WE OWE US: The Real Case For Reparations

Late last month, on January 26, a lawsuit brought by descendants of slaves against companies whom they claimed profited from slavery was dismissed in federal court.

Unfortunately for those who thought that this act of judicial sanity will put an end to the “Reparations” cause, the case was dismissed “without prejudice,” which means the plaintiffs can file an amended complaint — which they intend to do.

Thus we are due shortly for another round of racist demands from “slave descendants” that billions of dollars be extorted from American taxpayers and deposited into their beggar bowls.

There is only one way to put an end to the Reparations argument, and that is by explaining just who owes reparations to whom.

My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Wheeler, was born in Cranfield, Bedfordshire, England in 1616. In 1635 he and his new bride Joanne sailed to New England, where he became a founder of Milford, Connecticut.

In 1684, Thomas’ son John was one of the original founders of Woodbury, Connecticut, where John’s son John Jr, his son Caleb, his son Simeon, and his son Ashbel continued to live, farm, and raise their families for well over a century.

Ashbel’s son Truman moved to Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania in 1801, where he was a teacher and justice of the peace. His son, Charles Truman, moved to Mechanicsville, Iowa in the 1830s, where he was a doctor. His son, Charles Earl, my great-grandfather, was born in 1851 and became a trial lawyer in Cedar Rapids.

My family had been in America for 226 years before the Civil War, and in all those years none of my Wheeler ancestors owned one slave.

I cannot be so sure, however, regarding my mother’s family. We think my mother’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, William Mitchell, came from Scotland to settle in North Carolina in the late 1600s. William’s great-grandson Thomas crossed the Cumberland Gap in 1804 and settled in Tennessee.

The Mitchells were small rural farmers and it is unlikely they had slaves – but being the South, it’s possible (even though there is no evidence) that over the years they may have owned a slave or two.

In other words, there is certain doubt that the Wheelers were slave-owners, and there is a quite reasonable doubt the Mitchells were either. For someone to be found guilty and deserving of punishment thereby, they must be so beyond reasonable doubt. No reasonable case can be made that I, or my children, are tainted with Original Slave Owning Sin.

There are not a lot of folks among America’s 290 million whose direct ancestors have been here for a combined 738 years, or more to the point, for 460 years while there was still slave-ownership in America.

How much more difficult would it be to establish reasonable slave-owning guilt for all those other millions?

To claim some kind of voodoo tribal guilt regarding slave-ownership that mystically applies to all Americans no matter if they immigrated here last year, their parents immigrated here forty years ago, or none of their ancestors owned any slaves whatever is an assertion beyond reason and evidence, and resides in the realm of religious faith.

For there to be the slightest shred of justice pertaining to slavery reparations claims, the claims must be upon – and only upon – those people whose ancestors owned slaves beyond any reasonable doubt.

It turns out there are millions of descendants of slave-owners among America’s citizenry today. They are the only people of whom the reparations crowd could possibly claim should pay reparations.

Who are they and how do we know they are descended from slave-owners? Let me relate a little story.

In 1962, when I was a student at UCLA, Malcolm X came to our campus and made a speech. It stunned me that he spoke with the same kind of racist hatred towards whites that Hitler did towards Jews.

Finally, one of the other students couldn’t stand it anymore and yelled, “Why do you hate white people so much? You’re part white yourself!” Malcolm X acknowledged the obvious, that his light brown-yellow skin revealed his partially-white ancestry, by responding in a voice of utter venom, “Yes, and if you had the blood of a dog in you, you wouldn’t be proud of it either.”

Proud or ashamed, the fact is that Malcolm X was not just “black,” he was black-and-white. He was not just the descendant of slaves. He was also the descendant of slave-owners.

That the slave-owner raped a slave or used his superior position over her to extract a sexual liaison is irrelevant to the fact that Malcolm X never would have been born had it not been for such a liaison. He – just like the majority of American blacks – owes his existence to slave-owning ancestors.

There is an outfit called Millions for Reparations (www.millionsforreparations.com). When they held a rally here in Washington DC, a couple thousand folks were on hand to hear the Malcolm X of our day, Louis Farrakhan, spew racist vitriol. The Washington Post interviewed one of the people in the crowd, Suzanne Andersen, who advocated reparations because “My great-great-grandmother was a slave in Florida.”

But what about Suzanne’s great-great-great grandfather?

The bottom line is that the substantial majority of black people in America are only partially black. They are also partially white, and are so because they are of mixed white slave-owner and black slave owned ancestry.

If justice requires that the descendants of slave-owners compensate the descendants of slaves, this means that people of such ancestry – again the vast majority of American blacks – must compensate themselves. They are virtually the only folks in America of whom there can be no reasonable doubt that their ancestors owned slaves.

Blacks owe reparations to themselves. The chant and battle cry of Millions for Reparations is “They Owe Us!” The truth is that the demand of the reparations movement should be: “We Owe Us!”

Let us hope that this reductio ad absurdum will help bring reparations advocates to their senses. For the bald truth is that the reparations argument is fascist thuggery run amok.

It doesn’t matter whether my ancestors never owned slaves or were the biggest slave-owners in the South. I never had anything to do with it and I don’t owe any slave descendant one damn dime. Neither do you, nor does anyone else – except the slave/slave-owner descendants themselves.

Advocates of reparations owe themselves a lot. But the reparations shouldn’t be paid in cash. It should be paid by swearing off their addiction to whining, begging, and victimizing their lives with anti-white racism.

It should be paid by standing up and facing the reality of their slave/slave-owner heritage.

It should be paid by a conviction to be proud of themselves for what they accomplish as individuals and not for membership in a racial group.

It should be paid by being proud to be an American with no reservations.

No where in the world, no where in history, have black people accomplished more and flourished more than in America. No where else on earth do black people have the opportunity and freedom to prosper more than America.

All Americans have a right to be proud of these achievements. The celebration of these historical achievements would be the best reparations of all.