Abstract
The discourse on reparation for African Americans has gained impulse and will continue to gain significance in the future. The reparation scholarship reached new levels since the 1980s due to the impetus from the legislative precedent set by the US Congress in passing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which provided the basis for compensation to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War. As for reparations for Africa and other nations that suffered under the transatlantic slave trade and the European colonialism, there is an absence of political will to articulate demands for reparations for and present them at international forums. This paper examines the existing scholarship on reparation for African America. To understand the key arguments, the paper identified three main broad academic epistemic communities and other subdivisions on reparations for African Americans and Africa. It is hoped that this paper will provide some insights to policy makers and scholars.
Highlights
Reparation may denote any of the following: payment of debt owed; an act of repairing a wrong or injury; to atone for wrongdoing; to make amends; to make one whole again the payment of damages; to repair a nation, compensation in money, land, or materials for damages
The reparation scholarship reached new levels since the 1980s due to the impetus from the legislative precedent set by the US Congress in passing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which provided the basis for compensation to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War
The idea of reparation to African-Americans has a long and chequered historiography beginning from black leaders like Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., to international and Pan African organizations such as the Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Pan Africanist Movement, and the controversial ideologies of DuBois and Malcom X
Summary
Reparation may denote any of the following: payment of debt owed; an act of repairing a wrong or injury; to atone for wrongdoing; to make amends; to make one whole again the payment of damages; to repair a nation, compensation in money, land, or materials for damages. Turner and Jupiter Hammon for whom reparation meant a return to Africa), later crystallized in constructive demand for compensatory and restorative justice which characterized the end of the Civil War to the 1930s. More significantly it became a product of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing scholarship on reparation discourse by identifying the epistemic communities, examining their core arguments on the issue of reparation to African-American, and their implications to the wider issues of reparations to Africa for slave trade and colonialism
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