No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the plundering of blacks in America for several centuries. Maybe this figure is so big that one cannot imagine it, let alone calculate and spend it. But I think that the public struggle on these issues is as important as – if not more so – the specific answers that could be produced. An America that demands what it owes to its most vulnerable citizens is better and humane. An America that looked the other way ignores not only the sins of the past, but also the sins of the present and the specific sins of the future. More important than any check cut to every African-American, the payment of reparations for America`s maturation of the myth of childhood would represent its innocence in a wisdom worthy of its founders. A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature wrote a report confirming that the insurrection, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had taken place. But the complaint finally failed, in 2004. Similar lawsuits against companies such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founders they owned) have also failed so far.
These results are disheartening, but the crime by which reparation activists blame the country involves more than a few cities or businesses. The crime blames the American people themselves, at every level and in almost every configuration. A crime involving the entire American people deserves to be heard in the legislative body it represents. I wasn`t even thinking about purgatory.