Chantel Lynn

UWRT 1103
Professor Malcolm Campbell

Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:53 PM

Comment [1]: Professor Malcom
Campbell

10 November 2016
Creative Title
The classroom was hushed by an eerie silence, and blanketed with relentless
questions, fears, and doubts. Why cant they just protest peacefully, said one. I dont
understand, I just woke up to the chaos, explained another. I, in the midst of such
confusion, sit back and think about the destruction that took hold of my city, less than

Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:53 PM

Comment [2]: indent?
Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:53 PM
Comment [3]: no comma
Cassandra Cappello 11/8/16 10:39 PM
Comment [4]: Question mark

twenty four hours ago. Keith Lamont Scott is Sixth Person to Die in Police Shooting in
Charlotte this Year, read the NBC News headline. Keith Lamont Scott was killed by
Two Gunshot Wounds, Family Autopsy Find, says The New York Times. Sitting in my
Origins of American Stereotypes lecture hall I thought about how nice it must feel to
wake up and not have a clue about whats going on in the world. To not have to worry
about if your father or brother will be the next victim of two gunshot wounds. Keith

Cassandra Cappello 11/8/16 10:54 PM

Comment [5]: This anecdote is pretty
awesome. It makes the reader interested
right away.
Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:54 PM
Comment [6]: rt!!!!!!!
Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:55 PM
Comment [7]: italics? idk

Lamont Scott was not killed by two gunshot wounds, he was murdered at the hands of a
police officer, along with thousands of other African Americans, not six. It must be an
amazing feeling to live your life without having to explain how the media manipulates

Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:56 PM

Comment [8]: powerful

peaceful protests so that they appear to be violent. Or why having an African American
president does not eliminate all traces of racism around the nation. This my friend, is
called racial battle fatigue, a term found in the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and
Society, created by William Smith is defined as:

Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:56 PM

Comment [9]: comma
Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:58 PM
Comment [10]: quotation marks?

a theory attributed to the psychological attrition that People of Color experience from
the daily battle of deflecting racialized insults, stereotypes, and discrimination. RBF is
the cumulative effect of being on guard and having to finesse responses to insults,
both subtle and covert. In academia, we discuss having an arsenal of responses to
protect

ourselves. This arsenal is deployed as tools of self-protection from racial

microagressions and racialized aggression. (Smith.)
For majority of my life, I have heard the popular belief that we as a nation have
progressed so much since the Civil Rights Act, but if this is true, why are African
Americans still waiting on their reparatory justice for slavery? African Americans such as

Molly Hartness 11/8/16 10:59 PM

Comment [11]: maybe break this up into
two sentences.

myself, are still suffering from the aftermath of slavery because ever since 1865, we as
a people have been at a disadvantage economically, socially, politically and
academically due to a system of oppression based upon race, otherwise known as
racism. International law states that if a nation is commits an international crime such as
invasion and exploitation, they must make amends to that group of people as well as
their descendants if those descendants are still suffering from the consequences. Its
time that we address the elephant in the room instead of acting like it isnt a problem.
Why have African Americans not received reparations for slavery? According to the
Shorted Oxford Dictionary, a reparation is an appeasement or compensation for
wrongdoing. We as a nation so boldly proclaim to be the land of the free but when
legislators boldly turn a blind eye to the fact that our fourth amendment neglects those

Molly Hartness 11/8/16 11:00 PM

Comment [12]: preach gur

of African descendent when deciding to shoot an innocent man multiple times for simply
being black, or even the alleged fair trial promised in the fifth amendment, eyebrows
should be raised and questions need to be asked.
The Nuremberg Tribunal essentially defines crimes against humanity as the
murdering, extermination, enslaving, deportation and similar inhumane crimes against a
civilization. Many scholars have attempted to justify slavery with Biblical references and
the like but in reality, even a blind man could see that slavery was a crime against
humanity with the invasion of African civilizations, the horrific middle passage ordeal
and beheading an entire language and culture, not to mention the slavery aspect.
While one may argue that the Emancipation Proclamation and the 40 Acres and a Mule
proposition was just compensation for freed slaves, I would beg to differ. General
William Tecumseh promised each slave 40 acres and a mule upon their freedom but

Cassandra Cappello 11/8/16 10:53 PM

Comment [13]: check for parallelism
here. "murder, extermination,
enslavement, deportation.."

Cassandra Cappello 11/8/16 10:54 PM

Comment [14]: Explain the middle
passage ordeal for the readers
Cassandra Cappello 11/8/16 10:57 PM
Comment [15]: Explain this promise, too
and how freed slaves didn't even get this
land.

this is yet another example of a broken promise because Reconstruction was a terrible
period for African Americans which made it nearly impossible for them to thrive. Such
carelessness for slaves and their integration into society birthed generations upon
generations of African Americans who were forced to live a life of subordination under
systematic oppression.
Restitution is not an unfamiliar concept to the world. In 1952, Germany paid $222 million
to Israel as compensation for the Holocaust and in 1990, Austria gave an additional $25
million to Holocaust survivors. Similarly, Japan gave South Korea compensation for
their invasion during World War II and the UN Security Council did the same for Iraq
because of the Kuwait invasion. In 1988 the U.S passed the Civil Liberties Act, giving
restitution for internment camps to Japanese descendants totaling $1.2 million.

Molly Hartness 11/8/16 11:02 PM

Comment [16]: good comparison

According to Anthony Giffords The Legal Basis of the Claim for Slavery Reparations,
slavery gave rise to poverty, landlessness, the crushing of culture and language, loss
of identity, and the inculcation of inferiority among black people. There are no legal
barriers preventing a claim for reparations for slavery. In fact, both African and
Caribbean governments could make a claim for reparations like Israel did.
There have been many appeals for slavery reparation but de facto exclusion has
prevented any substantial action. In 1969, James Forman, the leader of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) lead the Black Manifestoan initiative
demanding half a billion dollars from churches and synagogues that played a role in
slavery. The Black Panthers and Black Muslims followed suit, to no avail. To think that
the people who lead the Civil Rights Movementa movement that opened doors for so
many other civil rights movementswill never receive just compensation is heart
shattering. In 1988, only one year after the Civil Liberties Act, US Representative John
Conyers proposed a bill regarding reparations of African American slaves that was
voted down by nearly everyone in the House. To this day, Senator Conyers is still
advocating for the bill. The bill simply proposed the creation of a committee with the sole
responsibility of discussing the logistics of providing African Americans with reparations
for slavery, but even that has not gotten approved. In 2000, law school graduate,
Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, filed a law suit against companies such as Aetna
Insurance, CSX Railroads, various banks, insurance companies, and agencies for their
profits from slavery. The companies never paid anything because they refused to claim
responsibility for their ancestors mistakes, regardless of the fact that they profited from
them. Over four years later, a federal judge in Chicago disregarded the case it threw it

out after deciding that the statute of limitations on slavery reparations had ended in
1865 (Points of View.) When will this topic be open for discussion?
Questions that could have been addressed in Senator Conyers proposed committee
would be regarding who should make the claim and who the claim would be against.
The questions of what court should hear the claim and the form of reparations are also
valid questions.
Those who support reparations for slavery argue that for the first seventy years of the
US government, slavery was protected and de jureunder the law-- segregation.
Supporters always believe that private companies should be held accountable and thus
should have to pay the reparations. Since African slaves are obviously dead, their
descendants should be the recipients of reparations because we still suffer the
repercussions of slavery. High rates of poverty, crime, and low education in African
American communities can be attributed to slavery.
The arguments of those against reparations for slavery is that there is no federal
documentation that could be used to trace slave lineage, therefore there is no evidence
that one African American deserves the reparations over another because many African
Americans immigrated to the US after slavery was abolished. Also, apparently the
reparations for the Holocaust and Japanese Internment Camps cannot be equated to
slavery reparations because those that were affected were alive to receive them
apparently these people forgot the definition of systematic oppression, otherwise known
as racism. One of the most popular arguments is that African Americans receive their
reparations through welfare, as if we are the only groups of people in America receiving
it.

Ever since 40 Acres and a Mule, society has neglected African Americans. But, with
the first African American president and a generation of forward thinking millennials, this
trend is bound to change. Many representatives and polls suggest that the debate over
reparations for slavery will become more of an open minded discussion over the course
of the next generation. Many modern day supporters of reparations for slavery argue
that reparatory justice is not limited to compensation and can be in the form of public
restitution. This could be by the forgiving of debts that are disproportionally forced upon
blacks who are arrested and thrown into jails because they cant afford to pay the
required fees. Similarly, the government could create a fund for African American
students to be able to attend college debts free or for homeowners to get loans. Each of
these forms of restitution will inevitably combat a fraction of the systematic oppression
that African Americans have endured for decades, preventing them the thrive in society.