The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.
I am a white man who believes the time has come for whites to acknowledge the collective liability that we owe our black neighbors. Those of us primarily of European descent have benefited from a system that initially enslaved and increasingly marginalized black Americans for centuries culminating in what we have been living through in the last weeks. It is time that all citizens address this issue politically, ethically and financially.
Our society is divided and sick. Our unwillingness to face and address this division for so long has led us to this moment. Our country and all its people need to discuss, plan and act soon so that our children and grandchildren will have a better chance of living in a less polarized and more just country.
When I was a young man in the early 1970s I worked as a Vista Volunteer (similar to today’s Americorps) and lived in a black community in North Carolina. My black housemates, and even I myself at times ,would get pulled over by the police and harassed because my friends were young and black. Small infractions, like the burned-out taillights that get undocumented immigrants in Tucson deported today, are sadly still being used to target young black men by police.
In North Carolina I got to know some farmers who had a black business called “Forty Acres and a Mule.” I asked where the name came from and they said it was America’s unfulfilled promise to free blacks following the Civil War. General William Tecumseh Sherman asked the black leaders in Savannah what they needed. The resounding answer was “land.”
In 1865, with President Abraham Lincoln’s and Congress’ blessing, Sherman started redistributing thousands of acres of slave plantations. The plots were generally 40 acres and Sherman lent army mules to some 40,000 freedmen and their families to start planting crops, building homes and feeding their families.
John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln on April 14, 1865, three days after hearing the president call for Negro suffrage. Vice President Andrew Johnson, a former slave-owner himself, became president, annulled the redistribution of farms and ordered the U.S. Army to remove the black farmers and return the land to the plantation owners.
It’s time to address this injustice and make good on the Declaration of Independence’s statement “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks are just the latest evidence that we have not kept our promise.
Many African Americans have called for reparations, and this country, including whites like me, needs to get on board. We live in a country where systemic racism can no longer be tolerated.
What will restitution look like? I don’t know, though our country needs to figure that out. African Americans, who have lived with the trauma of our history, have to take the lead to inform government and policy makers. All citizens need to listen. This is a time to begin to explore what is possible.
Some express concern that this will open up claims by unjustly treated Native Americans and Latino descendants of the Southwest. Yes, it will, and these claims will have to be addressed, too.
Of course, didn’t we as a country pay restitution to the Japanese Americans unjustly interned during World War II? And didn’t the German government pay restitution to the descendants of the Jews killed during the Holocaust? They did, and we should. It’s time that our country embraces the wisdom of the founders and put our Declaration into practice.
