the grounds that there is no statute of limitation for a crime against humanity. Today, America prides itself on its dedication to democratic values such as human liberty and equal opportunity.

However, the fact remains that the same America has a guilty conscience over its past history of slave labor and treatment of other communities of migrant workers. In fact, as Burke, Carrillo, and Robinson point out, it appears that America has a lot to answer for vis-a-vis its past crimes of stolen labor and for the massive injustice of defrauding "the laborer of his hire." (Robinson, p. 241) Both Carrillo and Robinson focus on the injustice of slavery and the labor stolen from tens of millions of blacks.

However, while Robinson simply raises the issue, Carrillo's article goes several steps further in exploring the current effort by the reparations movement to actually claim compensation (Carrillo, 2003). Burke, on the other hand, approaches the subject of "labor's lost legacy" through highlighting the plight of several million braceros who have yet to see any benefit from the government pension plan that they paid into. Thus, all three articles collectively highlight the indignity and injustice suffered by America's slave labor and migrant workers.

In fact, if at all there is any difference in the three articles, it lies in the question of reparation. Robinson does not raise the issue at all except by implication, when he says, "the value of Jourdon Anderson's stolen labor was to compound itself .. through the blood lines of the white man who had owned him ...." (p. 241) Carrillo and Burke, in comparison, are pretty much unequivocal in their reporting of and sympathy for the current reparation movements organized by the black and bracero communities.

However, there is one critical difference between the bracero and black reparation movements, although it does not in any way reflect on the injustice that has been done. And, that is, the braceros are fighting to win their money back while the blacks are asking to be compensated for generations of unpaid labor. Following President Bush's admission in Senegal that the United States was mindful of the past wrongs it had committed in enslaving stolen people from Africa, Carrillo (2003) explores the possible gains for the reparations movement.

However, Carrillo does more than simply focus on the "residual value" gained by the reparations movement from what she terms as a slip on President Bush's part. For, she also takes great pains to place in context the significance of Goree Island's notorious "Door of No Return." Carrillo achieves this through descriptions that bring alive the horrors of a place that had witnessed, "human beings ..

delivered and sorted and weighed and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return." Indeed, Carrillo is unsparing in her efforts to describe the anguish suffered by slaves in societies that prospered by their unpaid labor,.