REPARATIONS: FAIR, DESERVED AND OVERDUE - BUT AMERICA MUST FACE IT'S RACIST BASE AND HISTORY OF 'PASSING' TO CARRY IT OUT.

"PerchedEye" Blogspot is twelve years old this year, 2021, starting with the first term of President Obama. The focus has been the political-economic-cultural pillars that define America....and how those features have evolved in the days, months, and years since....and continue to evolve.  It's been an unusual if not overwhelming decade highlighted IMHO by a farcical election of a farcical, autocratic, fascist, grifting, fast-food addicted, deeply indebted occupier of the Oval Office who, through incompetence or deliberate opportunism ("it's a Democrat Hoax") sat passively and watched a once-in-a-century Plague (!, yes, a Plague like in 1345, 1660 and 1920 ad) infect 33 million Americans and kill 350,000 of us, so far in Aprical 2021.                                                                                                                             ---------------------------------------------

REPARATIONS. This archived draft responded to a web article,  On Reparations, the Question Isn’t If, but When and How (Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, executive editor at YES! June 23, 2019).] Based on the complexity of determining by color who is African-American, after 400 years of Black-White mixing, modern DNA testing seems the way to base reparations, but this method will uncover a new 'problem' - a sizeable portion of so-called 'White' America potentially can be termed 'African-American' resulting from 400 years of hidden and increasingly accepted racial mixing. (By the colonial 'One Drop Rule', approximately 1/32 African-American heritage could define a 'White' person as Black even though looking White.) 

In America, 'Reparations' has almost exclusively applied to redressing the historically preserved deprivations and barriers to first-class citizenship imposed on African Americans, and practiced almost wholly on the basis of color, 'The Color Line.'  No other American minority has received this kind of artificially-defined exclusion.  

The Color Line still exists in many unofficial forms - chiefly housing and schools segregation but especially as informal pressures and penalties against racial (African-American and White) interactions especially 'intermarriage'. The informal Color Line remains in many forms as still the unofficial 'American Way'.  However, because the Color Line was in practice centuries before modern DNA testing, it relied on visual appearance and thus was porous to racial mixing. The result is the African-American population is visually broad in color (and belonging is often a matter of  choice). As for the American "White' population, the African-American sociologist, E Franklin Frazier, among others, estimated that since 1800, an annual average of 10,000 African-Americans newly crossed the Color Line to live as White.  

Reparations to redress slavery has been with America since Emancipation - Union General Tecumseh Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 (1865) contained the famous '40 Acres and A Mule' recommendation for freed slaves. But Sherman's proposal met political death so this question still lives but after more 150 years since Sherman of increasing racial mixiing, it has morphed into a very complex matter of 'who' is African-American, and what is enough African-American heritage to qualify for reparations, and for how much of a full reparations share.  Several researchers, thinkers, and writers have addressed this question in 20th and 21st century times - one of the most current and perhaps most popularly known is Harvard University's endowed Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, host of "Finding Your Roots", a Public Broadcasting television Series (PBS) which entered its seventh season as of January 19, 2021. (Professor Gates nearly became a precursor to the murdered George Floyd when, in 2009, 'presumptive' police arrested him as he was entering his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) Prior prominent researchers and scholars who have also contributed to this subject are sociologist Edward (E.) Franklin Frazier, the author James Baldwin, Langston Hughes (poet and author) ... and many others, poets, authors, scholars and 'doers'.

REGARDING REPARATIONS - this blogger's BIG QUESTION is: 

'AFTER 400 YEARS OF RACIAL MIXING, WE CAN'T SAY, IN TOTO, OR PRECISELY, OR BY WHAT MEASURES WHO IS OR ISN''T AFRICAN-AMERICAN ...  THIS QUESTION MUST BE ADDRESSED AS THE BASIS FOR A REPARATIONS PROGRAM.'

(DNA-test qualifying for reparations on a sliding scale would open the door for a surprisingly large portion of white America to step out of the racial closet in order to get their reparation share.)

One of the most challenging truths to answering this question is the impossiblity of drawing a sharp border between not only white from Black America, but even with the African-American community itelf there is a dynamic of color. Both of these considerations prevent a simple approach to identifying who is qualified to get reparations, or how much of a full share: 

AMONGST AMERICA'S AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY, THERE ARE LIKELY FAR FEWER 'FULL-BLOOD' AFRICAN-AMERICANS THAN POPULAR BELIEF (PREJUDICE?) EXPECTS! 

This logically suggests a reparation policy based on a scientific-rigorous 'scale'. A scale of color? Of DNA composition? Perhaps other scale variables we haven't thought of? 

The answers to these questions will not just affect America's African-American community - as identified as African-American but will also affect White Americans in ways not easily thought of. Why?  Because the determining scale variables used in America are based not on scientific criteria but on what is easily seen by the eye - color and easily distinguishable physical signs. And at some point on these scales, an African-American can easily 'pass' for any number of American sub-groups who are not currently discriminated against, including White, e.g., 'Mediterranean' is a common 'error' committed by mainstream 'white' America in misidentifying African-Americans. 

American mistreatment of its African-Americans as second-class human beings then as second-class citizens began with slavery in 1619 which evolved into thinking based on greed that slavers-as-property should be made into an inherited status, most profitably even inherited for generations, hence the 1662 'One Drop' rule (hypodescent). 

The one-drop rule existed in form even until 1985 when American hospitals stopped listing babies as Negro, Black, or White. 

No other American racial or nationality subgroup has been given such a permanent sub-status and scrutiny as America has imposed on African Americans by slavery, followed by de facto 'Jim Crow' laws and 'modern' systemic racism.

Being 'African-American' historically (hysterically, in hysterical American history) has almost exclusively been a matter of the eye ... combined with politics.

So what might be a formula, a means of determining, a qualifications scale for who gets reparations? 

And, as there are so few pure-blood African-Americans, yet who still retain enough characteristics to suffer visual discrimination, how much will a reparation be for less than 'pure blood'? 

DNA scale reparations? Uh, Oh! Now we've raised the ghost ... of deeds past and topics forbidden to be spoken of, namely:

THERE ARE MANY 'WHITE' PERSONS AND THEIR FAMILIES WHO HAVE ENJOYED THE FULL SET OF PRIVILEGES DENIED TO AFRICAN-AMERICANS ... YET, BASED ON DNA, ARE AFRICAN-AMERICAN. SHOULD THEY RECIEVE A REPARATIONS SHARE?

This is perhaps the most problematic aspect of reparations in the American context. Why? Because money will test and hopefully break American racism. (The good old American 'solution' to all what ails the body and soul.) The perceived (and real) risk for a 'white' person and family to 'racially reveal' their racial legacy will be a 'medicine-made-easier-to-swallow' by rationalizing away color-based racism in order to get money. 

DNA-test qualifying for reparations will likely open the door for a surprisingly large portion of white America to step out of the racial closet.

Public sentiment based on the desire to participate in reparations ... in order to get a money share, will likely result in rationalizing away the stigmatization of African America in order to 'free' color-defined, white Americans to join the reparations queue.

Also, open-door registration for reparations will finally bring America to more willingly face its slavery history and legacy - the rape of Black female slaves, racial hate, and stigmatization.

Will there be DNA testing combined with the old standard ‘Paper Bag’ test for filtering current skin color ( the real-life American-color-gate leading from lower caste to full acceptance...as in the former apartheid South Africa who actually borrowed from the example of America's slavery system to design their own modern era apartheid system)? 

As many have pointed out, there needs to be first a national self-analysis and open discussion of America’s slavery and its not so long ago evil practices. Practices such as making it a crime to teach a slave to read and write, and for a slave to possess these skills.....and the lingering disposition in many states, even outside the former slave territories to continue, even until the 1960s (!}, a century after emancipation, to prohibit African Americans from attending ‘white’ colleges and universities. 

Then America has to face the reality that our substantial, national lagging behind other developed nations in such markers of ‘civil-ized’ societies such as health care for all and a national college subsidy program (some form of free college for all who desire and strive for higher education) ...our American foot-dragging, are significantly shaped by a lingering, post Reconstruction era focus on denying the descendants of formers slaves full citizenship. 

(From observations and listening on personal international travels, America seems to other nations to prefer to punish even its white (but needy) citizens if America can hold onto racially punitive institutionalized restrictions that were set up during slavery and preserved thereafter by legal code (Jim Crow segregated public institutions) and more subtle mechanisms such as social and entertainment media that promote, hence preserving, negative imagery’ of African-Americans and of Americans of color, generally. 

America needs to move ahead from those ‘chains’ made from its slavery history. 

Speaking the language of economic practicality which should not be the only measurement of modernization, but every American social innovation seems to eventually result in, or designed for, future monetary benefits (rather than improving quality of life or gaining national pride),  America is overdue to have a truly 100% national health care program like every other top-tier nation. This would seem to be a building block, a self-investment for future social stability and economic health (by lowering labor downtime costs). 

An affordable, national health care system will create a healthy, robust citizenry who are globally competitive; and it will create an industrially innovative America that will feed future growth. 

Additionally, our national health care program (for all and free) must be accompanied by a national college program designed for debt-free, higher education for all who wish to strive for that goal. 

America's old rationalizing of under-educated America by how easy it is to fill America's technical gaps by 'brain-draining' the engineers and scientists from foreign nations has seen its day. The globe began to resent this policy some time ago ... plus America has had problems assimilating this influx of job takers who home-grown Americans resent either deservedly or by American's own preferences to avoid technical education. (!!)

These are some of the destructive, weakening side effects America has created for itself by diverting so much of its soul and creativity to preserving 'slavery' in the form of discrimination and prejudice. America must move away from this posture so it can begin to be a true ‘democracy’ free of its shameful, slavery-based origins.