3 Major Myths about Reparations
Reparations for Black Americans has come to the forefront of America. It has also been an idea that politicians run from, and won’t have a conversation about. Democrats are seeing Blacks flee their party due to not holding the Black Agenda highly. They have not done anything tangible for Black American in recent memory. The term Foundational Black American has been defined as Black non immigrants, either your roots go back to blacks here before slavery or your ancestry in America is traced back to Slavery. The call for Reparations for FBA citizens is becoming louder and louder especially with an election year coming up. With so much information surrounding the topic, let’s break down the top three myths of Reparations.
I call this myth “free money”. Some people coin Reparations as a hand out. It is not a hand out nor is it free money. It is money that your ancestors worked for. On the backs of American slaves is how American gained its vast wealth.
I call this myth “why do I” myth. The full sentence I hear from white citizens is “Why do I have to pay, I had nothing to do with that?” Our tax dollars go to whoever and wherever our elected officials say it does. I had nothing to do with what’s going on in Ukraine or Afghanistan but our elected official made the decision to give Ukraine Billions of dollars. Ukraine and Afghan refugees received millions. Reparations would be the same way. We all pay taxes.
I call this myth “It didn’t happen to you”. It didn’t happened to you so why should you get paid money. Abraham Lincoln is the President who made the promise to give former Slaves or Freedmen 40 acres and a Mule as Reparations. America has never fulfilled that promise. When a person is owed money, and the person dies, it is well within reason for that person’s family or estate to go after money for the wrongdoings. So look at FBA as the Estate of Former Slaves coming back for the money owed to them by the government.
There’s a passage from a book called From Here to Equality by William A. Darity & A. Kristen Mullen. It says:
Slave-grown cotton is, in great measure, the root of New York's wealth. Forty years before Fernando Wood suggested that New York join with the South and exit the Union, cotton had already become the nation's foremost exported product. And in the four intervening decades New York had become a commercial and financial behemoth dwarfing any other U.S. city and most others in the world. Cotton was more than just a profitable crop. It was the national currency, the product most responsible for America's explosive growth in the decades before the Civil War.