Combat: Fighting for Black Reparations

Sometimes, an idea downplayed is an idea remade. Black reparations is one of those ideas.

When Congressman John Conyers, Jr., who represents Michigan’s 13th District, submitted bill H.R. 40 for consideration by the House of Representatives in 1989, he and other blacks cheered in hopes that the bill on black reparations would pass, if not in that year, in a few years afterward.

But in 2014 the bill, which was titled H.R. 3745 at first and later changed to H.R. 40 by Conyers, still lies at the bottom of an ocean of mediocre actions. Or as aptly exampled by the parable where a man shoots his daughter because she looked exactly like his wife, who was trying to kill him, black reparations has fallen victim to a mud of unclear appreciations and clear miscalculations.

At least four reasons shape opposition to H.R. 40, prompting Conyers to reintroduce the bill in the House every year since 1989.

First, still too many racists exist in Congress and the public to pass the bill. Second, many of those who oppose black reparations perceive a huge economic loss to the country if financial compensations totaling in the billions and perhaps trillions were paid to African Americans.

Third, opponents of the bill argue that many blacks will use reparation money to gamble, buy expensive cars and clothes, and go into debt. And fourth, the bill seems to have been poorly, if not too cautiously, crafted.

In effect, the effectiveness of H.R. 40 lies somewhere between a desert and poverty. What do we mean, then, when we say the bill may have been poorly or too cautiously crafted?

When Conyers submitted the bill in 1989, some blacks felt the bill, though adequate, was not strong enough to express the horrors blacks had suffered in America. For one thing the bill is not actually a black compensation bill, but a bill calling for the establishment of a commission to determine how reparations are to be paid. As such H.R. 40 is titled the “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.”

Then, the bill does not contain a strong black reparations proclamation, a firm concrete cornerstone on which the bill should stand. The bill contains a preamble with half a sentence acknowledging U.S. culpability in slavery and its impact on black America, but it does not accommodate a forceful proclamation that captures such normal reparations concepts as restitution, damages, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition of America’s offenses against blacks.

These concepts are formalized eloquently in the “United Nations Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law.”

Conyers says H.R. 40 was framed as a study “to have a national discussion without allowing the issue to polarize our party or our nation.” But 25 years later the bill still hibernates in a cocoon of obscurity.

Evidently, the less polarizing bill is just as polarizing as a more polarizing proclamation. So if H.R. 40 without a proclamation has never passed Congress, what harm would adding a proclamation do now after such a long period of failure?

A black reparations proclamation in the bill could be as short as “Whereas the United States of America enslaved black Americans unjustifiably from 1619 to 1865 and their African American descendants have suffered cruelly because of slavery’s legacy, we demand that a formal apology from Congress and the U.S. president be placed in the Congressional Record and that reparations be paid to each African American, which is to be determined and paid within two years after said apology.”

Or the proclamation could be as long as the U.N. Charter on Human Rights.

Moreover, a black reparations’ proclamation without H.R. 40 somehow seems stronger than a proclamation within H.R. 40. By itself the proclamation is like gold in a gold watch. The gold makes the watch valuable, not the rawhide straps of the watch. And like the straps of the watch, H.R. 40 only brings attention to the proclamation; it does not bring overwhelming value to the proclamation itself.

Finally, in its rawest sense, as a brain inside a skull, a black reparations proclamation is a declaration of justice. H.R. 40 is a skull without a brain; it is merely a placeholder to the declaration. But without justice, the bill has little force and slender meaning.

Justice deserves better. Justice deserves to be called justice, boldly and openly, and not silenced beneath the burqa of a less polarizing bill.

The original goal of the black reparations movement was to get a black reparations proclamation endorsed by Congress, then to set up a commission to study how reparations were to be determined and paid. But Conyers and others decided, instead of first drafting a bill that focused on the “end,” to create one that emphasizes “a means to the end.”

Yet, after 25 years the less desirable path still has not worked, while the more desirable path simply languishes, like a prophet in the backroom of a Starbucks. Isn’t it time to listen to the hum of the prophet and ignore the loud speakers of silence?