Reparations

Should African Americans receive reparations for slavery? If so, who should receive them since all blacks aren’t direct descendants of slaves? How do you go about handing out these reparations? All of these questions and more were brought up in my African American History class during a group project last Thursday. I found this presentation very interesting because this was one point a pretty hot topic and still is a sore spot for many older African Americans.


It’s quite obvious that Blacks still have some animosity towards Whites because of slavery. As I always say, can you blame them? I personally don’t because technically you can’t get mad at the Europeans for doing exactly what we were doing to each other in Africa at that time. I have heard countless conversations on this subject and it’s hard to “pick a side”. America no doubt made A LOT of money off of slavery; if you calculated the amount today it adds up to 1 trillion dollars! Clearly we were never compensated for our hard work and didn’t receive a formal apology from the government until the year 2008! How crazy is that? I mean even though Blacks probably bugged the crap out of the government for a formal apology earlier, what the heck difference does it make now? WHAT SLAVE DO YOU THINK HEARD THAT!? It’s not the apology we’re looking for, it’s more so that we want those racist Whites who are still out there and even the ones that aren’t racist but try to ignore or skip over the fact that slavery happened to acknowledge the fact that it did, admit their ancestors were wrong, and stop discriminating against us. I mean, that’s all I want. Blacks on the other hand need to stop walking around acting like they can’t make something out of themselves because of discrimination, clearly we can do better. Which brings me to my next point, how should the government distribute reparations for the blacks that suffered through slavery and even the aftermath of slavery?

Even though there’s no way to be sure who to hand out money to, I believe the best way to make up for what was done is to fix the education system. As everyone should know, Blacks were denied their rights to education for a very long time and because of that it affected their ability to build wealth, get good jobs, and many other things that still affect us today. If there were more educated blacks there would be more Black doctors, lawyers, presidents and so on. This would also help us in many other ways. I believe the government should start in the lower levels of education first and go back and simply build better schools in every black neighborhood in America. Then equip these schools with the same things that the white schools in most counties have. Now some White people may think, education is equal and there’s nothing wrong with the Black schools out there, but if you come to Richmond and see the difference between something as little as the classrooms or the cafeterias in the Black schools and White schools you would probably change your mind. Although we may be learning the same material from teachers who are just as qualified or smart as each other, who wants to walk in to a run down, rinky dink school every day? That right there is discouraging and makes many Black kids feel like their government doesn’t care about them. There are major differences in the sport facilities also. Granted, many of the predominantly Black schools in Richmond are very old there is still no reason they shouldn’t be updated just like the new county schools. I feel as though if many of the Richmond city kids I know had the privilege of walking into a nice, new high school every day the past four years with nice classrooms, brand new books, and just a really cool environment they would have never wanted to skip school and would have been encouraged to do a lot more activities. I look at the sport facilities of the county schools and wonder why we can’t have nice gyms and better tracks and fields outside, or even separate fields! At the high school I played basketball and softball for, the gym was quite old, the football field was also used for soccer and any other “grass sport” they may have had and the softball field was away from the school and was terrible! My coach had to drag the field himself with very old equipment and every time it rained we could count on either not having practice on the field for a while and just playing in the grass or having to go in the gym to practice. The county schools have much better facilities and even their DIRT was better than ours! I know that sounds silly but it’s the little things that matter to us kids. One school in particular that’s fairly new in the county near Richmond is called Cosby High School. The school on the inside is just plain and simple Awesome. The gym was very nice and the fields outside were on a whole other level. They have both practice and play fields for soccer, football, baseball, and softball. They even had different fields for varsity and junior varsity baseball and softball. The high school I played for had two fields, one for softball and one for baseball. Luckily softball had the nicer field, even though there was a little walk to get there.

If new schools were built for Blacks that were identical to the schools for the Whites and even other things like community centers and other places that kids go were all equal, things would be a lot different. I think the dropout rate would go down and a lot more kids would want to go to school and work towards a better life. Nowadays all Blacks kids think about is getting out of the hood and never going back. What they don’t realize is that by not going back and giving back to their rundown neighborhoods by building better facilities, those neighborhoods would always harbor poor Black families. If the government were to ever hand out reparations, they should just give us justice and build better facilities for our children, so they can grow up with the exact same opportunities as the White kids and finally things would begin to equal out.