The virtually-inevitable subject Jabulani Leffall maybe needs to cover

I heard that today Jabulani Leffall is having a show on "A look at race in American Sport" on his show "Central Standard on KCUR asking "what is the role of race in sport?" with author and Professor of English Thabiti Lewis.

Good for him.  I'm sure it will be a good show.  If I weren't working at the office, I'd listen in.

But having seen a recent documentary on Pierce City, Missouri, a small town outside of Springfield, and Harrisonville, Arkansas and both of those towns racial situations in the last century, it made me think about African-Americans request for reparations here in the US.

First, a definition:  In jurisprudence, reparation is replenishment of a previously inflicted loss by the criminal to the victim.

Of course, we gave reparations to the Japanese who were interred during World War II.  (Interred:  a nice word for rounded up and imprisoned, involuntarily) and countries have been giving reparations to other countries going way back, from the loser of a war, for instance, to the winner.

So when I saw this TV program last week and once again saw how horribly Americans treated these other Americans, WAY after the Civil War--1901, to be exact, for the Pierce City incident where the white people just stood up and started shooting their guns at the Black people's homes so the Black people all left the area, it made me think.

There was that one isolated incident.  And then there was the much broader situation of all the slave's situations after the Civil War when "Reconstruction" was used against them and the new president after Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, was such a hateful old racist in the White House and the list goes on and on of transgressions made by Whites against African-Americans (or Blacks, if that's how you want to say it).

The author Douglas A. Blackmon wrote what is supposed to be a fantastic book on the horrors perpetrated by this country and the people in it on African-Americans when he penned "Slavery by Another Name:  The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II".  

In it, Mr. Blackmon apparently tells of many, many situations where Blacks were discriminated against decidedly and even repeatedly in the US and for decades after the Civil War, frequently with the imprimatur of our own laws and courts.  (The book is being made into a PBS documentary, too, so watch for that in time to come).

From Mr. Blackmon's book:

  In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.


More:


Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.

Finally, at least for these examples here, today,  there are the widely-known cases of discrimination which have been proven to have occurred in the US Department of Agriculture, where the department ruled against Black farmers and in some instances, took their farms from them.

So where am I headed with this?

First, with all this information and evidence, doesn't it seem odd that so many White people--and others, too, certainly--have such deep-seated hostility towards Blacks and African-Americans and what they refer to as their "culture" in this country when we--the US--have been so instrumental in what was done to them, in creating their situations?  Maybe if we hadn't put them in servitude and taken their lands away and lynched them and held them down and used our lending institutions against them with higher, tougher interest rates (because that happened, too, don't doubt it), etc., etc., maybe they wouldn't, so many of them, be poor?

Second and finally, maybe the US DOES, in fact owe reparations to African-Americans?

Anyway, it seems like an excellent program Mr. Leffall maybe ought to have on his show one day with two excellent "pro" and "con" guests who could and would calmly and intelligently debate the subject.

I'm not saying or suggesting Mr. Leffall's program "Central Standard" is or should be exclusively about Black or African-American issues, either, by any means.  It just seems this would be an excellent and timely topic for him and his show.

Food for thought.

Enjoy your day, y'all.

(Oh, and if you have the stomach for it, you might read this excerpt from Mr. Blackmon's book:  http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/the-book/excerpt/.  It's an excellent and surprising, brief read.)

As one last note, too, associated with this, I have to say that the coming special on PBS that I mention here, above, on Mr. Blackmon's book will, no doubt, be yet one more reason wealthy white people, "Conservatives", Republicans and Corporate America want to de-fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), PBS and NPR.  It's just too much ugly, inconvenient truth for these people.

Links:  http://www.kcur.org/centralstandard.html#Thursday
http://www.kcur.org/
http://namethatshow.wordpress.com/about/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_reparation
http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/