Note: This is from a discussion with a friend on the feasibility of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans. No doubt, it is a difficult, contentious and painful topic. It is now making headlines in the news as its done every few years since I can remember. Below is my thinking on the subject a few years ago the last time it was in the news  followed by my thinking now.

I do not know if I’ve ever seen somebody actually workout the numbers R. However, in my case and the millions like me, there is a bit of the “devil is in the details” aspect. Half my ancestry is European (on my mother’s side) and he limits himself to those enslaved in the states. How about the rest of the African diaspora of the “New World” from which the other half (father’s side) of my ancestry stems from? So should I, for example, get half, a quarter or no reparations? Who would be the former colonial power footing the costs? The Spanish? The French, Dutch or Portuguese? And in what percentages? You can see while reparations seem all good, the accounting would be daunting if not nightmarish to figure all out.The group of people of which I am representative no doubt have and continue to suffer from the legacy of the peculiar institution, but how do you quantify and distill that along with the original sin of enslavement to get to a dollar amount. Also let’s not forget, at least in the states, the system of apartheid and share-cropping that arose after formal enslavement ended. Some might argue that this system was at least, if not more, repressive and exploitative than slavery had been. Certainly those Southern trees that bore strange fruit is a testament to the brutality of that era.

Still another aspect is the possible compensation due to the people brought over from Europe as as indentured servants who though ultimately gaining their freedom and joining he ranks of those labelled as “White”, still may be due compensation for the likely gross imbalance between the wealth they produced and what they gained in return. I mention this because my maternal great grandmother, escaping from Spain for who knows why, may have been one of these for all practical purposes enslaved people brought over as “indentured servants”. In that case, do I get to draw, being of mixed backgrounds, from reparations to both groups, one of the groups or none at all. So beyond the numbers in terms of dollars and cents, there is a social and political dimension that is impossible to disentangle from the complex and messy historical context.

To top it all of, just like the Jewish diaspora following the horrors of WW2, what can the dollar amount be in compensation for the near destruction of a whole class of people? Rancourt, for simplicity’s sake, leaves this out but I believe it cannot be discounted in the end. In reference to the present day, I fear that the same question of reparations may arise decades from now in the minds of the descendants of the refugees flooding into Europe due to the wholesale destruction of entire societies by Western imperialism. All that said, I am definitely for reparations. I certainly wouldn’t mind becoming an instant millionaire right about now :-).”

P. S. Now a few years later I can only say I am not wholly against reparations. I still wouldn’t mind, considering my precarious economic situation, being an instant millionaire lol. But seriously, the biggest problem with reparations, which I did not discuss in my response to my friend, is that reparations leaves the system of inequality untouched. As the WSWS maintains, it would exacerbate social divisions and thus strengthen the very same system that oh so needs to be replaced. Rather than reparations, what is required and should be promoted is a socialist, egalitarian society that would preclude class divisions and solve the problems of race, gender and nationality, among other oppressions, in one fell swoop.