Reparations for Slavery in the United States

Brittany Smith

English 205

26 April 2010

Reparations for Slavery

      "If you are the son of a man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father's estate, you have to pay off the debts that your father incurred before he died. The only reason that the present generation of white Americans are in a position of economic strength...is because their fathers worked our fathers for over 400 years with no pay...We were sold from plantation to plantation like you sell a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a bushel of wheat...All that money...is what gives the present generation of American whites the ability to walk around the earth with their chest out...like they have some kind of economic ingenuity. Your father isn't here to pay. My father isn't here to collect. But I'm here to collect and you're here to pay." (Malcolm X)

      It is an irrefutable fact that slavery in America was an outrageous crime and a moral abomination. Slavery was permitted by law in the southern United States from the era of British colonial rule in the seventeenth century until the surrender of the Confederate secessionists following the Civil War (1861– 65). Legal in Washington, D.C., slave labor was used to build the United States’ Capitol. The U.S. government, however, had never apologized to the more than 30 million African Americans living in America whose ancestors had toiled as slaves, nor had an apology been offered to the West African nations from which millions of Africans had been captured and transported on a harrowing, and often deadly, trip across the Atlantic Ocean.
Today, many African Americans believe that to atone for the injustice done onto their ancestors it is necessary that American Government pay a reasonable amount of reparations. If reparations are awarded unto black Americans we are assuming that the entire white population currently residing in the Unites States is collectively responsible for slavery, presuming that being black is synonymous with...