Whenever the world gets too crazy for me, I head down to the
soul food restaurant and seek out my mentor, the great ghetto philosopher,
Cleophus Leroy Brown.
Cleo graciously waived me toward a seat at his usual corner
booth. “What’s on your mind, College
Boy?”
“Everything,” I blurted out.
“”I’m on social media and practically every day someone posts another
instance of black folks either being killed or brutally beaten by police just
for being doing something, if it isn’t anything more than breathing , while black.
Everybody jumped up and down- and rightfully so, I might add, about Freddie
Gray, while more than 180 days after he was murdered by police, Tamir Rice’s
family has gotten no justice, no charges filed, no nothing! They haven’t even been allowed to bury their child.
We just had over 200 bikers involved in a shootout in WACO and the police didn’t
kill anybody! Bikers- almost all of them
white- shooting up a storm and none of the police were “in fear for their lives”
like they were when they killed 12 year old Tamir Rice for playing with a toy gun, and all
the other unarmed black folks. And not once did
I hear the word ‘thug,’
used!” By now, I was on the verge of
requiring oxygen.
“And you want to know what it all means. Right, College Boy?”
“Well, yeah. I mean,
I thought things were supposed to have been getting better. Especially with a black president and all ...”
“And I thought I taught you that exceptions to the rule don’t
negate the rule, they prove it! Just ‘cause
some people get a seat playing musical chairs, that doesn’t mean there’s a seat
for everybody! There are a lot of
lessons that can be learned from what’s goin’ on. But the main message I get out a all of this
is that America aint ready for reparations!”
Wha?”
“You heard me. But before
I break it down for you, College Boy, I want you to tell me what you think
reparations means.”
“It means we are finally going to be compensated for all
those years of enslavement.”
“That’s the very least significant part of reparations. There has to be a monetary component, but
that is just to make a statement of the seriousness of the situation. It should cost a lot, because a lot was
taken. But, more than anything else,
reparations is an apology. It says we
are sorry. And a true apology says
something else. Do you know what that
something else is?”
“I’m really sorry?”
I was truly grasping for straws.
“I means that I regret doing what I did to injure you; that
if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t do that. It means that if my wrongful actions have
defined our relationship, then I will do whatever it takes to redefine our
relationship in a way that is right and just and proper. This represents what is called ‘atonement’ or
‘at-one-ment’ in theological terms. “ Cleo’s look of self satisfaction was so strong
it almost knocked the taste out of my mouth.
But in my heart, I knew he was right.
“Just look at the history. Whenever we tie today’s issues back to
slavery, we get the same tired response. 'That was a long time ago. When
are you going to stop using that as an excuse?' Now If, when slavery was abolished, white America
had said, ‘You know what? We must a lost
our damn minds. We were so wrong. Here’s your forty acres and a mule, and we
are going to do everything, from real education- not just propaganda- to
whatever you might need- to bring you into the fold as fellow American citizens’
- if that had happened then we would have had a clean break and slavery really
would have been quite a while ago. But
instead we were lynched, segregated and denied the vote- even more than a
hundred years after the so-called Emancipation Proclamation. Today’s police departments grew out of the paddy
rollers whose sole purpose was to
police and intimidate slaves.
“To this day, there has never been that clear, clean break
with slavery. Never that admission of
wrongdoing and renegotiating of relationship based on total equality. When unarmed black folks are slaughtered by
the police, it’s just a statement that we aint ready to renegotiate the
relationship. As long as Fox
News scores more than twice the ratings of MSNBC AND CNN combined, we aint ready for
reparations. As long as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh
can make millions of dollars just by spreading stupid racism on the radio, we
aint ready for reparations. And as long
as people have to wear Tee shirts to proclaim that “black lives matter,” we
definitely aint ready for reparations. As
long as we aint ready for reparations, the stain of slavery will never be
lightened (it could never be removed anyway) from the soul of America.
