Articles: Not So Fast, UN: The US Owes No “Reparations” to Blacks

By George De Vries lll

 

A September 2016 United Nations panel in Geneva decided the U.S. owed blacks reparations for a history of ‘racial terror.’

Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post notes:

In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent.  Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.

This UN action, of course, was followed by last December’s resolution against Israeli settlements.  Interestingly, in the same December time period, the UN could not bring itself to impose sanctions and an arms embargo on a South Sudan that is plunged into ethnic conflict in which thousands have already been killed.  It seems the newer, anti-colonial, anti-West members suffer from a case of moral schizophrenia.

A thumbnail review of the real history of slavery is in order here.  First, to be clear, there is no doubt many injustices and human tragedies have occurred throughout our history because of slavery; but that is true everywhere slavery has occurred.  For a real accounting, thousands of slavery-related transactions that open the curtains on the history of slaves and the slave trade have been recorded and are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvard University.  Two other worthy sources include Hugh Thomas’ The Slave Trade and Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery.

Slavery became a worldwide phenomenon during the Middle Ages.  The modern slave trade began and expanded early in the era, but the practice existed in some form or other from time immemorial.  Under the Roman Empire, it was not a black-only phenomenon, but universal. Nevertheless, before the first millennium A.D., Middle Eastern Muslims were selling goods to African kingdoms.  Those kingdoms were paying for those goods with human capital -- their own people, black people.  Though Christians became involved in the slave trade somewhat later, Arab Muslim traders were probably first to hold blacks as slaves and as they ceded global dominion of the slave trade to Europeans later on. They also are estimated to have enslaved over a million European Christians in the “barbary states” of North Africa.

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Articles: Not So Fast, UN: The US Owes No “Reparations” to Blacks