Racial Repair and Reconciliation: How Can We Achieve Them?

 3. Applying Remedies to Repair the Damage and Heal the Trauma

Facing History believes that the lifeblood of democracy is the ability of every rising generation to be active, responsible decision-makers. And we believe that inspired teachers and innovative methods are the key. We work with educators around the world throughout their careers to improve their effectiveness in the classroom, as well as their students’ academic performance, historical understanding, and civic learning.

The most challenging part of racial reconciliation is discovering what will make the victims of racial injustice whole – and applying that remedy.

Some Americans feel that establishing honest communication between white and black individuals is enough. Others believe that white people must acknowledge the factual details of slavery. Only then will black people feel genuinely seen and heard.

Still others believe those remedies are not sufficient, because they address individual bigotry without changing the injustices built into our institutions and way of life. These people search for ways to eliminate the economic, social, and political disparities between the black and white communities. Some Americans – black and white – are part of a long-running movement for reparations to African Americans for slavery.

Reparations: Didn't Freed Slaves Get 40 Acres and a Mule?

The word “reparations” means “making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”

The idea of reparations is basic to American law: those who have been wrongly injured can sue those who caused the injury and recover money from them. The government of the United States has made reparations payments to wrongly injured ethnic groups within our borders, including native Hawaiians, Native Americans, and formerly interned Japanese Americans. More recently, the federal government granted reparations to the surviving families of the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. And to victims of Hurricane Sandy. It was complicated to work out exactly how to compensate victims for their material and emotional losses. Still, the government did not hesitate to try.

The YWCA is dedicated to eliminating racism, empowering women and promoting peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all. The YWCA of Southeast Wisconsin teaches an Unlearning Racism course.

In fact, reparations were made to a very small number of formerly enslaved people at the end of our Civil War. In 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15 to "assure the harmony of action in the area of operations" and cope with the masses of newly freed and homeless people. Around 40,000 of the four million freed slaves were settled on 400,000 acres (1,600 km²) in Georgia and South Carolina. Sherman granted each freed family forty acres of tillable land. The army also had a number of unneeded mules which were given to these settlers.

After Lincoln was assassinated,  President Andrew Johnson reversed the order. The land was returned to its previous owners. In 1867, abolitionist Congressman Thaddeus Stevens sponsored a bill for the redistribution of land to African Americans, but it did not pass.

Reparations Under International Law

America Healing is an effort by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to put the belief in a false human hierarchy based on physical characteristics and the racial and structural inequalities it creates behind us, by first putting it squarely in front of us. America Healing is a strategy for racial healing toward racial equity, and is designed to raise awareness of unconscious biases and inequities to help communities heal.

Bringing a claim for compensation/reparations for human rights violations is considered a basic human right. Many countries have paid reparations.

• • Germany paid reparations directly to the individual Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust as well as to the State of Israel.
  • New Zealand returned lands, factories, fishing rights, and boats to the Maori people.
  • Canada provided compensation to First Nations children who were taken from their families and mistreated in boarding schools.

During every Congressional session for the last forty years, Representative John Conyers of Michigan has proposed HR 40, a bill to establish a national commission to study the issue of reparations for slavery. The bill has never passed the House, so no such commission exists.

Recently the idea of reparations has again entered the national conversation, largely due to a thorough and compelling magazine article and televised interviews and testimony by its author, Ta-Neihisi Coates (see video below). How to accomplish reparations raises complex questions. Nevertheless, Coates – and other thinkers black and white – believe that ways can and must be found.