POSITIVELY BLACK
Junious Ricardo Stanton
The US Constitution and Slavery
“The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred eight but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation not exceeding ten dollars for each person.” - Article 1 Section 9 US Constitution
On August 17th thousands of grass roots activists converged upon Washington D.C. the citadel of this racist, oppressive and morally bankrupt government to press their demands for compensation and restoration of that which this government knowingly sanctioned, the ongoing oppression of our people. Most whites who oppose reparations do so out of fear of being forced to see themselves, their culture and nation for what they are and an irrational unwillingness to confront their delusional self-image as God’s gift to the world. Others resist because they have vested interests in the status quo, their wealth, position and way of life were built upon our suffering. Lastly most whites fear the issue of reparations out of mis-education. They say slavery is over, the US has changed and now is an society to the point it is color blind and offers equal access. Do you expect them to admit their forefathers were rapists, murderers and thieves or that color caste still exists in this country? They must defend their predatory way of life at all costs, even while making themselves look utterly foolish. This is why their PR media machine is concocting all kinds of counter propaganda against reparations. One editorial had the audacity to say reparations was unfair!? Their rationalizations were so lame they defy repeating. They kept talking about money and the awesomeness of the task of proving who was responsible for slavery, who profited and who owed reparations; as if that is so difficult to discern, just follow the government, trading company and corporate money trails. The fact of the matter is Europeans could never print enough money to compensate for the life of even one African, the real issue is Karmic Justice!
Misguided Negroes oppose the concept of reparations mainly do so because they have internalized the propaganda about AmeriKKKa being the land of opportunity, freedom and equality. They have been hoodwinked into believing slavery was a benign or even beneficial system for Africans, that slavery and its aftermath of exploitation and oppression were coincidental to, rather than central to AmeriKKKa’s rise to wealth and power. Both camps are blind of the centrality of slavery in the creation of this nation. They need to study and analyze US history from a factual rather than revisionist and propaganda basis. When they do they will discover, Europeans introduced the most diabolical form of human subjugation/degradation the world has ever seen in this hemisphere, first on the indigenous inhabitants then on imported kidnaped Africans. Even before there was a USA, Europeans were exploiting the uncompensated labor of Africans. Without this labor there would never have been an America, no industrial revolution or Western culture as it exists today. Contrary to popular belief, Western Europeans weren’t flocking to these shores. In fact things were so bad Britain had to empty the jails and debtor’s prisons to populate certain areas in her American colonies. Even that didn’t work. Indentured servitude failed because conditions in the so called New World were too harsh. Indentured servants frequently ran away before completing their term of indenture. Lastly Europeans had no real experience or skills as farmers and were unwilling to do the grueling back breaking work of chopping trees, clearing the land, tilling the soil or working in the mines especially in the Caribbean and Southern heat on lands they did not or could not own. So first they attempted to enslave the indigenous inhabitants but that failed because the natives outnumber the white men, they knew the land and could easily and successfully run away. Actually European diseases decimated millions of Native Americans . Being desperate and knowing their masses would balk at coming to the New World to work as surfs, a condition they were slowly coming out of in Europe, the elites turned to Africa.
Slavery was first established in the Western Hemisphere by the Spanish, later joined by the Portugese and eventually all other Western European colonizers. The English colonies beginning in Virginia moved to prescribe a social caste system that placed Africans on the bottom rung of the social ladder. (See A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.’s seminal work In The Matter of Color Race & The American Legal process The Colonial Period for further insight.) During the Revolutionary War, whites were resistant to arming blacks and letting us fight in the war. But when the British offered to free slaves who fought on their side, George Washington approved limited black participation. When the war was over and the former colonists wrestled with establishing a new socio-economic and political order, slavery was at the center of their discussions for obvious reasons. White land owners didn’t want to do the work themselves, their population was down and the system already used African free labor so they continued with it. Slavery was key to their economic survival. So much so that they wrote into the new Constitution albeit in obfuscatory language any prohibition against importation of “such persons any of the existing states shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred eight but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation not exceeding ten dollars for each person.” Congress could not outlaw the importation of Africans before 1808. Furthermore a tax of not more than ten dollars per person could be imposed. In other words the US treasury was enriched by a tax on imported Africans! This means, not only did the new government sanction slavery, defend it, prevent debate against it, slavery was its’ prime source of income! This is the reality opponents of reparations refuse to address. The reason we aren’t aware of this is because we have been “educated” by the government in public schools!
Serious proponents of reparations understand the slave trade was indispensable in the economic development of AmeriKKKa and Western Europe even before the invention of the Cotton Gin. More Africans were imported to this hemisphere than European immigrants until te decades just before the US Civil War. Slavery was written into the US Constitution for reasons of economic survival! The US Government is the first entity we should go after for reparations because not only did it sanction and condone our holocaust, it profited from it! On the political side, Jefferson, Madison, Washington and their Southern cohorts finagled a comprise that allowed Southern slave owners to count slaves as three fifths of a person for representation purposes in the House of Representatives which aided them in dominating the governmental process, thereby allowing them to virtually control the economic agenda and destiny of the new nation! (Article 1 section 2 of the US Constitution) Slavery was crucial politically also. As we know the courts and Congress worked to keep us in bondage until forced to address the issue following the Civil War; which was not fought over freeing the slaves as some would have us believe.
Following a brief attempt at integrating blacks into the social, political and economic life of the nation during Reconstruction, the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were passed. However they have never been fully enforced. If they had, our circumstances would be decidedly different. By the late 1800's white supremacy reared its ugly head and northern and southern elites collaborated to establish to a new form of color caste, quasi slavery/peonage called share cropping and convict leasing, again consigning black folks to non-citizen status. The state and federal legislatures, executive branches and courts went merrily along with this arrangement, maintaining the status quo of color caste until Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall mounted their attacks on the AmeriKKKan apartheid system. Their successful challenges to the vile doctrine of separate but equal, culminated in the Brown vs Board of Education Decision of 1954. Ironically today conditions aren’t that much different than they were when the Supreme Court decision was announced, we still have defacto segregation separate and unequal schools and disparate neighborhoods instead of de jure apartheid and legally mandated oppression.
We have a right to press for redress not only from the US Government but state and local governments as well as corporate entities. We’ve/are suffering from egregious wrongs that have been institutionalized within the fabric of this culture despite the cosmetic progress we have made. The legal remedies, constitutional amendments, federal and local laws have not erased the blight nor the pattern of discrimination from our lives. We have to educate our people to the real deal, foster a strong sense of self-love so we feel worthy enough to press for our human rights and dignity. Just as the civil rights movement used passive civil disobedience and the black power movement militantly confronted the powers that be demanding change, this generation must formulate a strategy whereby our interests are thrust onto the front burner until they are addressed and satisfactorily resolved.
Junious
Ricardo Stanton produce and host a Internet
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The Digital
Underground which airs live on Sundays from 12 pm- 2 pm eastern standard time on
www.NewBlackCity.com
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