Reparations for those upon whom U.S. has trod

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic magazine is leading the most pertinent conversation about race and the need for slavery reparations. We shouldn’t question whether he is right or wrong, we should question whether we are dreaming big enough.

What kind of reparations will help us to escape America’s exploitative past? Reparations is larger than any singular domestic issue; the United States has seized and ruined hundreds of thousands of lives across both space and time.

The period spanning the late 19th and early 20th century is a study of global plunder. Conceptions of white superiority drove 1890s debates concerning the possible annexation of Pacific territories such as the Philippines and Hawaii. Imperialists and anti-imperialists alike worried that non-whites might corrupt American racial purity by allowing Pacific peoples to be eligible for American citizenship.

In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party argued that the imperial tradition had a hold on a “black colony” within U.S. borders. It demanded reparations that kept their families alive, safe and allowed for equal opportunity: “bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” Even one of the most celebrated pieces of legislation, the G.I. Bill, allowed for Jim Crow laws to discriminate between black and white veterans.

We can also see the damage that American foreign policy had on people around the world.

Immediately following the acquisition of Cuba during the Spanish-American War, the United States established a naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Historian Jana Lipman writes that it became a source of U.S. neocolonialism as the privatization of the base searched for the cheapest form of labor by first employing non-Cubans.

How do we compensate those Cubans, Asians, Africans and Mexicans who were exploited by such bending of international law? This says nothing of the reparations owed to unlawfully held prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center established in 2002. When you uproot someone’s life for decades at a time, should those declared innocent not be compensated for their displacement, unemployment or imprisonment?

What form of payment can we make to families shattered during the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq and the current war on ISIL?

Who is compensated when U.S. strategy allows for “avoidable human error” that results in the destruction of hospitals and the deaths of patients and humanitarians? How can we financially replace the damage inflicted on those who experienced U.S. intervention in the Russia, Lebanon, Somalia, Yugoslavia civil wars? Are our pockets deep enough to make amends to those tortured by more than 50 U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes during the Cold War?

In 1988, we paid out only $20,000 each to the 100,000 Japanese who were held in WWII American internment camps and, still, memory haunts those whose families were destroyed.

The U.S. has a dark history whose triumphalist narrative hinges on the exploitation of Native Americans who abandoned their lives to escape death from plague and war; Africans and African-Americans who lived and died in slavery; non-whites who suffered from discriminatory housing policies; immigrants who were and are barred access to this nation because of their homeland, skin color and religion; homosexuals whose lives were destroyed during paranoid witch hunts; women whose success remains underappreciated and undercompensated; and those whose homes were taken by reckless banking practices.

We have to decide whether lives altered by America’s preponderance of power deserve financial reparations or if progressive legislation can improve the lives affected by U.S. policies. Can legislation permanently right discriminatory practices across the board, should we put political leaders on trial for human rights violations, or is it enough for the government to pay off its debts through restitution?

That larger question may be related to what improves our moral psyche, soothes our national consciousness and redeems our tarnished past.

If, as Coates so rightly argues, reparations must begin with creativity, should impact those who are currently alive, and begin with a plan, then those engaged in this conversation have to consider the cumulative wrongdoing of the past and present on all peoples.

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 1:31 PM with the headline "Reparations for those upon whom U.S. has trod."