Newsday: "Who would qualify for reparations"

This is a good and funny article written by Les Payne.

"Who would qualify for slavery reparations?"
By Les Payne
Newsday.com
August 5, 2007

Will Tiger Woods get reparations for slavery? What about Justice Clarence Thomas? Mariah Carey? Chuck D? Will the children of Abner Louima or Amadou Diallo get shares?

No, you've not missed the memo on U.S. reparations.

A blizzard of e-mail responses to last week's column has enlivened the debate over my view that slavery was a crime against humanity for which America must account and be assessed damages. Mixed-race Tiger Woods gets hauled onto the fairway because inquiring readers want to know who exactly would be eligible for reparations. This puts the cart before the horse, as farmers say, but I yield to questions from the floor.

A mixed-race reader from San Francisco, with half of her family white, questions using "one drop of [black] blood" as a criterion for determining eligibility. This standard was once used to increase family slave holdings in states like Louisiana. Later, it determined who got white privileges. Those living as whites with their "one drop" during and after slavery would not be eligible for reparations, since, as the San Franciscan points out, they "have not suffered discrimination."

As for golfer Woods, his mother is from Thailand, and his father's ancestry is African and indigenous American. As a twofer, Woods might claim ancestral tribal lands, but his slave roots are in Kansas. The white blood in Woods' family didn't keep his forebears out of slavery or reserve white privilege for the golf wizard.

During kindergarten in California, Woods has recalled, white sixth-graders tied him to a tree and threw rocks at him after spray-painting on him "Nigger," a word the prodigy would hear at various golf links. Woods was the only nonwhite at that elementary school, and the little darlings struck a blow against only that part of him that descended from slaves. That same blood had kept his father, Earl, from rooming in hotels with his white basketball teammates when Kansas State played on the road.

So the agony behind the stigma of slavery - even for overachievers such as Woods, Justice Thomas, Romare Bearden, Adam Powell, Chuck D., etc. - is visited upon citizens whose only distinguishing characteristic is that they descended from slaves; this condition is almost synonymous with being black in America.

Mere appearance is sometimes enough to bring on the hurt.

Amadou Diallo, 23, was mistaken for a descendant of slaves when, in 1999, New York City cops cut him down in a hail of 41 bullets. The unarmed victim was instead an immigrant from Guinea, a West African country formerly colonized by the French, who likely owe reparations for misappropriating land, human resources and mineral wealth. Though Diallo was due no compensation from American slavery, his parents got a $3-million settlement from the city for misidentifying their son as a fellow descendant.

Cops similarly mistreated Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant they brutalized in a precinct bathroom two years earlier. He, too, was not eligible for reparations. However, in the largest brutality settlement in city history, his civil suit reaped some $8.75 million. Other black immigrants ineligible for reparations have sued municipalities and won big for being subjected to treatment earmarked for the dark-skinned descendants of slaves.

As for who gets reparations - when the time comes - a full share, I submit, should go to those whose forebears endured slavery on these shores, and who suffered the inherited agony themselves. The case charges that slavery and attending U.S. atrocities, some of which are ongoing, have no statute of limitations and must be brought to book and punished before this republic can enjoy any lasting reconciliation between the races.

Of those names opening this discussion, I would exclude only Mariah Carey, whose mother is Irish and father a brown-skinned citizen from Venezuela. Thomas would likely opt out of reparations for himself.

Another loyal, black American, a classy writer and social critic of impeccable taste, accepts the prescribed bill of particulars on reparations. He opts out of reparations nonetheless, offering his share to those building the case.

Should a fair share reach a million dollars, however, he wants in.

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