Reparations: Six Recommendations

When blacks were stolen and sold so whites could get "in the black," they lost their freedom, their children, their wives, husbands, communities, homes, churches, culture.
When blacks were tortured and worked so whites could "get in the black" they lost their sanity, health, joy, hope, lives.

We can't return health, family, lives, peace of mind... We can't undo trauma, tragedy, the distrust inculcated by treason, theft, abuse, rape, dehumanization.
What can we do?

• Return schools to their communities that were demolished or integrated, fully funded and reconstructed to meet current standards. That includes schools and school houses throughout the 1900's plus those of the new millennia.
• Return banks to their people that were undermined, bombed, stolen, driven out of businesses. Accounts and credit to be adjusted to today's dollars with interest from date of closure, theft, bombing, or untimely demise at the hands of whites.
• Return the rights to the creativity and hard work of their people. Blacks have a right to the lion's share of the capital gained by that creativity plus interest. That includes black music, entertainment, athletics, innovations, inventions, labor.
• Return and restore the homes that were lost to red-lining. No black family is to be without a good home. Consider this also reparation for the discomfort of slave cabins, the humiliation of the slave auction block, and the slave ships' sardine-like torture.
• Return and repair places of worship, graveyards, and businesses destroyed, repossessed, damaged by whites, especially by the KKK and other supremacist groups in the 1900's.
• Calculate and channel any profit that was made from the sale of any black person back into restoring the black community by funding and founding their existing and new colleges, universities, trade schools, professional and K-12 educational institutions or through scholarships to schools of their choice.

We don't expect Jews, Koreans, Vietnamese, Armenians, Chinese, Mexicans, central Americans, etc. to fully integrate into the larger United States country of immigrants. Many people from these cultures choose to have their homes clustered, their areas and spaces that have integrity and economic vitality: entertainment venues, shops, restaurants, salons, banks, educational institutions, hospitals, professional institutions, churches. These areas are visited by others but recognized as largely of a particular culture. Why isn't that true of the black community? Because their communities have been actively and verifiably undermined and destroyed. These reparations might help ensure their reconstruction and endurance.

This amend will require a profound and fact-facing inventory of harms done.  Those committed to its success will need to have a conscience that is not dictated by human law but by heaven's law. God willing, and God is willing, the latter is what we serve in our few days on this Earth.

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