THE DEBT AMERICA REFUSES TO PAY

 

©Wendell Griffen, 2022

 

I am one of the more than thirty million (30,000,000) descendants of American slavery in this country. Our enslaved ancestors were shipped, sold, robbed, maimed, raped, murdered, and otherwise wronged from 1619, when a Dutch ship named the White Lion arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, until slavery was supposedly ended at the end of the civil war in 1865.

That entire pattern of behavior happened openly. It happened officially. It was sacralized by preachers and congregations, carried on as part of daily business, and continued across successive generations.

This society has done nothing to compensate the descendants of enslaved persons for 250 years of unpaid labor.

This society has done nothing to compensate the descendants of enslaved persons for 250 years of life theft.

This society has done nothing to compensate the descendants of enslaved persons for 250 years of rapes, castrations, mutilations, beatings, and murders.

This society has done nothing to compensate the descendants of enslaved persons for 250 years of state-sponsored and sanctioned enslavement of African people.

It has done nothing to repair the trans-generational harms my ancestors suffered and bequeathed to their descendants.

I refuse to forget the debt that is owed for those harms.

I refuse to forget that people who prayed and preached about loving God perpetrated those harms.

I refuse to forget that my ancestors were forced to endure those harms with a resignation that I witnessed generations later as a child growing up in the closing years of the official Jim Crow era.

I now live in an unofficial Jim Crow era of mass incarceration, political, economic, and education disempowerment, wealth and health disparities that are traceable to the enslavement of my ancestors.

America refuses to admit the debt it owes descendants of formerly enslaved Africans. Preachers, religious educators, politicians, and ethicists refuse to admit that a debt is owed.

Meanwhile, they want descendants of formerly enslaved Africans to think and talk with them about “racial reconciliation.”

I will not do so.

People who will not admit the transgenerational harms suffered by my people from American slavery lack the moral competence to talk with me about racial reconciliation.

Instead, I will continue to indict, denounce, and condemn this society for its refusal to admit and pay the debt owed the thirty million descendants of American slavery.

I will also challenge my Black co-descendants to do likewise.  I will remind them what Randall Robinson mentioned in his book titled The Debt:  What America Owes to Blacks.

The issue here is not whether we can or will win reparations.  The issue is whether we will fight for reparations, because we have decided for ourselves that they are our due...

…

Let me try to drive the point home here:  through keloids of suffering, through coarse veils of damaged self-belief, lost direction, misplaced compass, shit-faced resignation, racial transmutation, black people worked long, hard, killing days, years, centuries—and they were never paid.  The value of their labor went into others’ pockets—plantation owners, northern entrepreneurs, state treasuries, the United States government.

Where was the money?

Where is the money?

There is a debt here.

...Jews have asked this question of countries and banks and corporations and collectors and any who had been discovered at the end of the slimy line holding in secret places the gold, the art, the money that was the rightful property of European Jews before the Nazi terror.  Jews have demanded what was their due and received a fair measure of it.

Clearly, how blacks respond to the challenge surrounding the simple demand for restitution [reparations] will say a lot more about us and do a lot more for us than the demand itself would suggest.  We would show ourselves to be responding as any normal people would to victimization were we to assert in our demands for restitution that, for 246 years and with the complicity of the United States government, hundreds of millions of black people endured unimaginable cruelties—kidnapping, sale as livestock, deaths in the millions during terror-filled sea voyages, backbreaking toil, beatings, rapes, castrations, maimings, murders.  We would begin a healing of our psyches were the most public case made that whole peoples lost religions, languages, customs, histories, cultures, children, mothers, fathers... And they were never made whole.  And never compensated.  Not one red cent.  [Randall Robinson, The Debt:  What America Owes to Blacks, (Dutton, 2000, the Penguin Group, pp. 206-208)

To this day, America refuses to admit its debt. Instead, American policymakers and thought leaders add insult to the injuries caused by slavery by bragging about “the rule of law.”

In the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War that ended in 1865, three amendments were added to the U.S. Constitution. The 13th Amendment was ratified in 1866 and outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for criminal conduct. In 1868, the 14th Amendment was added. It guarantees equal protection of the law and prohibits deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was added which guaranteed the right to vote for all persons born in the United States, an apparent effort to extend voting rights to formerly enslaved men (no women were granted voting rights until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920). 

However, no provision was made in the U.S. Constitution - or in any other law - to repay the formerly enslaved persons or any of their descendants for 246 years of forced labor carried out under "the rule of law." The formerly enslaved population was given no land, no property, no money, and nothing else as restitution for deprivations they had been forced to endure under the "rule of law." The nation that enacted a Homestead Act in 1862 and settled white farmers on free frontier land taken from Indigenous people gave no land to formerly enslaved Black people.

The "rule of law" hypocrisy goes further. 

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, a law that called for $1 million reparations to be paid for emancipated Africans who had been enslaved in the District of Columbia – but the money was to go to the white people who enslaved them, worked them without pay, and kept the proceeds from their work. I have not found proof that the emancipated Africans received a penny. The District of Columbia Emancipation Act also included up to $100,000 to resettle formerly enslaved persons – but the resettlement was to be in Haiti and Liberia, not in the United States.  

Under "the rule of law," millions of formerly enslaved people were left homeless, landless, and penniless by the society that sanctioned their enslavement for 246 years. As if that plight was not sufficiently woeful, the people who enslaved them were restored to land on which they had toiled and produced wealth. 

The voting rights guaranteed to formerly enslaved Black men became worthless when state after state passed laws that mocked their emancipation. One day after the 13th Amendment was ratified which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, South Carolina enacted a law that required Black "servants" to enter into labor contracts with White "masters," to work from dawn to dusk, and to maintain a "polite" demeanor. Violation of that law - by failing to make such a "contract" or by failure to maintain the required demeanor - subjected the "servants" to criminal sanctions which could result, upon conviction, in the loss of voting rights and return to involuntary servitude. The "rule of law" made a mockery of the 13th Amendment.

This history is a fraction of the harms, injuries, and indignities inflicted upon formerly enslaved Black people according to "the rule of law" in the United States. Perversely, it is never mentioned when economists, politicians, lawyers, judges, and religious leaders discuss wealth inequity in my country. Instead, white capitalists and their Black sycophants blatantly question the industry and innovativeness of people whose marginalized ancestors designed cities, revolutionized the arts, developed life-saving medical procedures, and invented machines that transformed life in countless ways.

The shameless "rule of law" hypocrisy goes even further. Formerly enslaved Africans in the United States were defrauded of voting rights by various devices. I cherish to this day the 1963 receipt for poll taxes paid by my parents and recall the names and faces of Black people in my rural southwest Arkansas community who picked cotton to make enough money to pay the taxes so our elders could vote. Now, the descendants of those elders are openly disenfranchised by voter suppression schemes. 

Three generations after the U.S. Civil War ended a season of racial violence occurred in the United States that historians term the Red Summer of 1919. White mobs terrorized and murdered Black neighborhoods at will and without fear of prosecution. The Red Summer concluded in Arkansas, my home state, near the rural community of Elaine in southeast Arkansas, when hundreds of Black men, women, and children were massacred by a white mob and federal troops (who traveled from Little Rock aboard a troop train accompanied by Governor Charles Brough) over the course of several days beginning on October 1, 1919. 

No white person was arrested for or charged with committing any of the murders, planning the massacre, or participating in it. Land, livestock, and farm implements that belonged to the massacred people and their terrorized survivors were not restored to their descendants. The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 transformed a community of industrious, enterprising, and upwardly mobile Black people who owned some of the most fertile land in Arkansas into some of most impoverished people in the United States. This happened in my home state under "the rule of law."

To this day, the descendants of massacred, plundered, and terrorized Africans have not received restitution or reparation for American slavery and its consequences. It speaks volumes about the moral and cultural competence of "rule of law" cheerleaders when a travesty of this magnitude has not been addressed by White lawyers, judges, legal scholars, legislators, prosecutors, governors, religious leaders, columnists, or other influential leaders.

They will not mention it when talking and writing about the U.N.'s International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

I will not forget that omission. I will not treat it as inadvertent or mistaken.

I will not be silent about the debt America refuses to pay.