The African American Warrant for Reparations: The Crime of European Enslavement of Africans and its Consequences
By Molefi Kete Asante

Richard America(1993) told us in his brilliant monograph Paying the Social Debt: What White America Owes Black America that reparation for Europe's enslavement of Africans in the United States is an idea whose time has arrived. Almost a decade before the powerful book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (2000) written by Randall Robinson, America's book laid out the economic bases of the debt owed to African Americans. While the argument for reparations is a Pan African one, we are most interested in this essay with the discourse surrounding the enslavement and its consequences in the American society. There are those who will immediately say that the people of the United States will never accede to reparations. I am of the opinion that the discussion and debate surrounding reparations has never occurred until recently in any serious way and therefore this essay is offered as an attempt to raise some of the philosophical ideas that might govern such a discourse. Randall Robinson's The Debt has been one of the most popular and important books written on the general subject so far because he has captured the warrants for reparations in very clear and accessible language. What he has demonstrated is that while a paralysis of national will may exist at the present time, there is no lack of national guilt and interest in this theme. There is every reason for the United States to shape and frame the culture of reparations that shall become an increasingly powerful moral and political issue in the twenty first century. The highest form of law exhibits itself when a system of law is able to answer for its own crimes. Nothing should prevent men and women of moral and political insight from making an argument for an idea whose legitimacy is fundamental to our concept of justice. We must act on the basis of our own sense of moral rightness.