REBIRTH OF A NATION

A call for reparations, among other actions, to atone for enslavement and subsequent human rights violations over the course of American history.

A longtime activist working at the intersection of race, religion, and politics, Goza lays out a program that involves not just monetary reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black people, but also repentance and repair. By the former he means a recognition of the white supremacism that enabled slaveholding and which has been transmitted, fairly well unmodified, down to permeate all the trappings of today’s systemic racism. Goza charts the trajectory from Thomas Jefferson’s apparent foreclosure on the possibility that Blacks were fully human, through Abraham Lincoln’s willingness to allow slavery to endure to preserve the Union, to LBJ-era laws authorizing the militarization of the police “to ‘control’ urban unrest.” All of this leads directly to the issue of reparations, which, Goza reminds us, have a precedent in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided $20,000 in payment to each Japanese American person who had been interned during World War II. Granted, though Ronald Reagan approved of that legislation, some within his administration worried that “the bill could establish a bad precedent for other groups who feel they have suffered injustices”—namely, of course, Black Americans. Goza skims over the fiscal implications of reparations, which many economists hold to be impractical if not ruinous, but he makes a good case for the power of those reparations to “close the racial wealth gap at an individual and family level.” Given that this gap was deliberately engineered over generations, Goza’s conclusion that reparations would constitute “the paradigm shift we must embrace if we are to thrive as a nation” seems on point and certainly, from an ethical if not economic viewpoint, persuasive and well defended.

A welcome and timely contribution to the conversation around civil rights.