Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumUN Group Calls for Slavery Reparations, but Few in Media Are Listening
February 5, 2016
Big media have shown some interest since The Atlantics Ta-Nehisi Coates made a case for reparations for African-Americans after centuries of enslavement and discrimination. Just recently, a Los Angeles Times story (1/12/16) offered it as an example of how the post-Obama left is being driven to policy proposals [that] are so grand as to verge on the absurd, and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders stance against the idea made fodder for CNN (1/21/16) and others tracking the opinions of black people vis a vis the presidential election.
But when, right on the heels of that, a UN human rights group released a report saying African-Americans face systemic racial discrimination and deserve reparatory justice, that was not so newsworthy. The UNs Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent cited the persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education, housing, employment and labor, and even food security, among African-Americans and the rest of the US population, and pointed to police killings, zero tolerance policies in schools, the criminalization of poverty, environmental racism, discriminatory voter ID laws and schools insufficient teaching about the history of slavery as constituting a human rights crisis that must be addressed as a matter of urgency.
But corporate media didnt agree. Jesse Holland, the APs race, ethnicity and demographics reporter (and himself black), wrote it up (1/29/16); the Denver Post (1/31/16) ran a news brief, and the Christian Science Monitor (1/31/16) ran something online. Apart from that, it was mostly only African-Americanfocused outlets like Essence magazine (2/2/16) and independents like Democracy Now! (2/2/16) that saw any news in the news that an international organization thinks the idea of reparations for African-Americans is anything but silly. Black History Month, not off to a great start.
http://fair.org/home/un-group-calls-for-slavery-reparations-but-few-in-media-are-listening/
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)about white America giving back a tiny fraction of what was stolen?
HassleCat
(6,409 posts)But it allows people to say, "That's it. We paid you. Now shut up."
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)The freedom, the ideas, the free labor, the children of slaves, the self worth, their languages, their customs and traditions?
The entire history of the US is a carefully framed myth to promote the idea of white, European exceptionalism. Until that myth is replaced with the real history of the US, there can be no real progress, no solution.