The Story Remains The Same Will It Be Forever Ignored? Reparations

Just a few facts for a Wednesday afternoon related to where we were and where we are now. This post with a few additions was written three years ago concerning reparations. We as a darker hued people have lived by faith too long it is now time for action. Especially considering the fact that 1.2 trillion of wealth was accumulated by the 500 wealthiest people in the world in 2018. The question remains where is our the darker hue people’s justified payment?
 
1. Prior to the Great Migration which begun around 1910. Over 90% of the people of darker hue lived in the Jim Crow South.
2. In 1910 people of the darker hue owned over 19 million acres which had all but evaporated by 1970.
3. Only 45.4 of people of the darker hue own their own homes in America.
4. The people of the darker hue only own 2% of the total land in America currently.
5. In 1964 the median income for a family of the darker hue was 55% of his white counterparts. This was before the signing of the Civil Rights Legislation in 1964 and 1965.
6. In 2011 the people of the darker hue’s median family income was 59% of his white counterparts. So over that 47-year period, the gap between white and darker hue people only lessened by 4%.
 
General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton intended to create a complete separation of the races United States of Colored People after the Civil War.  This concept of 40 acres and a mule was devised because they understood that in this nation people of the darker hue would never fully truly be treated as equal to his white counterparts.  What they devised along with Lincoln’s approval was providing the “just freed people of the darker hue” with the following:

"The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States."

These three men understood that “white privilege” would supersede any concept of equality in rights for people of the darker hue. The land that was considered is now some of the most fertile lands in this nation. I assume that the Compromise of 1877 which took over federal troops out of the occupied former confederate states may not have been necessary had this options of land ownership actually had been consummated.  Yet the nation still created two separate nations within the nation with the implementation of the Compromise of 1877. With the immediate end of Reconstruction in place, a total totalitarian subjection of people of the darker hue was implemented in those former confederate states that subjected darker hued people with immediate loss of any rights as citizens. The almost immediate erasure of the 3 Civil War Or Black Reconstruction Constitutional Amendments.

So, was born the United States of White People, Jim Crow style which was put into effect for close to another 100 years.  The effects of the Compromise of 1877, the exclusion of providing property to recently freed darker skin peoples, is akin to creating a system that enveloped darker hued people into perpetual economic dependence.  This in addition to the total breakdown of secured colored business whose patronage from the darker hue community with the implementation of the Civil Rights Bills of 1964. Which opened the once excluded white businesses up to people of the darker hue. The Civil Rights Bill basically disrupted any meaningful economic power in communities that comprised the darker hued people. 

We, people of a darker hue, were somehow taught that any product created by white industries whether a service or an actual good was superior to any service of good offered up by peoples of a darker hue. Maybe it was the fact that something denied a lifetime was more valuable to people of darker hue that goods or services already available readily to them. So when white people say I didn’t own any slaves, or their parents and grandparents didn’t own slaves. The argument is irrelevant because both them, their parents, and grandparents benefited from the ills of a system of inequality that shunned a complete race of people from actually prospering in a supposed land of the free and brave.

It is imperative that the late Representative John Conyers, legislation to create a system of reparations is designed immediately by the federal government in the coming decade. The only way balance is ever going to come to a system that has continued to prosper for now almost 5 centuries is to dismantle it or at least begin to redistribute the wealth. Oh, I hear the arguments coming from both white and black people. Yes, black people who feel that they have benefited from this imbalanced economic and political system.  Yet, whether you are white or black one cannot argue that as of today, the greatest number if people shut out of the economic prosperity of this nation has been and continues to be men and women of the darker hue. People of the darker hue have been running a race towards equality still shackled to the ills of a time when actual shackles inhibited their ability to progress.

It is time to balance the scales both economically and politically. I would suggest what the United Nations deemed necessary a commission that will devise a comprehensive plan of reparations. That will include all facets of national leadership from both races in the areas of education, economic, housing, as well as the political solutions . The greatest minds in this  nation should be able to tackle and solve this problem. If a man can break down the human genome he/she should be able to create true equality in this nation. The only question is do they really want it? Or the have the will to do something about a system that has screwed people of a darker hue now for far too many years to imagine.