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Charles Geshekter has a point, of course, but alas, how can we be sure that his ancestors - before immigrating to the U.S. - had not accumulated bad karma by enslaving Siberians? (see below) Of course your "Slav" (or German?) ancestors were enslaved by the Ottomans and others, and so you may have a claim to reparations as well. The same goes for my anti-slavery Quaker ancestors of course. They may have accumulated a bit of good karma, but some of their ancestors were undoubtedly involved in dastardly deeds that left them with bad karma. Their ancestors may well have been slave-trading Vikings. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 13: Iinstructions received from the Siberian Chancellery in Moscow regarding local populations in Siberia:: The serving and trading men should be ordered to bring under the sovereign’s exalted hand the non-tribute paying Yukagir and Tungus and diverse foreigners of various tongues who live on those and other rivers in new and hostile lands. And the iasak [tribute] of the sovereign should be taken with kindness, not with cruelty, and the people of those lands should be placed, from now on, under the tsar’s exalted hand in direct slavery (v priamon kholopsteve) as iasak people for ever and ever. [N.S. Orlova, ed., Otkrytiya ruskikh … (Moscow: 1951), 236-37, trans. in Yuri Slezkine Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 13. The point about "imagined" communities is an important one too. Just as Africanists have pointed out that it is not accurate to think of African ethnic groups as fixed, static, or exclusive entities, it is misleading to think of the "United States" or "Americans" as composed of people who have some common responsibility for the slave trade. As has been pointed out, a good proportion of Americans are themselves ancestors of slaves, and many are also Hispanics and immigrants from all over the place, and this growing group of "Americans" ultimately rejected the views of the minority who purchased and exploited slaves, and even eventually (albeit very slowly) instituted laws against various forms of discrimination (which did not of course eliminate discrimination but began to turn the tide), and eventually voted for a "person of color" for president. I cannot tell you how many times African friends of mine argued with me - before his election - that Obama had no chance of winning the presidency, because of American racism, because "Americans are not ready for a black president," and so on. When I told an African notable in Cameroon that I was married to an African woman, he asked if that did not make my life very difficult in the United States, because of racism, when in fact it is no problem at all. I live in a neighborhood where "light-skinned" and "dark-skinned" people live side by side, and no one cares at all about the shade of color of the person one marries. Africanists often talk about the negative image of Africa -and of course there is much truth to this - but "America" is also still imagined by many foreigners to be far different than it generally is. Some have argued that talk of reparations is important because it reminds the richer nations that they need to do something to help implement "distributive justice" or whatever one might want to call it, but in Cameroon I was surprised to learn that there were no USAID projects because of the theft of funds by those running such projects in the past. This of course discourages attempts to fund development projects and it also contributes to the "imbalances" which are at the core of this discussion. Who are most responsible for the current "imbalances" within Africa? What has happened to Nigeria's oil revenues? Has it been used to the benefit of the whole population to try to overcome "imbalances" within Africa? As for the slave trade, it was pointed out that North Africa has been involved in the slave trade for a long time, and so have the Sudanic states (Niger, Mali, Chad, Sudan, etc.), and the Sokoto Calphate in Nigeria alone had a huge number of slaves, and so yes, what "Africa" are those arguing for reparations imagining? In fact almost all parts of Africa had an internal as well as an external slave trade in the past, and how can anyone disregard or play down this fact? And it has been asked, who exactly would receive the reparation payments, and how? It seems clear why there is so much skepticism about the claim for reparations. If there is any group who has the best claim for reparations (and I am not saying that it is practical) then it is women, who have not only been suffered incredibly in the past but continue to suffer discrimination and to be treated like virtual slaves in many parts of the world. And what about the forced labor of children on plantations in Africa today? Should we not be focusing on ending the obviously continuing mistreatment of women and children, in particular, now, rather than trying to figure out who should be paying reparations for the slave trade which so many Africans and others fought to bring to an end? The discussion may be fruitful, but what about current problems?
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