If Black People Want Reparations, They Must First Stop Asking The Federal Government

by Darryl L. Fortson, MD

 

I think the United States Constitution is a pretty excellent piece of legislative writing. But, sad to say, it is like the man in James 1:8 in the Bible - “double minded and unstable in all his ways.” Its Preamble states that it sought to “form a more perfect Union,” even as it allowed slavery. It purported to “establish justice,” even as it cruelly enslaved 10 million people of African descent under its auspices for 246 years. Its Preamble said that the Constitution was written to "ensure domestic tranquility," but its application was so strained that over 750,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perished in a great civil war that was anything but "tranquil." It was ordained and established to “provide for the common defense,” but it left Black people as prey to the Klan. The United States Constitution was supposed to "promote the general welfare," but has instead aided and abetted an unjust economic system leaving many Black folk on welfare. And sadly, some 161 years after the Civil War’s end, the “blessings of liberty” have not been fully or broadly secured for the African-American or his or her posterity. And yet, despite these gross hypocrisies, the law’s delay, and brazen, wounding, and ofttimes deadly assaults upon Black personhood, Blacks insist upon asking for Reparations from this same government, guided by this same Constitution.

  The current racial net worth gap, as calculated by the noted Reparations scholar Dr. William Darity, is $16 trillion, or about $400,000 for every black person in America. This is an amount of money would require that $160 billion be given to Black people yearly for the next 100 years. Not only is this not probable, but I’m not even sure that would be fiscally wise for America.

  It is at this point that most Reparations detractors write off the whole notion of Reparations as sophistry, but all this really means is that we have to stop thinking about what man or the Federal government can do in this matter, and start thinking about what God can do, which is anything except lie or fail.

 

The truth is that Black folk can get Reparations, but we have to petition the Divine and stop asking Federal or state “mammon” for divine justice. We have to stop asking the stubborn, vacillating taker of our freedom and justice – the Federal government – to give us the Reparations in which our true freedom and justice lies. We have to, in effect, stop asking Pharaoh for our freedom. Our organization, AASRT, Inc. (formerly known as the African American Slave Reparations Team), has submitted such a petition to the Living God. We are confident He will deliver—not by coins falling like manna from Heaven, but through a movement of the Holy Spirit, unctioning the righteous, the enlightened, and the obedient to take bold, consequential action to not only mobilize Reparations from personal, corporate, and sovereign coffers around the world, but by facilitating Black folk building an infrastructure that will retain those same reparative assets safely and grow them in a way that is prudent, verdant, and lasting, because the Reparations debt is too large to simply be paid; it must also be built from what is paid. And this Reparations blessing will come not just through faith bereft of works, but through a real world, effective plan inspired by that faith that Black folks work to invent, implement, and protect. 

  In short, we “need the faith of a mustard seed” alongside a coordinated plan to plant it in the fertile ground of the willing, rather than the barren soil of the U.S. government. The trees and the mustard we need cannot be expected to come from a government puzzlingly and chronically bereft of the character to do what is right, but from the people and entities within and beyond its borders who possess that character. Some of them will be White, some Black, some American, some foreign, but all of them will be moved by the Divine Hand to do what even a government as wealthy and powerful as the U.S. government cannot and will not do – which is the right thing.

Darryl. L. Fortson, MD is a Chicago native practicing medicine in Las Vegas and the author of “Voyage To Reparations: The Effective Way to Achieve Economic Reparations for Blacks and Spiritual Liberation for America,” available on Amazon. For more information, visit www.theaasrt.org