After reading “Pay one group, pay all,” (ODE, March 3), I am amazed by De La Cruz’s oversimplification of the matter of giving reparations to the descendants of slaves. I am also astounded by her failure to provide sufficient factual information regarding the topic. The only reference used in the article was an advertisement by David Horowitz that he placed in 27 out of an attempted 52 college newspapers, an ad that many institutions later apologized for running.
Horowitz claims, and De La Cruz agrees, that “There is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery.” They go on to claim that “several races benefited from using slave labor, and that includes black Americans.” Their main piece of supporting evidence is that 3,000 slave owners in the antebellum United States were black Americans. I questioned this, but found it’s true, according to “The American Negro” by Raymond Logan. However, I also found that, according to the 1860 federal census, there were nearly 4.5 million black Americans in the United States. Therefore only 0.7 percent of blacks in America at the time owned slaves. The same census counted the number of slave owners at 385,000; meaning that only 0.8 percent of all slave owners were black. To claim that black Americans as a race benefited from, or were responsible for, being enslaved is absurd — not to mention that some black “slave owners” had simply purchased the freedom of their loved ones.
As far as responsibility goes, it’s true that a few Africans were involved in selling other Africans into slavery. What the article failed to mention was the fact that 99.2 percent of the people buying slaves and profiting off their blood and sweat were indeed wealthy, land-owning, white men. Had these aristocratic white men not demanded slaves, there wouldn’t be a slave trade.
Next, De La Cruz doesn’t have a problem with paying reparations to the “direct victims of the injury, or their immediate families,” and asks about the “Union soldiers who died during the Civil War trying to free these slaves … Do the descendants of these people deserve reparations?” First, a large majority of the soldiers fighting the Civil War were volunteer soldiers. They were not ripped from their homes, shackled, thrown into crowded and filthy ships, taken across the ocean, purchased as soldiers and forced to fight. Even drafted soldiers didn’t experience this.
Second, families of American soldiers killed in action are compensated for their loss, a practice the military has been involved in since the Revolutionary War. The names of Civil War widows who received U.S. military pensions can be found on the Web site of the National Archives and Records Administration. In short, attempting to draw a comparison between Civil War soldiers and slaves is ludicrous and illogical.
De La Cruz said herself that “slavery was hideous.” Africans brought to this country as slaves — and for years after slavery’s abolition — were seriously mistreated, to put it lightly. Who’s to say they don’t at least deserve an apology?
I suggest De La Cruz do some research if she wants to construct a convincing and reputable article. Simply regurgitating the ideas of another person without investigating their implications, relevance or motivation is no way to go about writing.