The ongoing “state violence” of police officers gunning down unarmed black males has created a “human rights crisis.” It’s part of America’s legacy of “racial terrorism,” according to a United Nations panel.
The panel decided that the United States government owes reparations to its black population.
The panel failed to explain why hordes of blacks haven’t fled white oppression to the continental safe space called Africa.
• The truth is: Black Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than any black population group anywhere on earth. And they always have.
If, in fact, blacks are owed reparations (they are not), we could contend that reparations have already been paid in the form of advanced healthcare. The global population explosion experienced by blacks is the direct result of Western healthcare technologies.
They literally owe their lives to white people.
American technology, for example, can be attributed for the effective eradication of the Ebola virus in Africa. Likewise, countless thousands of Africans in America suffer from hypertension (high blood pressure) and are the beneficiaries of American healthcare technologies. American blacks also suffer disproportionately from diabetes. Again, they can thank American healthcare technologies and the two white Canadian physicians who discovered how to control diabetes through insulin injections.
The above doesn’t even scratch the surface.
• Even during America’s slave era, black Americans enjoyed a standard of living that far exceeded their African cousins. Owners — many of whom were black — were prohibited by law from beating their slaves and were required to provide them with suitable food, shelter, and healthcare.
About 90 percent of blacks brought to America as slaves were purchased from black slave owners in Africa. That is, they weren’t captured by white slave traders. Rather, they were purchased from black slave owners.
According to black historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
• Black-owned slaves in Africa lived a horrendous existence. Being sold to slavery in North America was akin to winning the lottery. Compared to slavery in Africa, slavery in America could best be described as adoption.
• The UN panel cited America’s history of lynching as an example of “racial terrorism.” In reality about one-third of all lynching victims were white. Nearly all lynching victims were guilty of committing brutal crimes, such as raping and murdering children. Granted, they deserved a fair trial; but the narrative that whites frequently lynched random blacks for intimidation is not born out in historical records.
There were 4,743 victims of lynching between 1882 and 1968. 1,297 were white. 3,446 were black. That’s about 42 black lynching victims per year.
By comparison, there were nearly 6,000 black Americans killed by other blacks in 2015 alone. For every black criminal lynched during the lynching era, there are an estimated 143 blacks murdered by other blacks when comparing annual statistics.
• Reparations also encompasses the challenge of identifying persons eligible to receive payment. Many Americans who are phenotypically white are actually bi-racial. That is, they have trace black African ancestry. Likewise, nearly all black Americans have white ancestors. Do they owe themselves reparations?
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