Reparations anyone?
Reparations have not been on my mind lately, but I'm blogging on the subject now because the day fast approaches (October 10th) when an artist named Damali Ayo launches her National Day of Panhandling for Reparations. Whatever the arguments for or against reparations—and I'm of the belief that throwing money at a problem doesn't necessarily solve it—the woman has taken the rancor out of the debate by turning it into performance art. Her Web site describes the one-day event:
"People of all races across the United States will sit outside of businesses, libraries, museums, art galleries, or on busy street corners. We will collect reparations from white Americans for the enslavement of Africans and African Americans. This money will be immediately paid out to black passersby. Both parties will be offered a receipt."
I watched a video of her one-woman effort, and I laughed—it's really comical in its own way.
I have thought about the idea of reparations over the years, wondered if there was any real effort made after the Civil War, when African-Americans were fresh from being enslaved. There was. A woman named Callie House, a seamstress who was born a slave in 1861, led a 30-year campaign to get the government to pay pensions to former slaves and blacks who served in the Union Army. It was only fair: The white Union soldiers received pensions, and many plantation owners were eventually compensated for their "losses." She helped to found the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association in Nashville in 1899.
House's campaign was doomed, even though it was fair and could have succeeded. At that point in time ex slaves were still very much alive and quantifiable, as were black Union soldiers. Ultimately, though the U.S. Postal Service charged House and others working with her with mail fraud. House and her compatriots were harassed and hounded by the government. In 1915, nearly bankrupt, the association filed a lawsuit that claimed that a cotton tax used to support the war sho
uld now pay for pensions. The government cried immunity, and the suit was lost on the grounds of government immunity. Callie House went to prison. She died in 1928.
Her story is told by Mary Frances Berry in My Face Is Black Is True. Or at the NYPL. It makes me think: If ideas like the pension bill were allowed to be tested back at the turn of the twentieth century, even if they failed, we’d have been able to spend the decades since ironing out the kinks.
Still, I had the pleasure of hearing the author Jill Robinson read her story "BLACKout", a hilarious satire on the idea of reparations. Narrated by a West Indian man named Nigel, the story opens with celebrations throughout New York City because S9821, a reparations bill that promises to compensate African Americans for years of slave labor, has passed. Nigel is bitter because he's not getting a red cent: West Indians are not African Americans. As the story progresses, the requirements by which a person can be eligible unfold and become so narrow, so Kafkaesque in their logic as to render the law nearly useless. To that end "Africans, West Indians, mulattoes, octoroons, Native Americans (what? you think they're not part of us?), Spanish-speaking people of color, and all others conveniently excluded from America's so-called apology . . ." devise a plan to go on strike.
That story and others from the genre of speculative fiction can be found in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, edited by a smart and delightful woman named Sheree R. Thomas, who helped me turn a decent short story into a better one in a writer's workshop a few years ago. And here's the NYPL link. And if you're really dying to read it you can get it online at the library here.
"People of all races across the United States will sit outside of businesses, libraries, museums, art galleries, or on busy street corners. We will collect reparations from white Americans for the enslavement of Africans and African Americans. This money will be immediately paid out to black passersby. Both parties will be offered a receipt."
I watched a video of her one-woman effort, and I laughed—it's really comical in its own way.
I have thought about the idea of reparations over the years, wondered if there was any real effort made after the Civil War, when African-Americans were fresh from being enslaved. There was. A woman named Callie House, a seamstress who was born a slave in 1861, led a 30-year campaign to get the government to pay pensions to former slaves and blacks who served in the Union Army. It was only fair: The white Union soldiers received pensions, and many plantation owners were eventually compensated for their "losses." She helped to found the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association in Nashville in 1899.
House's campaign was doomed, even though it was fair and could have succeeded. At that point in time ex slaves were still very much alive and quantifiable, as were black Union soldiers. Ultimately, though the U.S. Postal Service charged House and others working with her with mail fraud. House and her compatriots were harassed and hounded by the government. In 1915, nearly bankrupt, the association filed a lawsuit that claimed that a cotton tax used to support the war sho
uld now pay for pensions. The government cried immunity, and the suit was lost on the grounds of government immunity. Callie House went to prison. She died in 1928.Her story is told by Mary Frances Berry in My Face Is Black Is True. Or at the NYPL. It makes me think: If ideas like the pension bill were allowed to be tested back at the turn of the twentieth century, even if they failed, we’d have been able to spend the decades since ironing out the kinks.
Still, I had the pleasure of hearing the author Jill Robinson read her story "BLACKout", a hilarious satire on the idea of reparations. Narrated by a West Indian man named Nigel, the story opens with celebrations throughout New York City because S9821, a reparations bill that promises to compensate African Americans for years of slave labor, has passed. Nigel is bitter because he's not getting a red cent: West Indians are not African Americans. As the story progresses, the requirements by which a person can be eligible unfold and become so narrow, so Kafkaesque in their logic as to render the law nearly useless. To that end "Africans, West Indians, mulattoes, octoroons, Native Americans (what? you think they're not part of us?), Spanish-speaking people of color, and all others conveniently excluded from America's so-called apology . . ." devise a plan to go on strike.
That story and others from the genre of speculative fiction can be found in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, edited by a smart and delightful woman named Sheree R. Thomas, who helped me turn a decent short story into a better one in a writer's workshop a few years ago. And here's the NYPL link. And if you're really dying to read it you can get it online at the library here.
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