Reparations Rant – Did you Know Black People Got Reparations?

Essence did something interesting in the November issue. And no, I’m not talking about Tameka and Usher. I’m talking about a little article on page 166 entitled “The Big Payback”, updating Black women about the status of the national reparations movement. To give my readers a little background, reparations is the fight waged by a segment of the African-American population to hold the government accountable to their 40 acres and a mule promise. After 200 years of unpaid labour, it’s about time the prosperity (or, as I mentioned previously, the lost prosperity) of America is distributed to the people who helped create it.

Knowing my country, as I so sadly do, I thought that this movement was going just about nowhere. American’s don’t like to read, and they damn sure don’t like history, and it’s common practice to have slavery, and just about every other atrocity that this grand nation has committed, to be swept under the mattress in the basement under the house. No one things about the other peoples who got reparations (Japanese, Jews, etc.) it just becomes that Black people need to stop blaming White people for stuff their pappies have done. Yeah right.

But that really isn’t the purpose of my entry – the validity of the reparations argument. Really, America has a lot of fish to fry, and I just would like them to take the electric fences from around the projects and maybe stop shooting some people first, before we can engage all of our energies toward reparations. But the people who fight for them, they are to be commended – it’s a hard fight.

One of these women (such grossly misguided women, and I’m about to tell you why) Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, an US attorney, has been waging this battle fiercely. She has had the good sense to leave the government aside for a second, and go after the corporations who have profited from slavery – like Aetna and Bank of America. And in her cases against Chase Bank, Wachovia and Bank of America she’s gotten $20 million dollars (about £10 million pounds). Yippee! No, stop applauding the victory – because it really wasn’t one. The money went to such jackleg organizations like the NAACP. To do what with? Apparently to give the pervert/paedophile (a multi-tasker) R. Kelly an image award and defend paedophile Michael Jackson. I called the NAACP once, when I was at the tender and idealistic age of 17, for a kiosk to register Black kids to “rock the vote”. They told me they didn’t have the funds, but I could purchase a student membership for $50. I asked if I could use their location, and they said they would call me back. Well, FMD wasn’t stupid enough to pay $50, but it left me with a kind of earth shattering sadness one gets when they find out grown-ups are liars.

In essence, I am busting my Black ass in college overseas, and since this multi-million reparations payout there hasn’t been another scholarship, housing fund, or any assistance directly aimed at the poor Blacks in America. Deadria made sure they gave a few bucks to Howard, but their tuition didn’t go down – the medical school is still $27,396. (John Hopkins’s tuition is $31,300 so Howard ain’t cutting the Black peeps no deals). So, where did the money go? I think that guy below knows where it went.



CE (my maternal great-grandmother) parents died when she was 8. She had to shine marble steps and get by the best she could, darn near an orphan. Her parents fled the South, where they worked for nothing and were treated like garbage. This, this hardship they endured so I can be something. They didn’t lay down and die – they weren’t that selfish. They lived and died so I could live.
Those Negroes at the NAACP and Howard seem not to understand the purpose of reparations. It isn’t to make some already rich, hustling Black poverty pimps richer – which it apparently did, because I ain’t seen a dime, and a lot of kids behind fences in the projects can’t point to a penny either. It was so that our deceased love-ones can finally see justice – and a check – for their years of torture and abuse on American soil. I assume Deadria meant well, but she doesn’t understand the petite-bourgeois elite isn’t on our sides. The two Americas is split into Four Americas when it comes to Black folk – Rich White, Rich Black, Poor White, Poor Black – and sad to say, us poor Blacks are at the bottom of the totem pole, and our own people are keeping us there.

Stay tuned for an online petition that will go to the Board Chairman Julian Bond (I’m sure Julian Bond wants the cash to go to the right people, he just doesn’t know how all the pieces are falling apart). Reparations are to pay families, not fat cats.