Reparations: A Matter of Societal and Economic Justice
This thread will cover reparations for Foundational Black Americans (FBA) and why reparations being made are the right thing to do societally and economically.
In case you were not aware, Wikipedia conveniently deleted the page on FBAs two days after Juneteenth (https://t.co/SgivRa0MdI), according to https://t.co/vBurfI7MNU:
With that covered, onto the ethics of reparations. The USA gov’t officially sanctioned the theft of FBAs freedom, property, and wealth, having even sanctioned the lynchings & massacres of FBAs and also subjecting the FBAs to crimes in the modern day as well.
This amounts to not only the FBAs today being subjected to these crimes but also the current existing government structure of the USA body being guilty of the theft of FBAs great-great grandparents or great-great-great grandparents freedom and lives through enslavement.
Thomas Aquinas spoke on financial reparations as a natural duty in the Summa Theologica, for St. Aquinas said, «Augustine says (Ep. ad Maced. cxliii): "Unless a man restore what he has purloined, his sin is not forgiven". [1] The U.S. gov't has a duty to restore what it took.
Reparations by the U.S. gov’t towards FBAs would be described by St. Aquinas as a matter of “particular justice to direct the common good to particular individuals by way of distribution.” [2] Here, it would be a matter of distributive justice.
You might be wondering, "What if the individual died many years ago?" Well, St. Aquinas said when the person whom justice “is due be dead,” then it “should be made to his offspring, who is looked upon as one with him.” [3]
The public authority having committed injustices has a duty to correct said injustices:
The public authority, having endorsed the robbery of FBAs freedom for generations, is bound to correct this. It is a grave injustice to withhold from the descendants (those who can trace their lineage to the 1870 census) what they are rightfully owed from the public authority.
As St. Aquinas put it, “although the precept about the making of restitution is affirmative in form, it implies a negative precept forbidding us to withhold what belongs to another.” [5]
There is also a matter of hypocrisy when it comes to the American gov't and how it treats the reparations issue. Japanese Americans were interned from 1942 to 1946. This was due to a false belief that they would serve the interests of Japan. The gov't upheld the legality of this.
Two years after internment had ceased, the Japanese-American Claims Act was signed by Truman, partially compensating claimants who were interned for losses of property, belongings, and businesses. Forty years later, President Reagan would sign into law (Continued)
the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted reparations to those interned. The act recognized that the internment had been done out of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” So the U.S. gov't granted reparations to Japanese Americans (Continued)
for four years of internment, only forty years after the crime had taken place, but steadfastly refuses to provide reparations to FBAs for entire generations stolen through slavery and state-sanctioned massacres. Look at the Tulsa race massacre; the gov't refuses (Continued)
to grant reparations to the last few living survivors or to their descendants. Not too long ago, the case for reparations by the last three survivors, now two as plaintiff Hughes Van Ellis has unfortunately died, was dismissed in a June 2024 decision.
Not only does the government refuse to remedy the injustice they sanctioned, slavery, through reparations for the descendants (as they are bound to, as I showed above), they also refuse to even provide reparations to living survivors of gov’t sanctioned massacres.
Furthermore, there was the whole system of Jim Crow laws, formally enshrined & codified White Supremacy, which had the sole goal of keeping FBAs down and preventing them from getting their money up. This included preventing the quality education of FBAs, preventing (Continued)
FBAs from getting mortgages or insurance loans with the overall goal of keeping them out of certain areas (red lining) and, as I mentioned earlier, state-sanctioned lynchings. Another important aspect was FBAs being denied benefits that were awarded to White Americans (Continued)
such as being de facto excluded from reaping the benefits of the GI Bill for World War Two veterans. Despite serving their country bravely, FBAs were denied the same benefits their White comrades received. This epitomizes the extreme injustices incurred against FBAs.
One might say, "Well, I agree with this, but it would be impossible to pay for it without having a massive hike in taxes.” This premise, however, is false. Our wars, bases, military aid to our vassals, and secret operations abroad dwarf the costs of reparations to FBAs. [6]
The U.S. gov’t has spent trillions upon trillions in the post-9/11 wars. [7] This isn't including the already existing U.S. military bases abroad, which rack up over a hundred billion dollars annually, adding up to over a trillion dollars for a decade. [8]
You also have the hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars spent on military contractors, with these contractors often overcharging the gov’t. [9] Other examples of reckless spending by the ruling class include developing the COVID mRNA vaccine, spending billions. [10]
We must put America First: cut off foreign aid (including cutting off Ukraine, Israel, & Taiwan), end U.S. presence abroad, end the proxy wars, and cut the post-9/11 bloated military budget. And with trillions now freed up, we can easily begin a reparations program of (Continued)
direct cash payments to FBAs through a new Freedmen's Bureau. This isn’t just about correcting an injustice; it is an expression of American patriotism towards those who helped build the USA and worked hard in this great country.
If you don’t believe it’s patriotic, don’t take my word for it; take American patriot and founding father Thomas Paine’s word, who proposed repairing the injuries caused by 'the wickedness of the slave trade’:
Economic justice must be established in America. The ruling class in America will always oppose reparations so this ruling class must be done away with, as they will never back justice for Americans and instead send our money to Israel and Ukraine.
I will end this thread with a great quote from St. Thomas Aquinas on the unlawfulness of denying compensation for work done and we all know this is the case with FBAs:
Sources [1] [41655] IIª-IIae q. 62 a. 2 s. c. [2] [41618] IIª-IIae q. 61 a. 1 ad 4 [3] [41685] IIª-IIae q. 62 a. 5 ad 3 [4] [41912] IIª-IIae q. 66 a. 8 co. [5] [41709] IIª-IIae q. 62 a. 8 ad 1
[6] “$300 million dollars per day, every day, for two decades [in Afghanistan]” https://t.co/mCtH3MeLkL [7] Estimate of U.S. Post-9/11 War Spending, in $ Billions FY2001-2022, https://t.co/mBfJcLdVbo Estimated “$8 trillion total”
[8] Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World
