I wanted to share this to open up the discussion further as to why whites in a black movement such as Rastafari are sometimes not called to task - I highlighted the area at the end of the article which I feel should be reasoned on.
http://www.geocities.com/maskel2001/reparationspaper.txtREPARATIONS - RASTAFARI PATHWAY TO WORLD PEACE
Author: BARBARA MAKEDA BLAKE HANNAH
The call for Reparations was the earliest mission statement of the Rastafari movement from its beginnings in the mid-1930s in Jamaica. Their inspiration to demand compensation for slavery's injustice was the Maroons -- runaway Africans whose determination to escape the shackles of slavery caused them to fight the British, win their freedom, and gain land for settlement as reparations. Kofi Agorsah's excavations and work with the Nanny Town Maroons shows the extent to which their rebellion was inspired by the desire to return to Africa.
So far, Jamaica's Maroons are the only Caribbean people to receive compensation - however minimal - for the worst act of human exploitation in history: the enslavement of Africans. Today Reparations have been awarded to peoples of other races and nations whose sufferings are recent experiences affecting smaller numbers of people than those who have suffered and been affected by the enslavement over 350 years of Africans. As a result, the after-effects of slavery still plague the development and well-being of Black people all over the world.
World trends indicate that the issue of Reparations for descendants of African enslavement will become the international human rights issue of the new millenium. The fact that Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans, Korean sex slaves, Aboriginal peoples, Native Americans, victims of post-Cold-War national conflicts in Eastern Europe -- have all been granted Reparations in recognition of their unjust suffering as victims of genocidal actions, is a clear indication that Reparations has become a pathway of peace and reconciliation.
In the USA, in Africa and in the Caribbean, several groups and committees are meeting to discuss the issue of Reparations. As the pressure for Reparations increases, there arises a need for a central co-ordinating body to organise and present a major international petition which addresses this issue. I declare that the Rastafari movement is best-suited to lead this international call for Reparations to Black people.
Rastafari is, firstly, the first community of African descendants to stake a claim for Reparations. Secondly, from its position as a new world religion with members of the faith to be found in all countries, the Rastafari movement has a spiritual foundation which is globally known and respected, as well as an international network of members united by a common Afro-cultural philosophy.
HISTORY OF THE RASTAFARI MOVEMENT
Rastafari is a movement of Black people who know Africa as the birthplace of Mankind and who view Emperor Haile Selassie 1 as a 20th Century Manifestation of God who has lighted our pathway towards righteousness and is therefore worthy of reverence.
Rastafari grew out of the darkest depression that the descendants of African slaves in Jamaica have ever lived in -- the stink and crumbling shacks of zinc and cardboard that the poorest and most tattered remnants of humanity built on the rotting garbage of the dreadful Dungle on Kingston's waterfront. Out of this filth and slime arose a sentiment so pure, so without anger, so full of love, the philososphy of the Rastafari faith.
In addition to reverence of Emperor Haile Selassie 1 of Ethiopia, the basic tenet of the movement's beginnings was the demand that all descendants of slaves now living in former slave colonies who so desired, should be returned to Africa with enough funding to start life again. "Repatriation with Reparations" was the slogan which emerged in the 30's as a clarion call for the followers of Leonard Howell, Joseph Hibbert, Archibald Dunkley and other pillars of the Rastafarian movement who first preached the doctrine that Selassie I is the Living God.
Inspired by the Afrocentric teachings of Jamaican philosopher and orator Marcus Garvey, these men began deep study of their Bibles to see who fulfilled Garvey's prophecy that the rising of a Black King in Africa would herald a new day for Black people. To these men, the most powerful Biblical proof of this prophecy was Revelations 5, Verses 1-5:
"And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a great voice:
Who is worthy to open the Book and to lose the seals thereof?
And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not;
Behold the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David,
Hath prevailed to open the Book and to lose the seven seals thereof."
The Rastafarian demand for Repatriation with Reparations grew louder when Emperor Haile Selassie I made a gift to "Africans in the West who had supported Ethiopia in its fight against the Italian invasion." According to His Majesty, "Five hundred acres of very fertile rich land have been given through the Ethiopian World Federation Inc. to the Black People of the West who aided Ethiopia in her period of distress."
This land grant encouraged Rastafari to press harder for Reparations to fund the cost of resettlement on this African soil. Still largely a Jamaican movement, Rastafarians soon came into conflict with the establishment, which regarded their demand for reparations as too highly controversial to present to the English colonial masters. "Repatriation with Reparations" was for decades seen as a hopeless dream of misguided cultists, seeking compensation for a wrong that many either preferred to ignore, or which was claimed to have been corrected with the abolition of slavery and the beginning of AID programmes.
After all, it was argued, since Abolition, colonialism and Independence the enslaving European nations had provided millions of dollars worth of aid and assistance to their former slave colonies and shown a benevolent face in many ways to demonstrate its apology for the acknowledged wrong.
Clashes during Rastafari marches, cutting and trimming of Rastafari locks, arrest and imprisonment for using the ganja scarament, escalated into massacres, highlighted by the Coral Gardens Massacre in1957, when soldiers and police obeyed a mandate from the then-Prime Minister to fill the graveyards when the prisons were too full of Rastas. The tales of horror of that Good Friday brutality, suffered by hundreds of poor men wearing locks or a beard, are still being revealed.
On a continuing basis, countless thousands of Rastafari suffered the harsh brutality of prison for the simple act of smoking a spliff. These acts of injustice further strengthened the desire and claim of Rastafari to be returned to the homeland of their ancestors and to have their resettlement financed by the wealthy nations built by the 300 years of unpaid labour endured by these same ancestors.
REPARATION MESSAGE GOES ABROAD The Rasta message of African Reparations now began to spread outside Jamaica with the spread of the Rastafari mesage in the music. Bob Marley, Rastafari's most powerful messenger -- in the title song of his seminal reggae album "Exodus" (voted Album of the Century by TIME Magazine in December 1999), sang:
Exodus, Movement of JAH People
We know where we're going,
We know where we're from.
We're leavin' Babylon,
Going to our Fathers land.
Over the decades the Rastafari chant for Reparations and Repatriation never ceased but grew stronger and more justified as the claims of other enslaved and oppressed peoples for Reparations was granted.
Meanwhile, the Rasta Reparation message was spread by Jamaican followers to descendants of slaves in the other Caribbean islands and the Black ghettoes of North America and England. There are now fully operational organisations working for Reparations in all these areas of the African Diaspora.
In the United States, Randal Robinson of TransAfrica -- the organisation which led the US anti-apartheid movement -- spearheads the Afro-American effort to secure Reparations. In his book "The Debt - What America Owes Blacks" Robinson sets out a plan of action which addresses the methodology of a US reparation plan for African-Americans. In it he criticizes the US government for never taking responsibility for its role in the enslavement of Africans and the promotion of white supremacy; and states that the experience of enslavement, segregation, and discrimination continues to limit the life chances and opportunities of African Americans.
Robinson writes that African Americans have sought repeatedly to obtain reparations in the courts of the United States and through appeals to its government ever since the end of slavery, but these efforts have been unjustly denied. In the meantime Americans and the United States government have benefited enormously and continue to benefit from the unjust expropriation of uncompensated labor by enslaved Africans, the subordination and segregation of the descendants of the enslaved, as well as from discrimination against African Americans.
Putting it clearly, Robinson states that the principle is now internationally upheld through the above-mentioned examples, that reparations is the appropriate remedy whenever a government unjustly abrogates the rights of a domestic group or foreign people.
Robinson presents his argument strongly:
"Although all those who were enslaved are dead," he writes, "their posterity lives on to combat daily the disabilities caused by the theft over many generations of a birthright. Furthermore, the shift from slavery to freedom was more partial than whole as the ensuing 75 years witnessed the governmentally supported exclusion or systematic segregation of African Americans from virtually every quarter of American society.
"Deprivations within the sphere of labor, finance, housing, education, social and cultural institutions bear a direct and formative relationship to the economically, socially, and educationally sub-qualitative facts of African American life today. Thus the existing generations of African Americans are far from lost from the experience of slavery, but remain captured within its chaotic and deprivation-sustaining aftermath.
"The injury to the African American community survives the death of individual victims. The injury survives in the overrepresentation of poverty, and all the pathologies it spawns within the African American community. Not least of such pathologies is self-hate, lack of confidence, and lack of self-understanding. Thus, many African Americans must be educated to understand the justification and legitimacy of their own claim to reparations."
Robinson therefore arrives that the conclusion that:
"... hearings should be held in the Congress of the United States to establish the basis for reparations to African Americans, and to determine the amount of such reparations; whereinafter, a private trust should be established for the benefit of all African Americans...
AFRICAN DEMANDS In Africa, the 2nd World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission was convened in Ghana in 2000. Its deliberations concluded with a Petition being served in the International Court at the Hague for:
$ 777 TRILLION US,, Against the United States of America (USA), Canada, and European Union Members, For Unlawful Removal And Destruction Of Petitioners' Mineral And Human Resources From The African Continent Between The Years Of 1503 A.D. Up To The End Of The Colonialism Era - 1957 Through 1960s.
This is the first time a price has been put on African Reparations.
History scholar Elazar Barkan calls it "the new guilt of nations" . He argues in his book of the same name (W.W.Norton) that:
"...from Europe to the Americas to Australia, leaders are apologizing and countries are paying restitution for historical injustices.'
Barkan, chair of cultural studies and associate professor of history at California's Claremont Graduate University, said in a Reuters interview:
"The most important thing is the acknowledgment, because that shapes not only our past but what we think and act in the present and in the future."
Barkan's book compares restitution and reparation negotiations in different places, and one chapter examines the growing debate in the United States over whether and how to recompense African-Americans for the Injustices of slavery. He writes in a chapter headed "Restitution for Slavery:Opportunity or Fantasy?"
"The new international emphasis on morality has been characterized not only by accusing other countries of human rights abuses but also by self-examination ... this national self-reflexivity is the new guilt of nations. While Western countries have condemned the enslavement of Africans, they have neither apologized nor compensated victims and their descendants, but the subject refuses to go away," he writes. "The call for reparation is as much a call for repentance and mourning as it is for restitution."
THE AMERICAS Yet, the greatest need for the award of Reparations is to descendants of African slavery in the Diaspora nations of the Caribbean, North and South America, and European countries in which they have settled. The need for reparations extends as well as to residents of the African continent itself, which still has not recovered from the trauma of the kidnapping and exportation of its strongest, healthiest, wisest and youngest people.
The subsequent invasion and capture of African land by the enslaving nations, their takeover of governing systems and sources of income, their destruction of cultural practices, language and tribal borders further destroyed the natural development of the African motherland, and created in its place a continent whose main objective was to enrich Europe by exportation of its mineral and agricultural produce.
Until and unless the great global human crime of African enslavement over 300 years is corrected by applying the medicine of economics, the world will continue to be unbalanced. Blacks will always be hostile to whites, while whites will continue to regard people of African origin as inferior because of their economic degradation.
On the other hand, the reparation of this wrong with economic solutions will give Africa and African communities a chance to upgrade their social, cultural and economic conditions and live as equals with their brothers and sisters of other races in the countries which they helped develop.
REVENGE OR 'ONE LOVE'? The issue of Reparations carries with it the burden of racial differences between those affected by slavery and natives of countries that benefited economically from the civil outrage. The potential danger of revenge and retribution by Africans made powerful by the economic benefits of reparations, may appear in some of the more strident calls for Reparations which emphasise the guilt of historical actions, rather than the potential for Global Healing which will emerge when this great wrong is righted.
Rastafari, with its slogan of Peace and Love, is a true Afrocentric movement whose membership is not limited to Blacks.
By living the fundamental message of "One Love", Rastafari has demonstrated the true Christ spirit of the movement's teachings. As a result, people of all races have been drawn to the movement, to live its practices and be identified as Rastafari. As a result, the Rastafari call for Reparations is supported by an international body of non-Africans of all races who see Reparations as a human rights issue equal to the abolition of Apartheid.
The involvement of these non-Africans is important to diffuse the possibility of racism, revenge or retributions by recipients of Reparations, and to show that the crime of slavery is history, and that those alive today -- both Black and White -- can become friends and allies, brothers and sisters across racial boundaries.
Only in a spirit of racial equality can the award of Reparations avoid the problems of prejudice and utilise the spirit of goodwill that exists among non-Blacks everywhere who have recognised that goodness is colour-blind. Only the Rastafari movement, with its Jewish, Asian, European, Aboriginal and Indian membership, can transcend traditional racial hatreds and use Reparations as a means of healing and furtherance of world peace.
I&I Rastafari vision a restored Africa with modern cities, educated citizens free from disease, in charge of their economic growth, and spiritually united in the knowledge of an Almighty Creator and a righteous pathway to that Creator -- by whatever name or religion we connect with that Creator.
I&I Rastafari offer the Emperor Haile Selassie I Christly crown of PEACE AND LOVE as the banner to unfurl at the forefront of this righteous movement for African Reparations.
ONE AIM! ONE DESTINY! ONE JAH! 1 
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