WHAT DIRECTION REPARATIONS?

By Siphiwe Baleka

published in the NCOBRA 33rd Annual Conventions Program

There seems to be a lot of momentum in the reparations movement centered around HR40 (Black Reparations Slavery Study Bill) and the California Reparations Task Force. While many people are excited about these developments, I do not share their excitement. I am concerned that the current reparations agenda does not recognize the fundamental need to establish the conditions needed for repair. Consequently, any reparations such as payments, education programs and housing secured and applied in an environment where repair cannot take place, is a pyrrhic victory.

My father once told me, and I heard Malcolm X say this, too, that if you want to solve a problem, you must go to the origin of the problem. So we need to consider the origin of the problem that “reparations” seeks to solve.

A family was living in a specific territory. It spoke a specific language and practiced a specific culture with its own connection to the land, environment and other peoples. The family knew its place in the natural world. A member of that family was captured and trafficked across the Atlantic and placed in captivity. He or she was then subjected to a dehumanizing process in a controlled environment for the purpose of manufacturing an artificial product called a “slave”. The manufacturing process used violence to commit ethnocide - the destruction of a person’s natural identity - and resulted in transgenerational epigenetic effects. In other words, we were severed from our ancestral lineages and transformed from being natural human beings to unnatural, artificial slave products where we lived a life of subhuman servitude to free whites for generations, sacrificing their human identity and nature for the will and desires of their owners. The resultant legacy and harm from that experience, combined with the additional legacy and harm of racism, is what we are trying to repair. The solution then, is to reverse engineer what happened to us.

Since the dehumanizing manufacturing process required removal from our own territories into places of captivity, the first reparation demand needs to be reversing the captivity by returning to our own territories. We must have autonomous territories within the United States as well as programs to return us to the specific territories our ancestors were taken from.

Since the dehumanizing manufacturing process required the use of violence and the threat of violence, reparations must result in autonomous territories where there is guaranteed peace and security. This means that United States law enforcement have no jurisdiction. We need guarantees of peace such that financial resources do not need to be wasted on a military to defend the autonomous areas and nations from attack and can be used in providing rehumanizing services.

Since the dehumanizing manufacturing process severed one from their ancestral lineage resulting in ethnocide, these ancestral lineages must be restored. Ethnocide has created an identity crisis in the African American community. Since our identities were destroyed, they must be restored and our natural, rightful place in the world reclaimed. Fortunately, genetic testing enables us to do just that.

Thus, the overall aim of reparations is the complete REHUMANIZATION of the descendants of people that were taken from the African continent and were subjected to captivity, dehumanization and subhuman service.

It should be recalled that at Emancipation, the United States government intended that there be a new, independent African nation that would allow for the process of rehumanization. This was the desire that was clearly stated by the twenty representatives of the new Black government council that met with the United States Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton and United States Army General William Tecumseh Sherman in Savannah, Georgia, January 12, 1865. Five days later Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 ceding United States territory to the newly freed African people. The United States passed legislation to make this a reality.

I don’t see anywhere in the current reparations movement in the United States where providing the conditions for our rehumanization is discussed. There is no demand for land, autonomy and the exercise of self determination under international law. We can not hope to repair ourselves without reverse engineering the captivity, dehumanization and subhuman service. We need an environment and conditions where we can live without the threat of violence, police, and the administration of the United States (in)justice system. We need an environment where we don’t have to worry about where we are going to live and what we are going to eat so that we have time to focus on the work of internal reparations. The price tag for providing such environments on both sides of the Atlantic will require $25 trillion over the next 25 years.

In closing, I recall the words of Tendayi Achiume, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law and UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance:

“The project of Reparations is about undoing structures and remaking societies that were deliberately designed along logistics that reinforce racial subordination. . . . From the perspective of lawyers and legal academics and legal advocates I would say we have invested far too much time in taking advantage of strategic opportunities and THAT HAS KEPT US IN THE REFORM FRAME. And I think one of the things that has been the most powerful about the defund movement is that it has shown just the transformative power that comes from ASKING FOR YOUR IDEALS AS YOUR STARTING POINT. . . .One of the things I am trying to challenge myself to do as a law professor, for example, is to think about what it might mean to teach law school classes that are MORE ABOUT IDEALS, THAT ARE MORE ABOUT REIMAGINED SOCIETIES AND HOW WE MIGHT GET THERE RATHER THAN THE FOCUS ON LITIGATION AND PLUGGING THE HOLES OF A SYSTEM THAT IS DESIGNED TO PRODUCE INJUSTICE. . . .”

For a practical reparations plan to reverse engineer our captivity, dehumanization and subhuman service, see the Agenda for Black America’s Restoration and Self Determination -

*Siphiwe Baleka is a member of the NCOBRA International Affairs Commission and the Health Commission