Maulana
Karenga
Extracted from a paper titled "The Ethics of Reparations: Engaging
the Holocaust of Enslavement," at The National Coalition of Blacks for
Reparations in America (N'COBRA) Convention, Baton Rouge, LA, 2001 June 22-23
The
struggle for reparations for the Holocaust of Enslavement of African people is
clearly one of the most important struggles being waged in the world today. For it is about fundamental issues of human freedom, human
justice and the value we place on human life in the past as well as in the
present and future. It is a
struggle which, of necessity, contributes to our regaining and refreshing our
historical memory as a people remembering and raising up the rightful claims of
our ancestors to lives of dignity and decency and to our reaffirming and
securing the rights and capacity of their descendants to live free, full and
meaningful lives in our times.
But
this struggle, like all our struggles, begins with the need for a clear
conception of what we want, how we define the issue and explain it to the world
and what is to be done to achieve it. There
are several ways to frame and approach this important issue or rather different
aspects to one larger project: (1) the legislative dimension as with the Conyers
Bill, H.R. 40 and local and state bills and resolutions; (2) the legal as
N'COBRA and the Harvard group are doing; (3) the political by which there is
mass organization to support the project; (4) the economic which is the major
focus of all the above efforts; and (5) the
ethical initiative which I wish to engage in this paper. Our contention in the Organization Us is that the ethical
dimension is the first and most fundamental dimension of the reparations issue
and that unless that is engaged and successfully pursued, the issue of
reparations will appear to lack moral grounding in the court of national and
world opinion, and thus, will be cast as a claim unworthy of support on any
other level.
In
consideration of the issue of reparations as essentially and foremost an ethical
issue, it must above all be framed in ethical terms.
Therefore, the struggle for reparations begins with the definition of the
horrendous injury to African people which demands repair.
In other words, to talk of reparations is first to identify and define
the injury, to say what it is and is not, to define its nature and its impact on
the one(s) injured. Unless this is
done first and maintained throughout the process, there is no case for
reparations only an incoherent set of claims without basis in ethics or law.
This
is why the established order works so hard to define away the historical and
ongoing character of the injury. This
is especially done in two basic ways. First,
the injury is distorted and hidden under the category of "slave
trade". The category trade
tends to sanitize the high level of violence and mass murder that was inflicted
on African peoples and societies. If
the categorization of the Holocaust of Enslavement can be reduced to the
category of "trade" two things happen.
First, it becomes more of a commercial issue and problem than a moral
one. And secondly, since trade is
the primary focus, the mass murder or genocide can be and often is conveniently
understood and accepted a simply collateral damage of a commercial venture gone
bad.
A
second attempt of the established order to deny the horrendous nature of the
injury and its essential responsibility for it is to claim collaboration of the
victims in their own victimization. Here
it is morally and factually important to make a distinction between
collaborators among the people and the
people themselves. Every people
faced with conquest, oppression and destruction has had collaborators among
them, but it is factually inaccurate and morally wrong and repulsive to indict a
whole people for a holocaust which was imposed on them and was aided by
collaborators. Every holocaust had
collaborators: the Native Americans, Jews, Australoids, Armenians and Africans.
No one morally sensitive claims Jews are responsible for their holocaust
based on the evidence of Jewish collaborators.
How then are Africans indicted for the collaborators among them?
Although
there are other ways, the established order seeks to undermine the factual and
moral basis of the African claim for reparations, these two are indispensable to
its efforts. And thus, they must be
raised up and rejected constantly, for they speak to the indispensable need to
define the injury to African people and to maintain control of it.
As
Us has maintained since the Sixties concerning European cultural hegemony, one
of the greatest powers in the world is to be able to define reality and make
others accept it even when it's to their disadvantage.
And it is this power to define the injury of holocaust as trade and
self-victimization and make Africans accept it, that has dominated the discourse
on enslavement in America. Our task
it to reframe the discourse and initiate a new national dialog on this.
We
have argued that the injury must be defined as holocaust.
By holocaust we mean a morally
monstrous act of genocide that is not only against the people themselves, but
also a crime against humanity. The
Holocaust of enslavement expresses itself in three basic ways: the morally
monstrous destruction of human life, human culture and human possibility.
In
terms of the destruction of human life, estimates run as high as ten to a
hundred million persons killed individually and collectively in various brutal
and vicious ways. The destruction
of culture includes the destruction of centers, products and producers of
culture: cities, towns, villages, libraries, great literatures (written and
oral), and works of art and other cultural creations as well as the creative and
skilled persons who produced them.
And
finally, the morally monstrous destruction of human possibility involved
redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future
relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus
damaging the truly human relations among peoples.
It also involves lifting Africans out of their own history making them a
footnote and forgotten casualty in European history and thus limiting and
denying their ability to speak their own special cultural truth to the world and
make their own unique contribution to the forward flow of human history.
It
is here that the issue of stolen labor and ill-gotten gains which is seen as
important to the legal case can be raised.
For in removing us from our own history, enslaving us and brutally
exploiting our
labor, it limited and prevented us from building our own future and living the
lives of dignity and decency which is our human right.
At
this point, it is important to stress the role of intentionality
in the Holocaust. Again,
discussion of the Holocaust as a commercial project often leads to an
understanding of the massive violence and mass murder as unintended collateral
damage. Thus, to frame it
rightfully as a moral issue rather than a commercial one, we must use terms of
discourse which speak not only to the human costs, but to the element of
intentionality. It is in this
regard that Us maintains that maagamizi, the
Swahili term for Holocaust, is more appropriate than its alternative category maafa.
For maafa which means calamity, accident, ill luck, disaster, or
damage does not indicate intentionality. It
could be a natural disaster or a deadly highway accident.
But maagamizi is derived from
the verb -angamiza which means to
cause destruction, to utterly destroy and thus carries with it a sense of
intentionality. The "a"
prefix suggests an amplified destruction and thus speaks to the massive nature
of the Holocaust.
Clearly,
it is issues like these and the ones discussed below which require an expanded
communal, national and international dialog, which precedes and makes possible a
final decision on the definition and meaning of the Holocaust, and the morally
and legally compelling steps which must be taken to repair this horrendous past
and ongoing injury. Therefore, in
the context of holocaust, it is clear that reparations is more than receiving
payments. Indeed, in the Husia, the sacred text of ancient Egypt, we find a concept of
restoration, i.e., healing and repairing the world that is appropriate in
discussing the reparations project. The
word is serudj and it is part of a
phrase serudj-ta, meaning to repair
and heal the world making it more beautiful and beneficial than it was before.
This is an ongoing moral obligation in the Kawaida (Maatian) ethical
tradition and is expressed in the following terms: (1) to raise up that which is
in ruins; (2) to repair that which is damaged; (3) to rejoin that which is
severed; (4) to replenish that which is depleted; (5) to strengthen that which
is weakened; (6) to set right that which is wrong; and (to make flourish that
which is insecure and undeveloped. Again,
then, an expansive and morally worthy concept of reparations as repair and
healing requires more than monetary focus and payments.
Regardless
of the eventual shape of the evolved discourse and policy on reparations, there
are five essential aspects which must be addressed and included in any
meaningful and moral approach to reparations.
They are public admission, public apology, public recognition,
compensation, and institutional preventive measures against the recurrence of
holocaust and other similar forms of massive destruction of human life, human
culture and human possibility.
First,
there must be public admission of Holocaust committed against African people by
the state and the people. This, of
course, must be preceded by a public discussion or national conversation in
which whites overcome their acute denial of the nature and extent of injuries
inflicted on African people and concede that the most morally appropriate term
for this utter destruction of human life, human culture and human possibility is
holocaust.
Secondly,
once there is public discussion and concession on the nature and extent of the
injury, then there must be public apology.
One of the reasons we rejected the one-sentence attempt to get a
congressional apology is that it was premature and did not allow for discussion
and admission of
holocaust. In addition, as the
injured party, Africans must initiate and maintain control of the definition and
discussion of the injury. No one
would suggest or contemplate Germans superceding Jewish initiatives and claims
concerning their holocaust, nor Turks seizing the initiative in the resolution
of the Armenian holocaust claims. The
point here is that Africans must define the framework for the discussion and
determine the content of the apology. And,
of course, the apology can't be for "slave trade," or simply
"slavery"; it must be an apology for committing holocaust.
Moreover, the state must offer it on behalf of its white citizens.
For the state is the crime partner with corporations in the initiation,
conduct and sustaining of this destructive process.
It maintained and supported the system of destruction with law, army,
ideology and brutal suppression. Thus,
it must offer the apology for holocaust committed.
Thirdly,
public admission and public apology must be reinforced with public recognition
through institutional establishment, monumental construction, educational
instruction through the school and university system and the media directed
toward teaching and preserving memory of the horror and meaning of the Holocaust
of enslavement, not only for Africans and this country, but also for humanity as
a whole.
Here
it is important to note that the first holocaust memorial should have been for
Native Americans who suffered the first holocaust in this hemisphere. And we must address their holocaust concerns and claims, as a
matter of principle and with the understanding that until and unless they
receive justice in their rightful claims, the country can never call itself a
free, just or good society.
Fourthly,
reparations also requires compensation in various forms.
Compensation can never be simply money payoffs either individually or
collectively. Nor should the
movement for reparations be reduced to simply a quest for compensation without
addressing the other four aspects. Indeed,
compensation itself is a multidimensional demand and option and may involve not
only money, but land, free health care, housing, free education from grade
school through college, etc. But
whether we choose one or all, we must have a communal discussion of it and then
make the choice. Moreover,
compensation as an issue is not simply compensation for lost labor, but for the
comprehensive injury - the brutal destruction of human lives, human cultures and
human possibilities.
Finally,
reparations requires that in the midst of our national conversation, we must
discuss and commit ourselves to continue the struggle to establish measures to
prevent the occurrence of such massive destruction of human life, human culture
and human possibility. This means
that we must see and approach the reparations struggle as part and parcel of our
overall struggle for freedom, justice, equality and power in and over our
destiny and daily lives.
In
the final analysis, this requires the bringing into being a just and good
society and the creation of a context for maximum human freedom and human
flourishing. Indeed, it is only in
such a context that we can truly begin to repair and heal ourselves, our
injuries, return fully to our own history, live free, full, meaningful and
productive lives and bring into being the good world we all want and deserve to
live in.
Copyright
2001 Dr. Maulana Karenga