Of Bailouts and Reparations

I'm sure I'm not the only person looking at that number -- $700 billion -- and listening to the debate and wondering where the national will to responsibility comes from.

When I listen to the back-and-forth on the bailout, I can't help but think about the much-less-ballyhooed topic of reparations for African-Americans who are generationally disadvantaged and continue to be oppressed by the historical legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow, as well as racial prejudices in the present.

When the topic of reparations does come out, white resistance typically takes the form of such challenges as "I'm not responsible; I never owned slaves, and neither did my family." Or, "How could we ever figure out how much was owed to whom?" Or, "They would want too much; we as a nation would be bankrupted."

Hmm.

Consider the following, from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, making final appeal for the bailout: "This is a day of consequence for the American people. ... None of us is an island. We're all bound together in boom or bust."

Well. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it.

None of us is an island ... not white people, black people, or people of any other hue ... and we are all bound together, in boom or in bust.

So, given that we are all bound together, and given that $700 billion is a number we are willing to talk about as an estimate of the amount required to restore "faith" in a crumbling system that was established primarily by white people and that primarily benefits white people, maybe that will be a good (re)starting point when we do get around to that reparations discussion.

And that is a discussion we should have, because there is a besetting original sin in the US economy: that fact that it is constructed on the stolen life energy, blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved and exploited people of color -- from Africa, Mexico, and China, among other nations -- imported legally and illegally to do the dirty work of building a nation and its wealth.

Oh, to live in a Micah 6:8 world ...