Last week a “black activist” filed suit against a number of top U.S. companies in what Reuters said “may be the harbinger of further legal moves in the campaign by some of the country’s nearly 40 million blacks to be compensated for the suffering of their ancestors at the hands of slaveholders.”
Among the companies named in the suit were Aetna Inc., the CSX Corp. and FleetBoston Financial Corp. The class-action suit, Reuters said, claims that “over eight million Africans and their descendants were enslaved from 1619 to 1865, many brought to the Americas to work as slaves on tobacco farms, cotton and sugar plantations.”
The suit called the institution of slavery “an immoral and inhumane deprivation of Africans’ lives, liberty, African citizenship rights and cultural heritage … and further deprived them of the fruits of their own labor.”
There’s no question that black slavery was “immoral and inhumane” – as all slavery throughout time has been – but that’s about the extent of the factuality contained in this case. Nevertheless, before it moves another inch and before America wastes one more breath debating it, I think I have a settlement offer that will work.
It’s a solution that will rectify the “deprivation” claimed by angry African descendants, as well as the “citizenship rights and cultural heritage” claims made by activist Deadria Farmer-Paellmann in her suit – which was, ironically, filed against companies that weren’t even around when slavery was legal.
The solution? Taxpayers should support a U.S. government resolution that offers each African-American who seeks reunification with the Motherland a one-way ticket to the African paradise of his or her choice. The government should make its first offer to Ms. Farmer-Paellmann; after all, money can’t fix the generational loss she claims to have suffered, so relocation to Africa can be the only meaningful result.
What – no takers? Maybe that’s because the “solution” I proposed is as outlandish as “suing” this generation of Americans for the creation and maintenance of an institution they had nothing to do with.
There could be another reason. Like most American whites who don’t “long” to return to Europe, most American blacks are perfectly satisfied with, well, being “Americans.”
They don’t need the “activists” like Farmer-Paellmann speaking for them. Indeed, millions of blacks no doubt feel she doesn’t speak for them, even though she claims to be suing on their “behalf.”
Did you ever wonder why is it that a person’s race and ethnicity only seem to make a difference to a few people who, oddly, are usually trying to exploit it for personal gain and recognition?
And why is it that such activists are usually trying to find a way to solidify our differences instead of accentuate, compliment and promote our commonalities?
Opposing slavery is a colorblind issue. Besides, most every American has some distant cousin who was enslaved by someone.
Maybe that’s why such mundane qualities as the color of skin or ethnic background don’t make any difference to most Americans, especially since we’re too busy trying to find a way to earn a living and get along with our neighbors instead of inventing reasons to hate them.
Furthermore, it is absurd for Farmer-Paellmann to speak of “deprivation” in today’s America. There is more wealth in our country now than at any other time in our history. And because of our largely colorblind justice system and society, literally anyone and everyone who wants to put forth the effort to earn some of that wealth can do so.
Does today’s equality justify the enslavement of Africans 200 years ago? No more than it justified the enslavement of conquered European whites of old or Jews by the Egyptians – or the enslavement of blacks by blacks in Africa today (where are you, Jesse Jackson?). Institutionalized slavery in any time and by any nation is wrong and galling. It is as much an injustice as attempting to punish people several generations removed from it.
Farmer-Paellmann should either take the airline ticket or find something else to do with her spare time besides inciting more racial hostility. In a nation as diverse as ours, we can’t afford to hate each other simply because of skin color, ethnic background, or an “activist’s” perceived injustice.
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