06.21.2020 One Mo’pinion: How Reparations?
Michael R Hicks, Lead Editor, TheLENS
We in America love the good parts of our history, we extol the founding fathers, the 4th of July, baseball and apple pie.
Reality reveals a counter-narrative to that mythology, one that goes beyond the 250 years of slavery. A history of betrayal, theft, human atrocities, “freedom” without resources, terrorism, murder, and plunder.
America as a sovereign nation has a fiat currency that is the world’s reserve currency, one that is backed by “the Full Faith & Credit of the United States,” which on one level is American corporate and national yearly GDP capacity, but also the power of a well-funded military and history’s most deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
If America, through the actions of the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury, has literally created trillions of dollars out of thin air to be a bulwark against economic collapse during a global pandemic, *we are now all witnesses* that America has the *economic* ability to do justice by a group of American citizens who have only had a so-called equal protection under the law since 1968.
The $12 trillion+ racial wealth gap, between what Black Americans collectively SHOULD HAVE if this was a real economic meritocracy (and this is keeping Pareto’s 20-80 principle in mind as well) versus what they actually have, we now see IS DOABLE, AND IS POSSIBLE.
Now of course it cannot realistically be done all at once. There have to be means of gradualism to combat the dangers of inflation…but it *can be done.* It requires political will and it demands that white Americans release their belligerence and durable denial. No one blames slavery on *you* as an individual. However, you are a beneficiary of those oppressions in real time, and you may be, whether accidental or intentional, whether indirectly or no, continue to contribute to system that treat Black American descendants of chattel slavery as people with no futures. Disposable. A permanent bottom-caste.
