It is a question I get sometimes: I don’t have slaves but maybe my ancestors did, if that is the case, how to make amends?
The the case of Stacie Marshall in Georgia. She was in line to inherit 300 acres, which would make her the first woman in her family to own a farm. But she had discovered that her family had owned seven people. She wanted to know how to make it right.
She looked into her family’s past and was trying to “chip away at racism in the Deep South, where every white family with roots there benefited from slavery and almost every Black family had enslaved ancestors”. None in her farming community of talked about white privilege, critical race theory or renewed calls for federal reparations. They think it’s about heritage, not hate, they tell her.
Farming, family and unspoken discrimination are braided together so tightly here that she can’t untwist them. She is aware that she sometimes stumbles across the line between doing antiracism work and playing the white savior, but she finds the history unavoidable.
This is a fundamental question: should the descendants of people who kept others enslaved be held responsible for that wrong? What can they do to make things right? And what will it cost?
Locals suggested she could set up an internship for young Black farmers, letting them work her land and keep the profit. Maybe her Black neighbors wanted preservation work done on their church cemetery. Or she could give some land or money from the sale of it to descendants of the Black people who had helped her family build wealth.
She said you can’t really hide from your neighbors/ Not long ago, she ended up in a CrossFit class with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican her region elected to Congress in 2020.
Most residents are evangelical Christians. It’s such rich Trump country that the former president held one of his last campaign rallies five miles from Ms. Marshall’s farmhouse.
In recent years the issue of reparations has exploded among nations wrestling with the past. Scholars are beginning to see the German payout of $60 billion to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the United States decision to pay reparations to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II and even Japan’s awkward efforts to settle with Korean ”comfort women” as bedrocks of a new political landscape.
Every year since 1989, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, has sponsored a bill to establish a commission to study reparations for slavery. It remains stuck in committee, but away from Capitol Hill other developments are having a significant impact on the national debate.
Others argue that it is impossible to determine the actual present-day effect of slavery — to trace the impact of slavery on, for example, today’s overwhelming incarceration rate among black males, or to calculate all those generations of lost or artificially depressed wages. Not to mention the quagmire of determining who should be compensated. All blacks? Only those who demonstrate direct linkage to a slave? Should those of mixed race be included?
Supporters of reparations find this line of argument irrelevant. Historical crimes or injustices mean the victims still suffer, whether it is the victim or the victim’s descendants. Others say: ”Why should I pay for it, I didn’t do it?” No one is responsible personally for any wrongdoing. But just to stop the action doesn’t mean to have paid for the past. The perpetrator is very clear. It’s the identity of the U.S.
One approach could be funding. For example, a recent $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the College of William and Mary is one example of how a funder can approach the legacy of slavery within the humanities. It will support research and education pertaining to the college’s history with enslaved people.
History tells us of the belief that white, male, Christians are the only ones who bore the full image of God also explains why this elite set was the only one permitted to exercise full agency or stewardship over themselves (freedom), their families (gainful employment), their land (ownership), their towns, their states, and “their” nation (the vote).
The city of Evanston proposed a novel idea to fund reparations — a 3% tax on newly legal recreational marijuana sales.
In that city, 70% of the marijuana arrests were in the Black community. And they are 16% of the community. All studies show that Blacks and white [people] consume cannabis at the same rate.”
This funding solution has put Evanston ahead of any other city in America, and on the radar of Danny Glover, an actor and long-time reparations activist who has been vocal in his support of House Resolution 40. The 31-year-old bill was so named to invoke the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule.” The proposal would create a commission to study and develop a national plan for reparations.
We all need to acknowledging the fact that some families took part in some of the worst episodes of American life instead of running away from that fact, – it’s the honorable thing to do.” It can undoubtedly a brave thing to do. But at a time when every idea connected to race goes under a powerful social microscope, the pursuit of honor is not simple but needs to happen.
The NABWMT supports the need to make our history fully transparent.
Thanks for sharing the truth