With all the atrocities and miscarriages of justice African Americans have complained and marched about from Rodney King to Katrina to Jena Louisiana, I still don’t think we get it. We think we live in a place other than an America that kidnapped and enslaved us for centuries and has still not admitted that the heinousness of their acts were crimes against humanity genocide and unjustified and that has yet to apologize for them. We also live in an America that has apologized for the internment camps during World War II and called them a result of "...race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" and paid reparations to surviving internees. As of October 11th the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution that labeled the Ottoman Empire’s World War I massacre of Armenians as “genocide.” In international law a crime against humanity is an act of persecution or any large scale atrocities against a body of people, and it’s the highest level of criminal offenses. Yet to this day the largest known persecution and genocide against any people of any ethnicity has been against us and there has not been one single solitary act carried out to address it.
Do we get it yet? Our genocide is so wide spread and so deeply entrenched in what is called “the progress of the world” that taking responsibility and paying reparations for it would put a black eye on the morality of the world as well as change the balance of its economic power. Spain, Holland, Denmark, France, and Great Britain would have to ante up. Not to mention the Vatican that said enslaving Africans was spiritually alright and who grew wealthy off African enslavement. In 1998 the Vatican said “...As far as possible, reparation should erase all the consequences of the illicit action and restore things to the way they would most probably be if that action had not occurred. When such a restoration is not possible, reparation should be made through compensation (equivalent reparation)." That means we would get back Africa, the most mineral rich continent on the planet, or its equivalent and the monetary value of 500 years of mass slaughter and kidnapping. Let’s quit fooling ourselves, reparations aren’t ever coming in the form of a willing or legislative act. At most what we should expect is remuneration, a monetary payment that would act as punitive damages for our suffering.
We are continually ignored and denied the dignity of an apology justice and a returning of what was taken from us because morally politically socially and economically it would condemn everyone who would took part in them, switch the locus of global control to our favor, and totally destroy the ethical and moral high ground that the beneficiaries of these crimes claim as a basis for their position in the today’s existence. If at any point the people of the world acknowledge our enslavement for what is was it automatically acknowledges their guilt and blatant disregard for truth and justice. They have to maintain the idea of us being a mongrel people, minimize our contributions, and globally portray us as less-than to maintain their piece of mind.
Do we get it now?
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