What happened to the Reparations Movement? Tomorrow is the 10th year anniversary of the Millions for Reparations March. On August 17th, 2002, many gathered to call attention to the issue. In this video blog below, I remind people of it and ask the audience if its a dead issue. Feel free to comment on it.
Marc W. Polite
Hello Marc!
this is a very cogent question and I hope you will turn up the volume by continuing to ask it. A google search with the phrase ” reparations and epigenetics” will show you the area in which the most important components of the reparations issue are taking shape.
If you have not already seen “Ghost in your Genes” you can watch it online
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genes/
Long and short is that the science of genomics is able to show quantitative measures of the damage caused by trauma– not only within the life of the individual, but from one generation to succeeding ones!
If your grandpa suffered malnutrition or other abuse as a tweenager, your predisposition to several diseases/disorders is higher– even if he died long before you were born.
It has already spawned significant debate in the reparations law arena as you can see from the google search results.
From a socio-cultural point of view I don’t think any black American (or for that matter black African or black Australian….) would find this concept unfamiliar. If you traumatize enough individuals, then their collective expressions will tend to reflect that trauma. If as a group, we have a higher disposition to diseases and other mental and chronic disorders, we learn to live with the social consequences– perhaps even choose to celebrate them as part of our cultural legacy. To discover that huge tracts of ones cultural landscape may be shaped in this way is certainly a new approach to the geography of the African psyche ( see the article on “victimology” in the search results).
I think all this has yet to hit the mainstream and so I hope your blog and this anniversary can help precipitate renewed interest. If nothing else encouraging your readers to watch the Nova program and try to understand the implications of the new genomic sciences would be a great contribution.
Thanks for what you do!
Nice Marc and Dr. Blyden, asante sana! Agree with you both.
Good afternoon Eluemuno. Thank you for your comments! I will look into this further when I get a chance. I had no idea this field of research existed.
Hey brother,
Are you a member of NCOBRA? If you are not, that is what happened to the Reparations Movement. If you are and not active, that is what happened to the Reparations Movement. We are the Reparations Movement.