Restoration, Reparations And Both!

In secret huddles where the private interests of global empires are quietly whispered, rest assured that whatever we finally get as public policy around “reparations” or fixes to centuries of racial terrorism and trauma will be ground to powder and locked in chokeholds of “woke” fights until, like victims of America’s death squads, it “can’t breathe,” either.

One irony of life put a nondescript George Floyd front and center of international protest. Another sent his murder and demands for justice rippling “through Congress, college campuses, church basements and town halls.” All of it spurred a rhetorical debate, at least, that wrestles with the idea of global guilt for the evil forces at work which made the lynching of black folk a spectacle of American life and culture. Ironically, the earth roars, “Reparations now!”

In this tangle of ironies, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 “apologized” to Japanese imprisoned in “relocation centers” during WWII and gave survivors $20,000 each. As an International Criminal Court calls for Vladimir Putin’s arrest as a “war criminal,” not a hair will be ruffled on the heads of “criminal” corporations and institutions that still suck the blood of Africa.

We’ve crunched the numbers, but only God knows the depth of their offense or the exponential worth of the damage. Desperate, skeptical, or tired, some just say, “Cut the check!”

In 1989, Rep. John Conyers took a page from a meeting between 20 black preachers, Secretary of War, E.M. Stanton and Major-General W.T. Sherman on January 12, 1865. Conyers transformed Sherman’s “Special Field Order No. 15” (Jan. 16, 1865) into H.R. 40 – The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. “40” referred to the “40 acres of tillable ground” Section III of the Order provided to “each family,” but said nothing of a “mule.” Regardless, by August of that year, President Andrew Johnson’s counter orders of “pardon and restoration of property to the former Confederate owners of these lands,” turned most of some 40,000 freedmen, even at gunpoint, off their farms.

“Chickenfeed!” is what Dr. Cushion called the Church of England’s planned “compensation fund” of $122 million, endowed in part by “Queen Anne’s Bounty” for its investment links to the “South Sea Company.” This British joint-stock monopoly agreed in 1713, under the guise of “Asiento de Negroes,” to supply 144,000 slaves over 30 years to Spanish plantations in Central and Southern America. A Genoese company was first to make such an agreement in 1517 for 1,000 slaves over 8 years; a German firm in 1528 for supplying 4,000 slaves.

If the church were “truly repentant,” Cushion said, it would pay more like $1.5 billion out of its $12 billion investment portfolio (The Guardian, 1/15/23). Typically wily, the “perps” decide who the “worthy recipients” are, how much and in what manner the profits of their crimes are distributed,” then dragged out over another 9 years! Archbishop Welby was at least “deeply sorry for the links.” Maybe he can find a way to sob and write a nice, fat check at the same time.

In March 2021, a “prominent order of Catholic priests… vowed” to raise $100 million to “benefit the descendants of the enslaved people it once owned, and to promote racial reconciliation initiatives across the United States.” According to church officials, it was “the largest effort by the Roman Catholic Church to make amends for the buying, selling and enslavement of Black people.”

Maybe Houston Professor, Gerald Horne’s “10-point program” for African American reparations initiatives could merge the Priests’ “vow” with

“CARICOM.” This regional group was organized in 1973 to “establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the repayment of reparations by the governments of all the former Colonial powers and the relevant institutions…to the nations and people of the Caribbean community for crimes against humanity, of native genocide, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and a radicalized system of chattel slavery.” The “AfricaCaricom Summit” of 2021 formed an “Africa-Caricom alliance” to “deepen collaboration between the two regions.”

Introduced at every congressional session since 1989, “H.R. 40” was again introduced in January 2021 by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee to have this commission “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies. Further, it would identify “1) the role of the federal and state governments in supporting the institution of slavery, 2) forms of discrimination in the public and private sectors against freed slaves and their descendants, and 3) lingering negative effects of slavery on living African Americans and society.” Expect this report to be as eye-popping as it will be earth-shaking.

Black Utah Congressman, Burgess Owens opposed the Bill as “impractical,” inferring it blew smoke in the face of African Americans as false hope that would “never become a reality.” Sure enough, it got caught in the traffic of parceled-out, “narrowed proposals” as “more immediate means of curing crises disproportionately impacting black communities.” Public Policy Professor, William Darity, said “a handful of individual programs” won’t get it. He’s thinking more like $13 trillion; that these “individual initiatives” will never close this humongous “racial wealth gap.”

On April 14, 2021, H.R. 40 passed out of the House Judiciary Committee after 32 years of slow-dance, and on January 24, 2023, Senator Cory Booker introduced “S.40” as its “Senate companion.” Dreisen Heath, a Human Rights Watch advocate remarked that the nation now moves “one step closer to comprehensively reckoning with the disastrous effects of slavery that continue to compound for Black people every day.” What that looks like written on a check is yet a mystery.

It’s “a number,” as John described in Revelation 7:9, “that no man can number.” The volume of incalculable inequities that have poured into the gaps in wealth, political power, health and education, etc., since “1619” is immeasurable. Evaluations of “damage by dehumanization,” its harms and the “lingering negative effects” on multiplied millions of souls is a probe for which none of us are adequately prepared. With no equation for calculating the cost of living in such close proximity to peril, terrorism and death, there is no way, therefore, to accurately quantify generations of pain and suffering, and thus the cost of making each victim whole. Plus, interest!

Expert analysis and thus “repair” of this unspeakable harm is from God. He’s “the potter,” in whose hands being even “marred” and scarred sometimes, we are also restored and recreated as “other vessels” for His purpose (Jeremiah 18:4). God alone can, as He said through the prophet, Joel, “restore” what you’ve lost even to the “worms and locusts over the years” (2:25). Only God can, as David was inspired to write, “restore my soul” (Psalm 23:3).

That doesn’t let these criminal empires off the hook, nor does it take reparations off the table as a measure of God’s justice. But some admission should flow in this cascade of apologies, confessing, as church folk used to say when receiving an offering for the preacher, “We can’t pay you, but…” Both can happen: While God is restoring our souls, reparations generously applied as the “fruit of repentance” (Matt. 3:8) can help heal these gaping wounds. Cut the check and see.