Letter about Reparations

"Letter to the editor" to the Philadelphia Daily News, published on Wednesday, June 18, 2014:

As it has been said, "Everyone wants to inherit property - not guilt." Stu Bykofsky's piece called "the case against reparations" in some ways appears to be well-meaning, even though he compares the issue of reparations for African-American people to "dirty laundry" that has been soiled so by our past sufferings and "remnants of racism today."

However, the "dirty laundry" that Bykofsky wants to bring before a South African-type Truth Commission shows his complete naivete regarding how one group retains power over another. In fact, the so-called Truth Commission was more about the arrogant apartheid government flexing its muscles at the South African people in order to remind the latter that the former would still be running things, long after the great Nelson Mandela had ceremoniously served in his position as president.

To be sure, Bykofsky does admit that African-Americans generally have a far longer history in this country than most European Americans or so-called whites. Yet, he conveniently fails to mention how boatloads of millions of European immigrants were brought here and ultimately evolved into being "working white people," when there were already millions of African-Americans here who were deliberately excluded from the burgeoning political economy of capitalism and, for the most part, remained in a state of peonage as sharecroppers on the same plantations of their former enslavers.

However, there is something much more pernicious about Bykofsky's platitudinous assault against the right of African-American people to express our well-deserved resentment and hostility toward centuries of white supremacy, euphemistically called racism, when he says, "What (white) Americans fear is being called racist every time that conversation starts."

How dare he!

The issue of reparations was settled long ago. Therefore, for the life of me, I can't understand why this topic still exists. For example, Gen. William Sherman, during the Civil War, was redistributing land that had once been owned by enslavers and giving it to freed African-Americans. Unfortunately, as he did with the first two Emancipation Proclamations, the first one by Gov. David Hunter of South Carolina and the second one by Gov. John Fremont of Missouri, President Abraham Lincoln rescinded Sherman's orders and the land was returned to the former slave owners.

And please let us not forget the Freedmen's Bureau that was specifically set up by the U.S. government to aid the former captive workers. Of course, in 1876, Republican Party presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes promised "white" Southerners that he would abolish the Freedmen's Bureau and withdraw federal troops that were protecting the gunless African-Americans, if the aforementioned Southern voters gave him their support. They did. He won, and was placed in office. And he kept his disgraceful promise.

Finally, Bykofsky claims that he wants to help. He even went as far as making an unauthorized offer, "I believe that most Americans, if given a sensible and effective way to make amends, would take it."

If he really means that, then he should stop calling himself "white" and urge his readers to do so as well. Certainly, most of his fellows will not go for that. You see, claiming to be "white," regardless of one's social status, or cultural/historical past, not only makes a person part of an artificial "majority" group, but it also gives that person a sense of power. The brave words of freedom, equality and democracy that are constantly bandied about by U.S. politicians, newspaper columnists and others are only done so within their comfortable embrace of whiteness.

G. Djata Bumpus

Philadelphia