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White People Have Vital Role To Play in Reparations Talk
By Kevin C. Peterson
Lately there has been much positive talk on the national level from white people concerning reparations for black people. That’s good.
Talk about reparations — and its connection to the national sin of slavery — is ameliorative for the body politic. Such talk makes the possibility of a truly multiracial democracy more reachable.
The enslavement of humans in America has never been a favorite topic among white and black Americans alike. Among other things, our collective racial history in our country summons mass murder, human trafficking, forced miscegenation and stolen labor. More poignantly, at the bottom of the slave trade discussion, is inarguable evidence of the economic foundations of the nation — which is also the source of America’s political, economic and cultural hegemony.
Harvard Divinity School Professor Cornel West wrote a book some years ago titled Race Matters. Well, slavery matters too — in more ways than we like to admit.
This week, presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, called for a racial dialogue on reparations. The senator from Massachusetts was in no way tentative in her words, calling our silence around the insidiousness of slavey a long unaddressed conversation within the protracted American…
