Moving Forward or Looking Backward?

“Yesterday, the Restitution Study Group announced that a coalition of student, religious, community and other groups are committed to pulling loan money from the three parent banks and their subsidiary lending institutions until reparations are paid. The group’s head, Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against JP Morgan and seventeen other companies over restitution for profiting from slavery.

“The movement for reparations is based on the idea that slavery in the US not only denied captive Africans of economic compensation for their work, but that those individuals’ present-day heirs continue to suffer from that deprivation. Reparations advocates say that trillions of dollars that should have been paid the captive workforce before slavery’s abolition continues to be missing from the coffers of the African-American community. They argue that the heirs of companies that withheld those funds continue to benefit from the inheritance of that money.

“‘These companies have amassed enormous wealth off the backs of enslaved Africans,’ Farmer-Pallmann said. ‘They participated in institutionalized terrorism, genocide, rape, torture, and theft of humans. They owe us restitution, but they refuse to pay. They left us no choice but to boycott.’”

Although slavery in the US was a grave injustice, no person alive today is responsible for what is past. There were a lot of white slave-holders and there were also a lot of white persons who gave their lives to end slavery. (The companies are sued merely because they have deep pockets.) As long as the African-American community looks backwards, instead of forward, the divisiveness will continue. A sense of entitlement hinders vs. empowers.