Unpaid Debt=Anger – Think Piece

African American culture is a wondrous, life-saving, reactionary construction to slavery and discrimination. African American culture is forged in the “manifest destiny,” “chosen people” expression of cultural oppression; that is from where black cultural intensity arises including the prophetic tradition of the Black Church. Black culture offers black mental survival. It is different from the majority European American culture. African American culture has deep, dark roots with certain African tribal cultures that squeeze out Gospel, Blues, Jazz, and what Aimé Césaire called Negritude, pushed up through the weight of this amalgamation of European culture that is falsely called “normal” American culture. Despite the constraints, Blacks excel in all arenas; truth be told. It is, however, in those cultural spaces where the cost of entry is low, the rules are relatively clear, and without bias – such as in some sports fields – that blacks focus and excel in great numbers.

Blacks say that balanced books and forgiveness are available with reparations (repair) and change. Justice is more than an apology (which has not been forth coming except from a tiny number of U.S. institutions). We are told by Biblical sources that redemption is only achievable through actual change. Once it is agreed that The Debt is owed, the other questions of to whom, how, and from where resources for repair and recompense are gathered, properly comes to the fore. Jumping to these questions first is like going to the sentencing trial prior to the completion of the convicting trial; this tends to retard the whole process of resolution. The Debt accumulation crime must also be adjudicated in a restorative justice context rather than in a retributive justice context. This is not about vengeance. This is about repairing and building community. If we are to be one nation, one family, then the actions we take, based upon agreement on The Debt, must be to repair all our weakened and broken parts.

[i] The Civil War was about the balance of power between white males in the North and white males in the South – read the actual language of the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s response to Horace Greeley on this question. The Emancipation Proclamation does not put an end to slavery everywhere – not even everywhere in the South. It only frees slaves in those parts of the South where the Union army was fighting. It leaves the slave system intact in those parts of the South that were not fighting. Neither does the 13th Amendment end all slavery; it allows for legal slavery in prisons.