Last year, the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) was held in Durban, South Africa. Mainstream media coverage focused on a walkout by the U.S. and Israeli delegations over alleged anti-Jewish prejudice at the WCAR. That high-profile incident overshadowed months of hard efforts toward developing international agreements on racism and related discrimination (see TW, 11/01).

One topic that seemed to lose out in the WCAR hullabaloo was reparations. Reparations means to "repair" or "make whole," or to return a victim as closely as possible to the state he or she was in before the wrong occurred. In Durban, the central focus of reparations was addressing the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery of Africans by white colonial powers and the countless other resources that had been stolen from that continent. Wealthy European and North American countries were challenged to financially compensate African nations and individual descendants of slavery. Some reparations activists estimated the money due ran into the trillions of U.S. dollars.

Recent polls indicate that a majority of African Americans call for some form of financial restitution, but more than 80 percent of white Americans oppose that concept. During a trip to North Carolina, a white man once asked me, "I wasn’t alive when slavery was around. Why should I have to pay?" Columbia University’s Manning Marable wrote recently, "White Americans who are alive today are not guilty of enslaving anyone, in the legal definition of the term. Most white Americans below the age of 50 played no role in directly supporting Jim Crow segregation and are not guilty of overt acts to block the integration of public accommodations and schools. But white Americans, as a group, continue to be the direct beneficiaries of the legal apparatuses of white supremacy, carried out by the full weight of America’s legal, political and economic institutions. The consequences of state-sponsored racial inequality created a mountain of historically constructed, accumulated disadvantage for African Americans as a group." Clearly, we need to look at racism systemically – it’s not just about achieving "reconciliation," a popular word in our church these days.

Is money the "bottom line" in the call for reparations? Not exactly. Dudley Thompson, Jamaica’s former foreign minister, said in Durban, "Reparations is not about asking for money. You can’t pay me for your raping my grandmother. You cannot compensate me for lynching my father. What we demand is the restitution of our human dignity, the restoration of full equality, politically, socially and economically, between the oppressors and the oppressed."

So how do we move forward? Several possibilities come to mind. The main concern for most reparations activists is for people to honestly research and discuss our collective history. Our church, for instance, can use "celebrations" – like the anniversary of the Jamestown Covenant – as learning opportunities about what truly happened to native peoples here. Personally, we can identify how prejudice and privilege frame our own lineage. I’ve always been extremely proud of my extended family, a group deeply committed to education and social justice. But as I look deeper into our history on this continent, I realize that my ancestors – like Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War hero for whom I am named – lived throughout New England on land they had stolen from indigenous peoples. My sense of pride of being the descendant of people who had helped to "free" this country from British colonial rule is sobered by our obvious participation in the genocide of those who were already living here.

As we continue to seek right relationship with one another, we also can look at current realities – the ways people of color are not fed, not treated safely, not offered good healthcare or shelter; the interrelationship of racism and the prison industry. South Africa is but one nation attempting to develop a new national consciousness of "wholeness" and speaking truth to its violent past. These issues and more are addressed in this special look at reparations – a new entry point that may help us face the racism that still frames our world.