Thoughts on Slavery Reparations

Feb, 2004, Federal District Court judge Charles R. Norgle dismissed "without predjudice" a lawsuit bought by descendants of slaves seeking reparations from corporations they say profited from slavery. The legal implications of this lawsuit have been argued at length in many venues. As a result, I have been led to some personal ruminations on this issue.

I have always been mystified by racial grievance mongers who pontificate on the glorious Nirvana that their lives would be had they only been left in Mother Africa, notwithstanding the general quality of life there. Since most American blacks have some measure of Caucasian genealogical ancestry, and since slavery was the transmission belt that enabled the mixing of their black and white ancestor's gene pools,(whether by rape,semi voluntary or voluntary associations) than what they are really saying is that they and their decendents would rather not exist.

I acknowledge the kidnapping and suffering of my African ancestors, and the resultant decades of slavery, oppresion, and discrimination that amounted to a monstrous crime for them. But the result was me and my family living in a nation that provides the most liberty and opportunity for any African descended people on earth. I am profoundly grateful to be here. I welcome the opportunity for any clarifcation of the historical record, and should that clarification reveal more evidence of the often bestial nature of the American institution of slavery, than we should unflinchingly face and acknowledge it. The historical record should be properly contextualized, and honestly examined without any attempt to inflate the crime beyond the actual truth of the injustice. The endless racial navel gazing, racial identity posturing, and puffed up grievance mongering should be rejected for the PC irrelevance that it is.

Sometimes it seems as though the race industry merchants and class action lawyers would divide us into warring ethnic enclaves with mortar pits in the streets sniping at each other ala the Balkans, all of them seeking racial spoils with government help. This is nothing more than a cultural Marxist wealth redistribution scheme.

Tennessee in June 1861 became the first in the South to legislate the use of free black soldiers. The governor was authorized to enroll those between the ages of fifteen and fifty, to be paid $18 a month and the same rations and clothing as white soldiers; the black men appeared in two black regiments in Memphis by September.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995) pp. 218-219

Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. Furthermore, the story outlines the history of slavery here, and the first slave owner, the Father of American slavery, was Mr Anthony Johnson, of Northampton, Virginia. His slave was John Casor, the first slave for life. Both were black Africans. The story is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners.
-"Selling Poor Steven", American Heritage Magazine, Feb/Mar 1993 (Vol. 441) p 90

Of course, a full telling of Black History would not be complete without a telling of the origin of slavery in the Virginia colony:
Virginia, Guide to The Old Dominion, WPA Writers' Program, Oxford University Press, NY, 1940, p. 378

"In 1650 there were only 300 negroes in Virginia, about one percent of the population. They weren't slaves any more than the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia, and who were granted 50 acres each when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco.

Slavery was established in 1654 when Anthony Johnson, Northampton County, convinced the court that he was entitled to the lifetime services of John Casor, a negro. This was the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

But who was Anthony Johnson, winner of this epoch-making decision? Anthony Johnson was a negro himself, one of the original 20 brought to Jamestown (1619) and 'sold' to the colonists. By 1623 he had earned his freedom and by 1651, was prosperous enough to import five 'servants' of his own, for which he received a grant of 250 acres as 'headrights.'

Anthony Johnson ought to be in a 'Book of Firsts.' As the most ambitious of the first 20, he could have been the first negro to set foot on Virginia soil. He was Virginia's first free negro and first to establish a negro community, first negro landowner, first negro slave owner and as the first, white or black, to secure slave status for a servant, he was actually the founder of slavery in Virginia. A remarkable man." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/johnson.html

I found the reference, out of Michael A. Hoffman II's "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America" : Joseph Cinque was himself a slave trader, selling his fellow blacks into this horror after he himself was set free by a US court.

Amistad producer Debbie Allen calls this destabilizing fact a "rumor." She'd better. If the thinking public, black and white, discover that "noble" Cinque later sold his own people in the very manner he condemned, then there will be a second mutiny, this time against Spielberg and his shameless hoaxing.

Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People,"
(New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:

"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.

"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.

"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.

"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."
(End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)

BLACK SLAVEOWNERS
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm

Child slavery today in West Africa?
http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/child.html

Slavery throughout historyhttp://www.freetheslaves.net/slavery_today/slavery.html

"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement--even for the most admirable and benign of purposes--is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
--Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take it away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson

There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach and in the destruction of lives.

Fred Plops For Reparations

Sells Out To Johnny Cochran

I see by the papers in the Yankee Capital that Johnny Cochran, and of course Jesse and Al, are wheezing and blowing like a county-fair calliope with a leaky boiler. They always are. This time it was about the need to pay reparations for the ravages trala of slavery. It got me to thinking.

I hate it when that happens.

Now, I know I’m hard-hearted, and mean-spirited, and no damn good. It’s probably my only virtue. But on consideration, I realized that they might be right. The ravages of slavery do run deep, and cause motingator trouble, with no end in sight. I decided that compensation was only reasonable. Sometimes you don’t like a conclusion, but you have to reach it. All right. I’ll be a man about it.

You can pay me reparations, Johnny.

To start with, I figure you owe me for three bicycles. Maybe it’s a small thing, but I’m tired of losing bicycles. Are we talking market value or replacement? What I really want to be paid for is having to keep my latest two-wheeler in my living room. Do you know how many times I’ve knocked the fool thing over? And, oh, the scratch in my granddad’s antique desk that the brake lever made. What’s that worth?

Call it three grand. OK? Direct deposit would be nice.

But . . . how do we dollarize cultural retrogression? God knows I appreciate your offer of reparations, but I’m having trouble with the arithmetic. Help me.

A few years back, my middle-school daughter brought home a horrendously misspelled science hand-out. Now, Johnny: You and I both know that it’s easy to make a typo, and write “phenylkeetone” instead of “phenylketone.” But “feemelkeebome” is stretching it. The errors were of this sort. An understanding of chemistry clearly had never rippled the serene surface of the woman’s mind.

Without thinking, I asked, “What color is your teacher?” (If I had thought carefully, I would have asked, “What color is your teacher?”) My daughter responded with an anguished, “Da-d-d-d-y!” She had made the connection, but knew she wasn’t supposed to.

I’ve got no problem with black teachers, if they are competent. No problem at all. But a teacher who is too ignorant to spell her subject, and too lazy to use a dictionary, ought to be flipping burgers. Simple burgers, with no moving parts. Thing is, we can’t fire ignorant teachers, Johnny, because of the lingering effects of slavery. I can yell at an ignorant white teacher, but not at a black one. To expect blacks to meet standards is racist. You can send me the price of four years of tuition in a private school outside the country.

What’s the cost of permanent welfare? Subsidized everything? Enormous police departments? What do you figure? Just add it to your tab. Have you thought about setting up an endowment?

But here’s a large ravage of slavery, Johnny: Fear.

What price do we put on looking over our shoulders? On watching to be sure we don’t go one subway stop too far? Warning our girlfriends not to drive on certain streets? Checking the clientele of Seven-Eleven before going in at night?

People in, say, Switzerland can walk their streets after dark. We can’t. Why? What have we got that they don’t, that might cause fear?

Elvis impersonators, Johnny. Yep. Switzerland doesn’t have any Elvis impersonators. Check for yourself.

What’s fear worth? Is it a minimum-wage job? Forty-hour week or twenty-four hours a day? Benefits? Seniority pay as people grow older, weaker, and less able to defend themselves? You see the actuarial difficulty. Accounting is a more difficult trade than you might think.

The white guy beaten to death 100 yards from my door last year – they never caught the killers, but – what you reckon, Johnny? Do you figure it was white Presbyterian women from the old-ladies’ home? That’s my guess. That’s who usually does it. Anyway, you can send me $540 for the Sig 9mm pistol I bought after blacks started moving into the neighborhood and crime went up. And ammo, carry permit, Hydra-Shock rounds.

Now, millions of honest blacks might write and say, “Fred, we aren’t criminals. Why should we pay for what other blacks do?” Splendid question. But of course whites say, “We don’t have any slaves. Why should we pay for what some other whites did?” If it is a reasonable question for blacks to ask, as indeed it is, why isn’t it a reasonable question for whites to ask?

But while you are in a mood to pay up, Johnny, let me introduce a useful concept: Civilizational rent. You’ll like this. It’s such a good idea.

A culture is essentially software. No? Sure, there are physical embodiments: positron-emission scanners, high-bypass turbofans, radar with Doppler beam-sharpening. Yet basically a culture is a body of knowledge, like Microsoft Word. (All right, throw in values. But I don’t want to make this too difficult.)

White guys invented these things at considerable cost. We had to. Europe doesn’t have much low-hanging fruit, and it gets cold in the north. So generations of people that I’m sure you’re familiar with – Newton, Leibniz, Galois, Gauss, Carnot, Dirac – did work that led to all kinds of useful . . . you know . . stuff.

Western civilization, it’s called.

As a result of slavery, you have been using our civilization without a license. (I know: You’re having trouble with the idea of implied retroactive acceptance of a license I invented five minutes ago. Microsoft would grasp it in a heartbeat. Anyway, I’m writing the column.)

Further, you’ve been using it for a long time, Johnny. Air-conditioning. Roads. Writing. The wheel. Complicated stuff like that. Medicine. Tractors. Shoes. Houses. I’ve spent time in Africa, where people live in stick things that look as if a Cub Scout had built a campfire and forgotten to light it. You’re getting a deal here, Johnny.

I don’t wish stick houses on anyone. I’m glad you have the benefits of electricity, clothes, and daytime TV. I’d love to see blacks study, earn degrees on their merits, prosper. Think of the trouble it would save. But – as suggested by your manly desire to pay reparations -- you owe us licensing fees. Granted, it’s hard to set a price on a culture. But if Microsoft Office goes for $250 at fire-sale prices, I guess a whole civilization is cheap at $100K a copy.

I believe we can do business, Johnny. I hope so. I can use the money. *****************************************************

Old column, but still a great read.

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