Reparations?

Question

should the U.S. pay to the African continent or should all the financial backing we have given in the past be enough?

Answer 1

Sure and, while we're at it, Italy should pay most of Europe and parts of Africa for their occupation during the days of the Roman Empire. Greece should pay for their behavor during the Hellenistic period. Iran should pay for their behavior during the Persian Empire. We need to find the Mongols and make them pay up too. KA CHING! Give me a break!

Answer 2

Reparations are being sought by African America's here in the states and not for the African Continent. Believe it or not, most slaves were not captured -- they were sold to the slave traders by their own people (tribal leaders).

I think we should give reparations. Anyone who was a slave previous to 1852 who is still alive should receive money from the government for past wrongs.

Answer 3

Aren't we giving a lot of money to many of the African countries now in Foreign aid? Who said the African countries were looking for reparations?

Answer 4

The United States has not been providing financial backing to Africa. Can a thief steal your most precious belongings and give you part of your riches back and call it charity in the name of good will? Read up on Henry Morton Stanley and the Berlin Confernce for the underdevelopment of Africa. Colonization is just a pretty word for thievery and murder.

The posts below show what a disadvantage the U. S. educational system is doing to her children. These people are so uneducated.
It is true that the institution of slavery was not a practice unique to America. The distinctive difference in American slavery is that it introduced the notion of holding a person in bondage for life solely based on the belief of inferiority or superiority
based on the color of ones’ skin. In other words an element that was never considered before in other societies to justify bondage : racism.



For instance, in Race: An Evolving Issue in Western Thought, John Henrik Clarke assert that slavery, “...is almost as old as human societies...Slavery was a permanent feature of the ancient world, in Egypt, Kush, Greece and Rome. Every people has at some time or another been slaves. In fact, Europeans enslaved other Europeans for a much longer time than they enslaved Africans. Yet, this slavery did not give birth to racism, though it did lay the basis for feudalism.”



In America, "Slavery was not romantic; it was evil, ferocious, brutal and corrupting in all of its aspects. The enslaved was treated with utter disrespect...For looking a white man in the eye the enslaved person could have his or her eyes blinded
with hot irons. For speaking up in defense of a wife or woman a man could have his tongue cut out. For defending his right to speak against oppression, an African could have his right hand severed. For defending his right to speak against oppression, an African could have his tongue cut out. For running away and being caught and African could have his or her Achilles tendon cut...Among the punishments that were favored by the slave owners were whipping holes, wherein the enslaved was buried in the ground up to the neck; mutilation of the toes and fingers.”

Furthermore, this unique system was sanctioned in the United States for over two hundred years. In The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson contends that the enslavement of African peoples in the United States was “the most heinous human rights crime visited upon any group of people in the world over the last five hundred years.”

Expounding on this in The African American Warrant for Reparations, Molefi Kete Asante contends that slavery
in America was dehumanizing and subjected slaves to any violation the master deemed suitable.



Slavery was also practiced in Africa but resembled the status of slaves in European indentured servitude. They could be held captives taken in war or kidnapped in raids or even sell themselves into servitude. Furthermore, Femi Akomolafte contends “ it was not at all uncommon for African owners to adopt slave children or to marry slave women, who then became full members of the family.

Slaves of talent accumulated property and in some instances reached the status of kings; Jaja of Opobo (in Nigeria) is a case in point. Lacking contact with American slavery, African traders could be expected to assume that the lives of slaves overseas would be as much as they were in Africa; they had no way of knowing that whites in America associated dark
colors with sub-human qualities and status, or that they would treat slaves as chattels generation after generation.

When Nigeria's Madame Tinubu, herself a slave-trader, discovered the difference between domestic and non-African slavery, she became an abolitionist, actively rejecting what she saw as the corruption of African slavery by the unjust and
inhumane habits of its foreign practitioners and by the motivation to make war for profit on the sale of captives.”

Answer 5

If you're talking about reparations for slavery, well, they sold their people....
If you're talking about for the mess in the middle east, well, we should fix the stuff we broke.

Answer 6

No, and yes.