In These Times senior editor Salim Muwakkil:

The national movement to gain reparations for the descendents of enslaved Africans was a fast-rolling bandwagon until slowed by events of 9/11. Well, it’s accelerating again.

In truth, it’s been picking up momentum since Hurricane Katrina blew the cover off this nation’s well-camouflaged race/class divide. The distress revealed in that storm’s wake moved even President George Bush to urge redress of poverty’s racial disparities. He quickly moved past that urge, but the national conversation continues.

As I see it, the question of reparations for racial slavery and Jim Crow apartheid is one of the nation’s most substantive issues. It’s also one of the most disparaged.

Editorials like this one give me solace, and by my estimation they’re getting more frequent. If you’re into emailing or IMimg links to fellow political junkies, be sure to get this one out.

Marse Arse says: “I ain’t nevah heard a payin’ no n––––– fuh no work!”

Michelle & Jesse were not reached for comment.

Here’s a column on reparations for Afro-Americans that’s worth emailing to friends and family. The last two grafs:

Blacks worth $6k; whites $88k
…
African Americans that favor reparations should stop allowing discussions to be guided by perceptions that: 1) reparations are unlikely ever to be awarded; 2) reparations are undeserved by African Americans since all ex-slaves are dead; 3) today’s white Americans have not injured African Americans and should not be required to pay for sins of their forbears; 4) it is impossible to determine who should get what and how much; and 5) African Americans must become self-reliant and determine their own fate and stop waiting for relief from external sources.

Don’t be deceived; opponents of reparations have benefited from a system of white privilege that is imbedded in American society. Let’s stop acceptance of a system of white privileges and Black disadvantages that has accrued advantages for whites for fifteen generations.

Or as Malcolm X, that stalwart of the civil rights movement, put it:

If you are the son of a man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father’s estate, you have to pay off the debts that your father incurred before he died. The only reason that the present generation of white Americans are in a position of economic strength…is because their fathers worked our fathers for over 400 years with no pay…We were sold from plantation to plantation like you sell a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a bushel of wheat…All that money…is what gives the present generation of American whites the ability to walk around the earth with their chest out…like they have some kind of economic ingenuity. Your father isn’t here to pay. My father isn’t here to collect. But I’m here to collect and you’re here to pay.

Do they deliver The Washington Times down in Hell?

MADRID — The Spanish government has approved a divisive bill allowing reparations for victims of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco, one of the darkest chapters of Spain’s modern history.

The bill also bans symbols and references to the 1939-1975 Franco regime in public buildings and asks local governments to rename streets or plazas that are named after the former dictator or allude to his regime.

[Link]

…and crackerdom ensues.

I’m not entirely sure what possessed A la Pundit to cover this, considering the rabid racism of his base audience.

And he doth proclaimeth (with a healthy dose of ye olde verbal irony):

It’ll cure blacks’ sense of grievance and make whites more sympathetic to the injustice of slavery by driving home the economic costs.

I don’t believe the author of this sentence has the capacity to sympathize with the man who couldn’t patronize a store owned and operated by a person who looks like him if he so desired. Granting small bits of humanity such as this to a people oppressed for the good part of 500 years is beyond a dollar amount. Who cares how angry a bunch of racists get?
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