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THE ETHICS OF REPARATIONS:
Engaging the Holocaust of Enslavement
Maulana Karenga
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY,
LONG BEACH
| Extracted from a paper titled "The Ethics of Reparations:
Engaging the Holocaust of Enslavement,"at The National Coalition
of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) Convention,
Baton Rouge, LA, 2001 June 22-23 |
The struggle for reparations for the Holocaust of Enslavement
of African people is clearly one of the most important struggles
being waged in the world today. For it is about fundamental issues
of human freedom, human justice and the value we place on human
life in the past as well as in the present and future. It is a
struggle which, of necessity, contributes to our regaining and
refreshing our historical memory as a people remembering and raising
up the rightful claims of our ancestors to lives of dignity and
decency and to our reaffirming and securing the rights of their
descendants to live free, full and meaningful lives in our times.
But this struggle, like all our struggles, begins with the need
for a clear conception of what we want, how we define the issue
and explain it to the world and what is to be done to achieve it.
The struggle for reparations begins with the definition of the
horrendous injury to African people which demands repair. To talk
of reparations is first to identify and define the injury, to say
what it is and is not, to define its nature and its impact on the
one(s) injured. Unless this is done first and maintained throughout
the process, there is no case for reparations only an incoherent
set of claims without basis in ethics or law.
This is why the established order works so hard to define away
the historical and ongoing character of the injury. This is especially
done in two basic ways. First, the injury is distorted and hidden
under the category of "slave trade". The category trade tends to
sanitize the high level of violence and mass murder that was inflicted
on African peoples and societies. If the categorization of the
Holocaust of Enslavement can be reduced to the category of "trade" two
things happen. First, it becomes more of a commercial issue and
problem than a moral one. And secondly, since trade is the primary
focus, the mass murder or genocide can be and often is conveniently
understood and accepted a simply collateral damage.
A second attempt of the established order to deny the horrendous
nature of the injury and its essential responsibility for it is
to claim collaboration of the victims in their own victimization.
Here it is morally and factually important to make a distinction
between collaborators among the people and the people themselves.
Every people faced with conquest, oppression and destruction has
had collaborators among them, but it is factually inaccurate and
morally wrong and repulsive to indict a whole people for a holocaust
which was imposed on them on them and was aided by collaborators.
Every holocaust had collaborators: the Native Americans, Jews,
Australoids, Armenians and Africans. No one morally sensitive claims
Jews are responsible for their holocaust based on the evidence
of Jewish collaborators. How then are Africans indicted for the
collaborators among them?
Although there are other ways, the established order seeks to
undermine the factual and moral basis of the African claim for
reparations, these two are indispensable to its efforts. And thus,
they must be raised up and rejected constantly, for they speak
to the indispensable need to define the injury to African people
and to maintain control of it.
As Us has maintained since the Sixties concerning European cultural
hegemony, one of the greatest powers in the world is to be able
to define reality and make others accept it even when it's to their
disadvantage. And it is this power to define the injury of holocaust
as trade and self-victimization and make Africans accept it, that
has dominated the discourse on enslavement in America. Our task
it to reframe the discourse and initiate a new national dialog
on this.
We have argued that the injury just be defined as holocaust.
By holocaust we mean a morally monstrous act of genocide that
is not only against the people themselves, but also a crime against
humanity. The Holocaust of enslavement expresses itself in
three basic ways: the morally monstrous destruction of human life,
human culture and human possibility.
In terms of the destruction of human life, estimates run as high
as ten to a hundred million persons killed individually and collectively
in various brutal and vicious ways. The destruction of culture
includes the destruction of centers, products and producers of
culture: cities, towns, villages, libraries, great literatures
(written and oral), and works of art and other cultural creations
as well as the creative and killed persons who produced them.
And finally, the morally monstrous destruction of human possibility
involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past,
present and future relations with others who only knew us through
this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among
peoples. It also involves lifting Africans out of their own history
making them a footnote and forgotten casualty in European history
and thus limiting and denying their ability to speak their own
special cultural truth to the world and make their own unique contribution
to the forward flow of human history.
It is there that the issue of stolen labor and ill-gotten gains
which is seen as important to the legal case can be raised. For
in removing us from our own history, enslaving us and brutally
exploiting our labor, it limited and prevented us from building
our own future and living the lives of dignity and decency which
is our human right.
At this point, it is important to stress the role of intentionality in
the Holocaust. Again, discussion of the Holocaust as a commercial
project often leads to an understanding of the massive violence
and mass murder as intended collateral damage. Thus, to frame it
rightfully as a moral issue rather than a commercial one, we must
use terms of discourse which speak not only to the human costs,
but to the element of intentionality. It is in this regard that
Us maintains that maangamizi, the Swahili term for Holocaust,
is more appropriate than its alternative category maafa.
For maafa which means calamity, accident, ill luck, disaster, or
damage does not indicate intentionality. It could be a natural
disaster or a deadly highway accident. But maagamizi is
derived from the verb -angamiza which means to cause destruction,
to utterly destroy and thus carries with it a sense of itnentionality.
The "a" prefix suggests an amplified destruction and thus speaks
to the massive nature of the Holocaust.
Clearly, it is issues like these and the ones discussed below
which require an expanded communal, national and international
dialog, which precedes and makes possible a final decision on the
definition and meaning of the Holocaust, and the morally and legally
compelling steps which must be taken to repair this horrendous
past and ongoing injury. Regardless of the eventual shape of the
evolved discourse and policy on reparations, there are five essential
aspects which must be addressed and included in any meaningful
and moral approach to reparations. They are public admission, public
apology, public recognition, compensation, and institutional preventive
measures against the recurrence of holocaust and other similar
forms of massive destruction of human life, human culture and human
possibility.
First, there must be public admission of Holocaust committed
against African people by the state and the people. This, of course,
must be preceded by a public discussion or national conversation
in which whites overcome their acute denial of the nature and extent
of injuries inflicted on African people and concede that the most
morally appropriate term for this utter destruction of human life,
human culture and human possibility is holocaust.
Secondly, once there is public discussion and concession on the
nature and extent of the injury, then there must be public apology.
One of the reasons we rejected the one-sentence attempt to get
a congressional apology is that it was premature and did not allow
for discussion and admission of holocaust. In addition, as the
injured party, Africans must initiate and maintain control of the
definition and discussion of the injury. No one would suggest or
contemplate Germans superceding Jewish initiatives and claims concerning
their holocaust, nor Turks seizing the initiative in the resolution
of the Armenian holocaust claims. The point here is that Africans
must define the framework for the discussion and determine the
content of the apology. And, of course, the apology can't be for "slave
trade," or simply "slavery"; it must be an apology for committing
holocaust. Moreover, the state must offer it on behalf of its white
citizens. For the state is the crime partner with corporations
in the initiation, conduct and sustaining of this destructive process.
It maintained and supported the system of destruction with law,
army, ideology and brutal suppression. Thus, it must offer the
apology for holocaust committed.
Thirdly, public admission and public apology must be reinforced
with public recognition through institutional establishment, monumental
construction, educational instruction through the school and university
system and the media directed toward teaching and preserving memory
of the horror and meaning of the Holocaust of enslavement, not
only for Africans and this country, but also for humanity as a
whole.
Here it is important to note that the first holocaust memorial
should have been for Native Americans who suffered the first holocaust
in this hemisphere. And we must address their holocaust concerns
and claims, as a matter of principle and with the understanding
that until and unless they receive justice in their rightful claims,
the country can never cal itself a free, just or good society.
Fourthly, reparations also requires compensation in various forms.
Compensation can never be simply money payoffs either individually
or collectively. Nor should the movement for reparations be reduced
to simply a quest for compensation without addressing the other
four aspects. Indeed, compensation itself is a multidimensional
demand and option and may involve not only money, but land, free
health care, housing, free education from grade school through
college, etc. But whether we choose one or all, we must have a
communal discussion of it and then make the choice. Moreover, compensation
as an issue is not simply compensation for lost labor, but for
the comprehensive injury - the brutal destruction of human lives,
human cultures and human possibilities.
Finally, reparations requires that in the midst of our national
conversation, we must discuss and commit ourselves to continue
the struggle to establish measures to prevent the occurrence of
such massive destruction of human life, human culture and human
possibility. This means that we must see and approach the reparations
struggle as part and parcel of our overall struggle for freedom,
justice, equality and power in and over our destiny and daily lives.
In the final analysis, this requires the bringing into being
a just and good society and the creation of a context for maximum
human freedom and human flourishing. Indeed, it is only in such
a context that we can truly begin to repair and heal ourselves,
our injuries, return fully to our own history, live free, full,
meaningful and productive lives and bring into being the good world
we all want and deserve to live in.
| Dr. Maulana Karenga is professor and chair of the Department
of Black Studies at California State University, Long Beach;
Chair of The Organization Us and the National Association
of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO). Dr. Karenga is widely
known as the creator of the pan-African holiday Kwanzaa and
the Nguzo
Saba. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles
and 14 books including: Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family,
Community and Culture and Introduction to Black
Studies, 3rd Edition [www.Us-Organization.org] |
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