There is a debate stirring in the United States: Should Black people receive reparations for the horrors of slavery?
The question is a ridiculous one. Did the Jews receive reparations for the evil of the Holocaust? Did the Japanese receive reparations after America put them in internment camps?
The questions are rhetorical, but the answers are yes. It makes no sense that Black people have waited this long without receiving any form of reparations and that the question is even being brought up.
Of course we should receive reparations.
America carries on as if she is a stranger to the idea of reparations.
Now you have Senator Cory Booker, writer and scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates and actor Danny Glover, among others, who went before the Senate to plead with the White ruling bodies of Congress to give us, Black people, reparations.
If they wanted to give us reparations, then they would’ve done it by now. They wouldn’t have waited 154 years since the day that marked our freedom up until today.
The ruling class of America does not care about the cries of the once-Black slave for freedom, justice and equality.
That’s not to say the desire for reparations will go unfulfilled.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan recently spoke at the N’Cobra Reparations Conference in Detroit.
During his keynote, he said the repair of us has to come from the God Who created us.
But he also said, “If reparations does not repair our broken minds, our corrupted souls and bring us anew again, we can say we’re engaged in reparation masturbation. I’m not trying to be vulgar, but our expressions are vulgar—if it only is for a few. We all have to be made anew; not half made—made anew. Our lives have to be transformed so the reparation has to start where the original creature started.”
As much as we want the American government to pay for the evil of slavery, that’s simply not going to happen. The repair of us has to start with us.
How do we repair ourselves?
We stop lying to each other. We stop robbing each other. We stop killing each other. We stop committing adultery and fornication. We stop smoking and drinking. We clean up our own lives in order to clean up our communities.
And after we’re cleaned up, we go after the land. The land is where the future is.
“I’m saying to those who love reparations, to those who love justice, let’s mark out some states. It may take us 50 years, but if we become the power in all those states, we got enough lawyers to make judges,” Minister Farrakhan said. “We got enough intelligent Black people to run the state legislatures. Become appellate court justices, state supreme court justice. When you run the state politically, then you have the chance to run it economically.”
The key to reparations is working on ourselves, first, then buying land in organized unity and creating some states that we can call our own.
