Getting To Reparations: A 21st Century Reparations Manifesto

Getting to Reparations:

The 21^st Century Reparations Manifesto of People of AfrikanDescent in America

The Full and Comprehensive Reparations Approach as Determined by the International Court of Justice, the International Law Commission, and Other International Law Guidelines –

 America Fulfilling the Obligation To Make Full Reparation*

Submitted by Kamm Howard, N’COBRA-Chicago Chapter 2014

*This Manifesto was inspired by the reading of the chapter “Reparations Now!!! Reparations How?” in Slavery Reparations Time is Now, by international law professor Nora Wittmann, PhD.

In 1969, James Forman interrupted the Sunday morning worship service at New York’s Riverside Church, one of the leading churches of New York’s wealthy elite, delivered the Black Manifesto, demanding $500,000,000 in reparations from White Christian Churches and Jewish Synagogues.  These institutions, he asserted, were “part and parcel” of the “system” and that they “aided and abetted” the exploitation and degradation of African people. The Black Manifesto began:

“We the Black people assembled in Detroit, Michigan, for the National Black Economic Development Conference are fully aware that we have been forced to come together because racist white America has exploited our resources, our minds, our bodies our labor. For centuries we have been forced to live as colonized people inside the United States, victimized by the most vicious, racist system in the world.  We have helped to build the most industrial country in the world.”[i]

Today there is a need for a new Black Manifesto – a new reparations manifesto, declaring the comprehensive nature that reparations must take to address the humanicide inflicted on people of African descent in America.

Humanicide

Hunter H. Adams introduces the term humanicide as the only term large enough to frame what actually happened to us a people. 

After critiquing the use of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Maafa (Ani), Maangamizi – the African Holocaust (Karenga),  the Black Chattelization Wars (Chinwiezu) , genocide (Lemkin),  ethnocide (Charny), and a few others, he quotes , Pieter Drost’s THE CRIME OF THE STATE: HUMANICIDE (1959),

“Humanicide is the “natural” crime against human existence in a civilized society”[ii]

Adams goes on to say:

Humanicide transcends Lemkin’s original intent of the meaning of genocide, extend Charny’s five categories of ethnocide. Humanicide reveals the fractal nature of the continuum of the Trans-Atlantic “Slavery” to the public policy-based discrimination today – the deeper we probe, the more complexity we discover. It Humanicide is not the equivalent to racism, discrimination or Apartheid – it encompasses and eclipses them.

It outlines how the process of killing of a people’s or person’s identity, culture, history, language, religion, socialization and family relations occurred. It considers punitive killing’s, including those colonized, to enforce compliance with the odiously oppressive system. [iii]

Finally Adams calmly and clearly concludes that what took and is continuing to take place is

… a singularity of subjugation – never before inhuman history has an equivalent system of exploitation occurred so comprehensive it resulted in “complete defeat” – the denial of a people’s ability to survive on their own terms, loss of control of their children’s custody and socialization, and ultimately, loss of control of their future. [iv]

International Law Context

In structuring the format of the Reparations Manifesto of People of African Descent in America, we look to the international law as its foundation.

The Permanent Court of International Justice laid out the “general and foundational rule” for reparations in the Chorzow Factory Case of 1928. In that ruling, which is still controlling law, the Court held “that reparation must, as far as possible, wipe out all consequences of the illegal act and re-establish the situation which would, in all probability, have existed if that act had not been committed.”[v]

The extent of “all consequences” was fleshed out as full reparation in the International Law Commission (2001) Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for International Wrongful Act.  In Article 31.  “… the responsible state is under an obligation to make full reparation for the injury caused by the internationally wrongful act.” [vi][Emphasis added]

The International Law Commission (ILC) and other established international guidelines lay out what is considered full and comprehensive reparation. These include:

1. Cessation, Assurances and Guarantees of Non-Repetition (ILC Art. 30)
2. Restitution and Repatriation (ILC Art. 35)
3. Compensation (ILC Art. 36)
4. Satisfaction
5. Rehabilitation[vii]

Cessation, Assurances and Guarantees of Non-Repetition

Under international law, a state responsible for wrongfully injuring a people  “is under an obligation to a) “cease the act if it is continuing, and, b) offer appropriate assurances and guarantees of non-repetition…” This means that cessation is the first act and requirement toward reparation.

Therefore, first and foremost, as reparations enforcers, we demand the cessation of ongoing injury against our nation, this includes, but is not limited to:

1. The immediate release of all New Afrikan freedom fighters, commonly referred to as political prisoners, who are currently criminally held in this nation’s prisons.
2. Removal of the occupying police force in our communities to the same per capital ratio as that of police in the majority-ethnic community.
3. Removal of all majority-ethnic teachers from the schools that are predominantly New Afrikan to the same per capita ratio as New Afrikan teachers in schools which are predominantly majority-ethnic.
4. Moratorium on any new business license of any non- New Afrikan within a predominantly New Afrikan community, unless a petition of 10,000 signatures of New Afrikans in the community accompany application of business license.
5. Cease all targeting for punishment, via censure, imprisonment, bad-jacketing, assassination, and other COINTEPRO-like conduct of legitimate New Afrikan individuals, leaders, groups and organizations.
6. Cease all targeting for reward, via promotions, contracts, positions of political leadership, conferring of spokesman or leadership mantels, and other Willie Lynch-style rewards of anti-Black New Afrikan individuals, groups or organizations.
7. Delegitimize, cease funding, repeal, and/or and halt all social, cultural and political policies that have a theoretical foundation that blames the New Afrikan for suffering from the injury of the crimes against their humanity, i.e. blaming the injured party for not having the wherewithal to heal him/herself from multi-generational inherited and ongoing injury.
8. Enact legislation that assures an elected school board in every community that has at minimum 25% New Afrikan enrollment.
9. Enact legislation that creates a civilian police accountability commission in every municipality that has at least 25% New Afrikan residents.

Restitution and Repatriation

Restitution – “re-establish the situation which existed before the wrongful act was committed”. Changes … traced to the wrongful act and can be reversed… often completed by compensation.  To restore the victim to the original situation before gross violations of international law occurred. How Includes restoration of freedom, recognition of humanity, identity, culture, repatriation, livelihood and wealth.[viii]

Restitution must attempt to wipe out all consequences of the illegal act.

1. Fund all programs, projects, systems, institutions, media, measures, etc. that has its objective or returning the Afrikan mind to the New Afrikan, i.e., cultivate a healthy Afrikan self-image and identity.
2. Ensure that true world history, in particular, African history is taught Afrocentrically in all schools.
3. Provide DNA testing to all who desire to know what African ethnic group they descended from.
4. Provide genealogy research to all New Afrikans desiring to know where there American roots lie.
5. Return all stolen and ill-gotten land, or its equivalent to Africans who were deprived from their land via the colonization of America- African nations that were here prior to the colonial expansion or that established self-governing territories- Washitaw, Seminoles, Guhla- Geechie, etc.
6.  Return all stolen and ill-gotten land, or its equivalent to Africans who were deprived from their land post-enslavement.
7. Provide full means for all New Afrikans desiring to return to Mother Africa.
8. Provide restitution for all patents stolen or abrogated during and after enslavement from New Afrikans by their majority ethnic enslavers or “bosses” to known descendants where claims were made.
9. Provide restitution for all artistic creations that were stolen or abrogated during and after enslavement from New Afrikans by their majority ethnic enslavers, bosses, agents, handlers, etc., to them or their descendants where claims were made.
10. Provide restitution for all land and property abrogated or destroyed during acts of banishment of New Afrikans by majority-ethnic communities – like Tulsa Oklahoma.
11. Provide compensation to all New Afrikans and/or their ancestors who were criminally injured in the name of research.
12. Return all lost equity to New Afrikans who were criminally injured via predatory lending.   

Compensation

The injuring State is obligated to compensate for the damage, if damage is not made good by restitution.  Compensation is “any financially assessable damage suffered…” Proper compensation is such that is “appropriate and proportional to the gravity of the violation and circumstances.”[ix] The violations of which this Manifesto addresses can be summed up in the term “humanicide” – as described earlier.    It includes the taking of life, identity, spirit and humanity, and theft of labor, theft of children, theft of wives, theft of husbands, theft of men in the community and theft of creativity.  

It also includes the mental damages inflicted generationally upon New Afrikans. Collectively the damages resulting from violations are in access of an equivalency of $5 million for every New Afrikan in America or $210 Trillion**. Subtracted from this amount would be all resources that had been directed toward New Afrikans via Restitution and Repatriation, Satisfaction and Rehabilitation. In addition, all injuring parties – the US Federal, State and local governments, injuring corporations, injuring institutions, and individuals who have inherited their ancestors criminally gotten gains – are all required to contribute to this compensation amount.  It is expected to cover multiple generations.

Compensation would be made to one or several reparative funds that would:

1. Establish a Center for Reparative Measures for People of African Descent in America. In part, the Center would solicit, evaluate, select and fund proposals for “special measures,” as spelled out in the Commission for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination General Comment 32 (CERD/C/GC/32). ““Measures” include the full span of legislative, executive, administrative, budgetary and regulatory instruments, at every level in the State apparatus, as well as plans, policies, programs and preferential regimes in areas such as employment, housing, education, culture and participation in public life for disfavored groups, devised and implemented on the basis of such instruments.”(par.13) [x] In other words, national projects aimed a repairing, healing and restoring the damaged humanity of the New Afrikan population in America.
2. Establish new entities called Community Reparation Corporations that would administer the special measures approved by the Center that would do the following:
3. Provide business training and business loans for micro-enterprises and retail operations.
4. Provide capitalization for micro-enterprise, retail and service related business.
5. Provide capitalization for distribution operations in every major area of product consumption by New Afrikans.
6. Provide capitalization for manufacturing and industrial operations for New Afrikan collective enterprises.
7. Provide grants to the 1,000,000 New Afrikan businesses equivalent to the annual salaries of two full time employees (to be hired) for a minimum of one generation. (Would immediately wipe away unemployment in the New Afrikan community.)
8. Provide education and training on nutrition, food gardening, healthy cooking and exercise to counter the propensity of high blood pressure, strokes and diabetes resulting from past and ongoing criminal injury concerning the New Afrikan diet. (Knowledge was possessed by Africans and many African descendants on food and herbal growth and combining)
9. Provide quarterly health screening and ongoing education on health.
10. Provide grants for any diet related medical condition including operations.
11. Provide capitalization for New Afrikan trauma centers; one per 150,000 New Afrikans
12. Provide African centered parenting training as a part of high-school curriculum
13. Provide training on Afrikan cultural continuity, traditions and norms.
14. Establish and fund Afrikan-centered rites-of-passage training programs
15. Provide community centers where children can safely visualize new futures and acquire the added skills to realize them.
16. Provide pre-release, re-entry, and community incorporation mechanisms for incarcerated New Afrikans.
17. Provide family integration mechanism (pre and post release) for incarcerated New Afrikans
18. Provide training for parents with school-age children geared toward ensuring high educational engagement of the entire family in the child’s matriculation.
19. Provide various counseling modalities in schools geared toward New Afrikans.
20. Provide competitions and awards for New Afrikan team-based academic  achievement and community-building activities
21. Provide STEM Centers per 5000 New Afrikan students
22. Provide scholarships for New Afrikans in the college of their choice for which they are equipped.
23. Liberate HBCU’s from the direction and ownership of the majority-ethnic and compromised New Afrikans.

Satisfaction

Satisfaction is part of full reparation under international law as a “means” for reparations for moral damage, such as emotional injury, mental suffering, and injury to reputation.”[xi]  In some instances where cessation, restitution and compensation do not bring full repair, satisfaction is also needed. Seeing our injury from the frame of humanicide, it is easy to see where the legal notion of satisfaction is greatly needed.

Apology falls under the reparative category of satisfaction.  Apologies under international law have certain characteristics: a) acknowledgement that a legitimate rule was violated, b) full admission of fault and responsibility, c) expression of genuine regret and remorse, d) acknowledgement that there was/is no excuse/justification of the violation, e) a guarantee of non-repetition, and f) a willingness to do whatever it takes to repair the wrong/injury.  Although the Legislative branch of the United Sates government has issued three apologies, several components to the above structure are missing in the US apologies to New Afrikans.

In addition to correcting these attempts at satisfaction, for us, more than an apology is necessary for satisfaction. Additionally, complete satisfaction mandates the restoration of the Afrikan being in areas of humanity, spirituality, intelligence, high culture and civilization, i.e., a complete reversal on the attack on Afrikan dignity.

1. Retire all arguments, statements, etc. that state that because Africans were involved in the slave trade whites have no responsibility.
2. Retire all arguments, statements, etc. that state that chattel enslavement was “legal” (which it was not under international law), therefore, this government have no responsibility.
3. Retire all arguments, statements, etc., that no one is alive who enslaved Africans or who engaged in lynching, or apartheid, etc., therefore, again there is no responsibility or obligation on the current generation. (Under international law, one cannot benefit from a crime against humanity, if they are, then they are also guilty of the criminal wrong. All of white America and its recent immigrants benefit from the crimes against Afrikan humanity in the standard and quality of life and opportunities they enjoy in America. Thus they have a lawful obligation to make reparations.
4. Remove the “disclaimer” from the Senate Apology
5. Act with intense speed and earnestly to “rectify” the harms as stated in the House of Representatives Apology.
6. Cease denying and/or minimizing the crimes of humanicide, and the criminals –all US president, as the crime is ongoing.
7. Acknowledge and propagate that Egypt was populated by Black Africans and all that it produced, built , created, theorized was produced, built, created and theorized by Black Africans.
8. Acknowledge and propagate that the true name of Egypt was Kemet – Land of the Blacks and not the Black Land, and that Europe’s civilizing founders (Greeks and Romans) were taught by Black Africans and not the other way around.
9. Acknowledge and propagate that Africa was more “civilized” and culturally advanced than Europe when Europeans inaugurated the so-called Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade system.
10. Acknowledge and propagate that Africa was under-developed by Europe via the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, slavery, colonialism and apartheid – which is the true cause of Africa’s state today, and that there was little benefit to Africa by European involvement and contact.
11. Acknowledge and create a system to counter and correct the centuries long  and on-going anti-African propaganda and teaching by the universities, religious institutions, and governments that are aimed to justify, diminish, obfuscate, deny, hide and/or excuse the humanicide committed against Afrikan people; a propaganda that stills denies the dignity of people of African descent globally.
12. Acknowledge and create a system to counter and correct the centuries-long and ongoing pro-white propaganda that produces pathological racial tendencies in whites exhibited in the notion of white skin value and privilege, white impunity and immunity when aggressing against New Afrikans, and the failure to see New Afrikans possessing the same humanity as whites.
13. Acknowledge and propagate that the US Government has consistently thwarted the advancement of New Afrikans by repeatedly and systematically imprisoning, exiling, co-opting, assassinating or otherwise destroying the most ablest New Afrikan leadership,  and by extension,  movements.
14. Acknowledge and propagate that the US Government has consistently fomented disunity, antagonism and strife in the New Afrikan community that has created patterned and habitual thought, behavior and emotions that renders the New Afrikan community untrusting, weak, delusional and disunited today.
15. Provide means and apparatus for a plebiscite for New Afrikans to democratically determine their relationship with the American Government, releasing themselves if they so choose from this forced forth class-citizenship imposed upon them by the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution.   

Rehabilitation

Here, Ms. Wittmann infers that rehabilitation consist of mind, emotional and spirit healing. In doing so, she speaks to the lasting effects of the trauma of enslavement and segregation.[xii] We agree. For this healing to take place effectively, the following repair initiatives are dogmatically declared necessary:

1. A national center with satellites in every major city and jurisdiction where a New Afrikan population of 10,000 persons reside focused on research and healing modalities to acknowledge, identify, quantify, counter and correct the processes and damages associated with the process of mentacide (as defined and understood by Dr. Bobby Wright) and the falsification of Afrikan consciousness (as defined by Dr. Amos N. Wilson). The center must begin by recognizing the full component of the “heart, mind and soul damage”
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of  mental bondage as noted by George G. M. James
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of mis-education   as understood and elaborated by Carter G. Woodson
   1.  Specifically understand and address the breath of psychic trauma   as delineated by Sultan and Naima Latif
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of plantation psychosis  as understood by  Na’im Akbar
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of cultural mis-orientation  as defined and detailed by Kobi Kambon
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of  fractured consciousness  as instructed by Wade Nobles
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of post traumatic slave syndrome as described by Joy DeGruy
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of the Black Inferiority Complex as outlined by Tom Burrell
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of injury resulting from the worshiping of a white deity  and how it compounds and exacerbates the above injuries
   1. Specifically understand and address the breath of any other African-centered diagnosis of disturbance of African thought, emotions and spirit resulting from the crimes of enslavement and apartheid.

The debate about reparations being about a check clearly points to the ignorance of the nature and scope of injury to people of Afrikan descent resulting from the humanicide of the Maafa.

As spelled out in this Manifesto, a check to individuals is not what is desired.  Recalling N’COBRA’s definition that reparations is  “the process of repairing, healing and restoring a people who were injured, due to their group identity…,” this Manifesto declares the scope of how that process is to be undertaken.

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[i] Introduced in Detroit, Michigan, on April 26, 1969, the Black Manifesto called on white churches and synagogues to pay $500 million in reparations for black enslavement and continuing oppression. The money would fund projects to benefit blacks, including the establishment of a southern land bank, four television networks, and a black university and called on blacks to bring whatever pressure was necessary to force churches and synagogues to comply. On May 4, 1969, Forman took the pulpit in the middle of services at New York City’s Riverside Church and demanded reparations. Riverside Church was selected because of its connections with the Rockefeller family, viewed as classic white oppressors.

[ii] Adams, Hunter H. 2014. “On Stemming the Tide of 500 Years of Humanicide”, published in , Eternal Year Of African People

[iii] Adams. ibid

[iv] Adams. Ibid

[v] Wittmann, N. 2013. Slavery Reparations Time Is Now. Vienna. Power of the Trinity Publishers

[vi] Wittman. ibid

[vii] Wittman. ibid

[viii] Wittman. ibid

[ix] Wittman. Ibid

[x] United Nations Commission for the Elimination of Racial Discriminations General Recommendation 32 (CERD/C/GC/32) The Meaning and Scope of Special Measures in the  International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms Racial Discrimination  

[xi] Wittmann, N. 2013. Slavery Reparations Time Is Now. Vienna. Power of the Trinity Publishers

[xii] Wittmann. Ibid.