Reparations for slavery

Did you know that America’s first slave was a black man? After that slavery was in America for 245 years! Slavery in America began when the first African slaves were brought to the United States (North American Colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619) to assist in the production of such crops as tobacco. In 1619, the Dutch introduced the first captured Africans to America, planting the seeds of a slavery system that evolved into a nightmare of abuse and cruelty that would ultimately divide the…

to survive the harsh conditions. This blatant denial and distortion of reality allowed for the continuance of racist and misogynistic views that contribute directly to the devaluation of a woman, her life and her body. This type of disregard for reparations, which are crucial to democracy and the decency of humanity, continues to affect the wider phenomena of sex trafficking that has plagued women and girls in the Pacific. The popularization of the fetization of Asian women has led to a rise in…

Upon release of a new debate topic about racial justice and whether or not African Americans should get reparations, I was immediately terrified of what could become of the topic. A mass of racist interpretations that I feared ran in my head, “it dehumanizes them”, or “slavery happened a long time ago”, and worst of all, “there’s no obligation to pay because African Americans benefited from slavery.” I cringed. Here I thought this would be the worse topic I would ever debate, but after a few…

Strangers and Conformity After the United States Civil War, General William Sherman promised reparations. Such reparations never occurred. Throughout the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain demonstrates failed attempts to understand the experience of freed slaves. Twain uses strangeness to reveal that humanity is based on understanding reality, and inhuman treatment occurs when people conform by pretending to understand. People treat others humanely when they have something to empathize…

of a Kenyan father and a white mother who passed away years after slavery ended, has some ancestral baggage on slavery. Therefore, many believe no other man could make a more inspiring apology about America’s past sins. Many may argue that an acknowledgment of the wrongs done by the nation have power all alone. However, an apology about something that happened centuries ago does not go far enough, unless it is entailed to reparations to the descendants of slaves. Today,…

1. Servitude was considered better than slavery. The people who commonly entered into servitude were redemptioners, convicted felons, and the poor whites. Unless you had money, you were expected to work and many immigrants had to enter into servitude. Redemptioners were typically involved in servitude as a family after they made the journey over to the Americas. This is due to the fact that they could only pay for a portion of the trip and had to either enter servitude, or ask people they knew…

still suffers ( in the case of the minorities), and profits (in the case of the white world) from the issues of the past. Fanon states, “I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,p. 205). The issue with this statement is that the black man and black women are in fact still the slaves to the slavery their ancestors. The black community’s current position within the social hierarchy has direct ties to their poisoning as slaves less than a hundred…

How can a group apologize for the enslavement of another? This is the question that is being posed to the United States today. How can America’s citizens apology for atrocities that they had no part in? If we take a look at another historically abused group, Native Americans. They received compensation for their treatment through free schooling and tax exemption. What makes Native Americans any more deserving than the descendants of slaves? Today tensions between races are high, and proposed…

Slavery laid at the core of Ghana’s pre-colonial states, whose economy was almost fully dependent on slave labor. Indigenous slavery occurred before the transatlantic slave trade, and coexisted with it from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. During pre-colonial Ghana, slaves were a commodity and their descendants maintained a slave status as well. Since slaves became a part of their masters’ property either through adoption or marriage, they weren’t exactly classified as complete outsiders,…

During slavery in the United States, southern white slave owners were raised to believe that blacks were inferior, and they believed it. It was hard for slave owners to imagine life any other way, and for them, there was no reason to imagine life any other way. It could be argued that the Yankees used Plato's epistemology. They broke free from the "chains" holding them to the belief that blacks are inferior. The reason that they were able to do this might be that their "chains" weren't as…