More Than a Band-Aid “O, ye nominal Christians! Might not an African ask you… Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of gain?” (Olaudah, p.75). For 150 years, Africans all over the country shared Olaudah Equiano’s question of when white Christians would resolve they had toiled enough. When Lincoln emancipated the slaves, they were liberated from the slave codes which allowed and encouraged owners to gruesomely punish them, but remained oppressed by the de facto laws of a country founded on white supremacy. In the 150 years since then, black people have continued to ask when the manacles of racism and discrimination will be at last loosed. Through the struggle of the Civil Rights Movement…show more content… Now is the time for the government to join the effort. However, paying a sum of money to the African-American men and women who still suffer from the social and economic inequalities perpetuated from slavery is not the remedy to those miseries. Instead, the debts of slavery will be paid as the deep wounds of racism on the body of black society are healed through directed efforts designed to elevate its members. Black communities are often disadvantaged because of an inability to recover from the economic, educational, and social setback of slavery. The concept of repaying of former slaves with money, land, or education to account for this inequality on an individual scale was not unheard of during the late 1700s (Coates, 2014). Still, most slaves lacked the literacy to petition their governments for reparations. However, one freedwoman, Belinda…show more content… As Africans were captured, sold, and transferred to other plantations, “relations and friends [were] separated” with no regard to keeping families intact (Olaudah, p.75). Without secure families to separate into, slaves lived a communal lifestyle and adapted a new way of life (Butler, 67). While slave traditions led to the formation of a rich black culture, the black family unit remains bruised by slavery. Namely, black men are often missing from their communities due to unproportionately high rates of incarceration (Wolfers, 2015). In cities all over the country, about twenty black men are in jail for every 100 women are not, adding up to 1.5 million black men absent from their communities (Wolfers, 2015). If this trend continues, a third of the black boys born in America can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives (NAACP, n.d.). Unfortunately, as more fathers are being put into prison and more black men are prevented from getting jobs by a criminal record, more families fall deeper into poverty and further away from Royall’s dream of wealth (Quigley, 2015). Now, when white students are 20% more likely to graduate high school, and when 70% of the black boys who do not will be imprisoned, the argument for educational, social, and economic reparations grows stronger (Quigley, 2015). Unless the
