What Are Reparations?
Reparations, as a concept, are a known and commonly used element of law and justice. It is restitution for losses or damages from the aggressor to the aggrieved, including the loss of opportunity. Reparations are not limited to a given timeframe. Nor is it limited to the specific persons that have been harmed. Liability, loss, and damage are passed on to the following generations just as assets are inherited.
Much like assets, the absence of wealth, property, and opportunity are also compounded over subsequent generations. The lack of assets also negatively impacts the social, political, and economic influence a given group. Without intensive policy intervention, this generational spiral always ends in complete collapse.
In international law, reparations are used to compensate communities, families, and other groups that were victims of atrocities and their descendants. Restitution, compensation, recompense, and restorative justice are terms that are often used interchangeably with reparations.
Reparations can take many forms. They can be cash payments, truth, and reconciliation, public apology, land, grants, etc. They can come as a result of an official commission, court case, or through intentional legislation. It can also be in the form of a voluntary offering. However, reparations must commiserate with what was lost and acceptable to the aggrieved party.
Age of Responsibility
The American Descendents of Slavery exists in this country as a result of the legal and codified institution of Slavery in the colonies and later the United States. The mass trafficking, forced servitude, and brutal repression of peoples from the African continent was a system created through a very deliberate legislative process that these people did not influence. They were victims in the most real sense of the word.
The fact that people with Black skin sold slaves into this machine and a minuscule amount of dark-hued people owned slaves had little to no impact on the existence of this system. These people became the indispensable beasts of burden in building the foundation of the richest, most powerful nation in human history. All while being in the belly of the cruelest form of slavery the world had ever seen.