Why Do African Americans Deserve Reparation?

In the United States, history is often believed to be categorized to good and bad. But, sadly that is not the case. Many times the cruel stages in history are often sugar coated and disguised to be something that they are not. While the brighter parts of history are many times untouched/unaltered. The times of enslaved people throughout the United States should never be forgotten.

This unprecedented global tragedy claimed millions of lives over four centuries, and left a terrible legacy that continues to dehumanize and subjugate people around the world to this day. The forced movement of West Africans across the Atlantic to the Caribbean happened on cutting-edge scale of brutality and inhumanity, killings and massive abuses. Millions died without a burial, without a trace. These Europeans paid no monetary price for their progress, but they incurred a terrible cost in the form of the of the root racism that we still battle today. The slave trade left an ineradicable mark.

This concludes that people should change what they think about slavery since many have been in pain during

Ashley Miller HIST 202B Timothy Paynich 3/7/16 HUMAN Rights How much of history would change if African Americans never went through adversity? Between 1877 (End of Reconstruction) and the 1950’s (Beginning of the Civil Rights Movement) African Americans went through immense hardships. They had to fight numerous times in order to gain their rights and even be counted as “human”. During the Harlem Renaissance many African Americans arose and found ways to create and show what they were going through.

Analyzing “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates The past is the past, but sometimes the past comes back and bites us on the butt. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article, “The Case for Reparations”, Coates describes the wrongful acts done by white supremacists towards African-Americans. Throughout his article, Coates provides strong logos and pathos to his argument. The one issue that he fails to discuss is ethos or credibility towards his argument.

Slavery dates back to the seventeenth century, when Africans were taken from their homeland to the English colonies in the new land of America. Simply regarding an African’s skin color, they were put in the lowest position possible as a slave and treated very poorly. And although the African slaves became African American, they were not treated as a fellow American or and even treated like less than a human. African Americans were completely disregarded and ignored in the constitution, because evidently, some of the fathers of the constitution of the United States of America were slave holders themselves. Constitutionally, slavery was abolished in 1865, but Fredrick Douglass had the opportunity to escape to freedom before then in 1838.

Slavery, the War on Black Family While slavery in America was an institution that was started over 400 years ago, the affects were so horrific that it is still felt today by modern day African Americans. Many families had to deal with the constant stress of being sold which made it difficult to have a normal family life. Slaves were sold to pay off debts, an owner dying and his slaves were sold in an estate sale, or when an owner’s children would leave the home to begin a life of their own, they would take slaves with them. Often times, children were not raised by their parents, other family members of someone designated to watch the children because the mother and father had to work long hours and the children were too young to join them.

In the book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome written by Dr.Joy DeGruy she explains how the past events in American history has lead to post traumatic slave syndrome. She explains that the way African Americans were treated during the slave era and after has had an everlasting effect on African Americans. The book goes on to describe how America has been denying its past and has not helped to integrated and level all the playing fields for African Americans. The book brings to light how we can try to contribute in making America a fair and equal place for all as most claim it to be. Through the book DeGruy talks about the four major contributing factors for the reason why America is the way it is.

People wondered if us african americans can be equal. Since the beginning of time us african american people we’ve been slaves until 1865. People treats us like if we aren’t nothing. They don’t give us the right to do anything, we are human beings too. We are the same just because our color is different it doesn’t mean anything.

When we talk about slavery, many historical names come to mind, the biggest being President Lincoln. Although Lincoln was against slavery, it proved to be a long road ahead before his emancipation proclamation was issued. Lincoln was not the first to confront issues of slavery in the United States. It took a seamlessly long time before words were spoken that could even begin to abolish slavery slowly. Blood was soon shed to stop this inhumane way of life, but at what cost?

Reparations for slavery is an ongoing debate, the idea that descendants of Africans who had been enslaved by the Atlantic Slave Trade should receive a compensatory payment is ridicules to many. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations”, and he argues that the idea of reparations is what is important. Coates begins building his argument with personal facts and reliable sources, overall successfully creating an emotional appeal to his readers. Throughout his article he builds a strong argument arguing that we need to start considering what the nation might owe the African American population after everything that’s been done to them. Throughout his article his attempts to appeal to the readers emotions helps build his argument against reparations.

The subhuman treatment is especially apparent in the depiction of the slave ships where the white men packed them like sardines and branded them like cattle. They saw Africans as their monetary value rather than their personal value (Baker, 35-44.) People of all ages and sexes suffered or died. In addition, the atrocity of the slave trade and slavery as a whole still has lasting effects today due to the lingering bigotry of whites over the years. It makes sense why history books don’t delve deeper into Nat Turner’s rebellion because while it was a horrific event, it was a dramatically smaller scale in comparison to the slave trade.

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates is an article issue in June 2014. The article is about discrimination, segregation, and racism toward black Americans. Two and a half centuries ago American success was built on slavery. And in present day African American are being discriminated for the color of their skin that even now the wound that black Americans face in their daily life has never been healed or fully atoned for. In this article Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses the struggle African American went through and all the hard time they face in their daily

Reparations for slavery is the idea that some form of compensatory payment should be made to the descendants of Africans who had been enslaved as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade. With that being said, I don’t believe this essay is a case for reparations. Coates never gives the breakdown of what the United States reparation would look like. He never tells us, his readers, how the system would work, or how anyone would actually make the political case for it. This argument is not about reparations for slavery, either.

The second part of this is how we remember them, to do this we first have to understand a critical term, Civic memory. Civic memory is when we take collective parts of history both good and bad and present it the way it happened, we have chosen to believe what history tells us happened to be fact. This is in some cases largely untrue, an example would be how we were taught that we had slaves in the country, but the books left out the parts where we tortured and beat them. Another one is how we know segregation was a problem in the U.S. for many years, yet we were given no knowledge of what happened to the people affected by segregation. If we're to bring back into civic memory all of these people we hurt, we would then truly have a sense of what it would take for this country to become whole, and heal its deep