The idea is said to have originated in January 1865 with General William Sherman’s Order #15. That order called for the release to newly freed slaves of land along the eastern coastline from Charleston, S.C., to the St. John’s River, south of Jacksonville, Fla. By June of that same year, 40,000 former slaves occupied almost 400,000 acres of land known as the Sherman Reservation. The land later was reclaimed and reissued to pardoned Confederates.

Since those early days immediately following the end of slavery, there has been little attempt by the United States government or by religious institutions to make amends for the horrors and inhumanity of the enslavement of an entire race of people. In fact, the present living conditions of many African Americans, when compared with the rest of the world, causes a number of white people to ask, “Why reparations?”

As one of the descendents of African slaves, I can bear witness that the call for some sort of restitution continues because we still live in a society where the residual negative effects of slavery are a reality.

A June 17th New York Times’ article by Paul Van Zeilbauer documents one of the latest evidences of slavery’s residual effect. Zeilbauer quotes statistics from a study conducted by Princeton sociology professors Devah Pager and Bruce Western. Their study of the effects of race on job searches by ex-offenders also uncovers data on racial discrimination against African-American men who have no criminal record, no brush with the law. The unanticipated data reveals that white men with prison records receive more than twice as many entry-level job offers in cosmopolitan New York than black men who never have been arrested.

The system of slavery from which this legacy of racial discrimination flows is based on the forced uncompensated labor of kidnapped Africans, which led to untold riches and privileges for American whites while denying equal access to employment, housing, education and a host of other opportunities to those same Africans and their descendents.

The fact that our entire American economy is fueled by the residual effects of the enslavement of a race of people who were stolen, shipped like cargo against their will, inspected and paraded unclothed before crowds, then branded like cattle before being sold into forced labor, is an abomination and should, by its very nature, elicit an apology at the very least. Yet a 2002 New York Village Voice article found that 62 percent of white people polled in a survey on reparations say no apology for slavery is due  even though 67 percent of those same people acknowledged that there is continued discrimination against blacks.

I find it curious that, in this age of technological advancements, few people have trouble sympathizing with someone who has been the victim of identity theft. It is not much of a stretch to imagine what it would feel like to be unable to prove who you are, to dispute unfair charges to your bank account or to be denied access to your own Social Security number.

But there seems to be profound difficulty on the part of these same sympathizers to imagine what it would be like for someone to have his or her cultural identity, language, dignity and security stolen. In the case of the former, everyone wants to see the law restore a sense of well-being. In the latter case, few want to entertain the thought of restitution.

In his book Amazing Grace, Jonathan Kozol relates a story of racial inequality in New York that can be traced back to the days following emancipation, when “Black Codes” were established. They are the same codes that led to legal segregation, Jim Crow washrooms and today’s racial profiling and de facto segregation.

The story is of a $150 million enterprise that produced what Kozol refers to as “ a dazzling new elite public school known as Stuyvesant High, to which admission is gained by passing highly competitive tests.” The school is “ten stories high with 12 science labs, five gymnasiums, an Olympic swimming pool, a theater, a rooftop satellite, desks that collect data for meteorlogic computation, 450 IBM and McIntosh computers, a two-story library with 40,000 books and a penthouse cafeteria with a river view …”

“We deserve it,” Kozol quotes a 17-year-old Stuyvesant student saying of his school. The student’s claim is a prime example of the sense of privilege and entitlement white Americans take for granted.

On the surface, qualifications used for students to gain entrance into Stuyvesant High might tempt a person to think the so-called competitive testing is an equitable way of choosing prospective students. But anyone willing to scratch beneath the surface will find that a good number of the Stuyvesant students come from schools like Public School 6 on the fashionable East Side, where state-of-the-art equipment is in abundance, while the majority black and Latino city children are warehoused in windowless abandoned buildings like one in the South Bronx, once used as a skating rink.  Its graduates are more likely to attend high schools like William H. Taft than elite Stuyvesant High.

Taft is a high school where one student expressed feelings very different from the Stuyvesant’s youngster’s sense of entitlement. The Taft student used self-deprecating sarcasm to describe the meaning of the initials T-A-F-T, indicating that in certain eyes they stand for “Training Animals For Tomorrow.”

His statement reminds me of what Chief Justice Earl Warren said in his remarks following the 1954 Supreme court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education. Speaking for the majority, Warren said, “To separate [black children] from others of similar age … solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

Personally, I do not believe any amount of money can restore the damage done by the destruction of lives and theft of culture experienced by my ancestors or the denial of opportunity and privilege experienced by today’s black youth. And I believe some form of restitution must be made to repair the breach created by slavery, segregation and today’s glass ceilings and redlinings. I believe an apology must be made so that black children who are warehoused in abandoned, windowless skating rinks and those at schools like Taft High can experience the same pride that Stuyvesant students feel; so that no further damage is done to their hearts and minds.

The U.S. government and religious institutions have benefited from a system that left 60 million Africans at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage and hundreds of thousands more dead from overwork in fields and from beatings and lynching.

I believe the church should admit its complicity in the system of slavery and acknowledge that that system created the spiritual and societal dehumanization of blacks and whites alike; that it afforded the whites privileges that continue to perpetuate systemic racism as well as individual racist acts. I believe there is a link between yesterday’s institutional slavery and today’s diminished status of African Americans and that the U.S. government and the institutional church are aware of that fact.

I believe an apology for the conditions that created that diminution of status is warranted, whether the people issuing the apology are personally responsible for the original condition or not. I believe a tangible form of restitution must be made, beginning with serious affirmative-action programs that benefit African Americans and that set measurable goals.

Psychologists tell us that any steps toward reconciliation, whether between spouses, siblings, friends, communities or nations, call for a series of steps that begin with remorse and move to acknowledgement/confession, apology/repentance and restoration and amends. Each is a step that must be taken with regard to reparations before we arrive at a point of reconciliation. If the church cannot lead the way, we fail ourselves, our children, our nation and our faith.

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