Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 18

The more critically that one examines the issue or the question of Reparative/Reparatory Justice, the more the seemingly and dauntingly intractable the imperative need and the necessity for a remarkably justifiable compensation for the rehabilitation the Descendants of Indigenous Continental Africans Chattel-Enslaved in the Americas becomes, especially when the issue or the unignorable question of Reparations takes the form or assumes the generational mode of what Point-Number-Eight (8) of CARICOMS’s Ten-Point Reparatory Justice Program also factors into the equation or into full account something called “Psychological Rehabilitation” or the “Indemification” of the most horrific, massive and protracted Holocaust in history over at least the past ONE-THOUSAND YEARS. We are, of course, here talking about the Chattel Enslavement of Continental African People for at least a half millennium via what globally became known as the Transatlantic European Trade in African Humanity.

And this is also where the seminal and the groundbreaking and morally redeeming works of such 20th-Century African American Psychologists and Sociologists as Dr. Kenneth Bancroft Clark (1914-2005) and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark (1917-1983) come to the fore. Dr. Clark, who the present writer had the rare and the chance privilege to meet at a belatedly and characteristically retroactive graduation ceremony conducted in his honor, sometime in the very late 1980s or the early 1990s, at The City College of New York (CCNY) of the City University of New York (CUNY), pioneered the epoch-marking study that blisteringly and seismically detailed the deleterious impact of racial segregation right here in the United States of America on the mental health and the well-being of African American children. It was Dr. Cark’s testimony before the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS), in the Brown v. Board of Education, in Topeka, Kansas, if memory served this author accurately, that opened the floodgates of racial desegregation in the country that significantly altered the hitherto cast condemnation of the descendants of formerly chattel-enslaved Continental Africans.

Then there is also the remarkable contributions of Dr. Edward (E) Franklin Frazier (1894-1962) and his seminal books detailing and critiquing the negative impact, for the most part, of the previously discussed slavocratic institutionalization of the Black Codes (See A Leon Higginbotham’s “In The Matter Of Color”) that perennially entrenched the socioeconomic immiseration and the cast-like status of the post-slavery Indigenous African right here in the United States of America. Today, Dr. Frazier is best remembered for his books titled “The Negro Family in the United States (1939) and “The Black Bourgeoisie” (1955). Then, there is also the pioneering work of Inez Beverly Prosser (1891-1934); and such contemporary psychologists and sociologists as Robert Lee Williams, officially credited with having coined the term “Ebonics,” for Black English; Joseph L. White, the putative “Godfather of Black Psychology,” and Kobi Kambon - aka Joseph A Baldwin - the renowned Afrocentric Psychologist and Scholar. The list goes on ad-infinitum.

You see, so far, the question of Reparatory Justice has tended to be almost exclusively reckoned in terms of Monetary/Fiscal Compensation for some 400 Years of the Chattel Enslavement of African-Descended People in the Caribbean and the Americas. But I guess what I am trying to critically latch onto here is the fact that no amount of money or capital investment by the various governments in Europe that actively and massively participated in and hugely benefited from the Chattel Enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans is apt to remarkably yield any positive results in the manner clearly articulated and anticipated by the authors of the CARICOM Reparatory Justice Program (CRJP) and, indeed, the leadership of the CARICOM Nations at large.

You see, what has almost completely been lost in the decidedly salutary discourse on Post-Slavery or Post-Emancipation “Justice” in the Americas, in general, to be certain, and the African-Caribbean Region, in particular, is the equally seemingly intractable fact that the deleterious impact of the Chattel Enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans for approximately a half millennium was a Double-Edged Sword and one that also entailed the “Psychological Brainwashing” of both the Slaver and his/her descendants, inasmuch as it incalculably and negatively impacted the psyche or the totality of the mindset of the veritable victim of Chattel Enslavement. Now, what this clearly means is that the proposed call for the “Detoxification” of the descendants of the erstwhile Chattel-Enslaved Indigenous Africans, will also inevitably necessitate the “Psychological Deprogramming” or “De-falsification” of the systematically and the perennially entrenched inculcation of White-Supremacist Theories and Fascist and Rabidly Racist Psychological Temperament into the behavioral and the cultural morality of the descendants and the primary beneficiaries of the Slavo-Colonial Regime which, to be certain, rigidly persists to this day and age.

For a striking example of the preceding observation, one only needs to critically and sedulously pay attention to the current conflict and the fits-and-starts argument raging between the United States of America and the Zionist State of Israel, on the one hand, and the Islamic Revolutionary Republic of Iran, on the rather downright farcical question of whether a politically sovereign and a democratic Iran, same as both the United States of America and Israel, requires the categorical approval of the self-proclaimed foremost global power and its “Surrogate Daughter” and lockstepping ally in the brutal perpetration of wanton acts of unspeakable depravity and the totally unprovoked War Crimes against the leadership and the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran, well before the latter victim of White-Supremacist Aggression could produce and own the Nuclear Bomb for the maximum security of its people and its citizenry, in much the same manner putatively achieved and/or acquired by nearly each and every one of the officially declared European (NATO) Allies of both the United States of America and Israel.

The preceding observation absolutely in no way is meant to undermine or to seriously impugn the validity of the CARICOM demand for Reparatory Justice. Rather, the primary and the fundamental objective here is to critically underscore the fact that neither side of the discourse on Reparatory Justice or Reparations is more psychologically wholesome than the other. You see, the Madness of White-Supremacist Chauvinism of the kind smugly and cavalierly paraded by the membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), that was recently morally refreshingly pointed out by Russia’s President Vladimir Vlasimirovitch Putin, in his Post-Alaska confabulation with President Donald John Trump, in which the Russian leader virulently accused the US-MAGA “Rapepublican”-led Trumpian regime of being pathologically afflicted with the carcinogenic disease of “Eurocentrism” which, according to President Putin, had caused the Trump-occupied White House to lose sight of an organically integrated Multicultural, Multiracial and Multinational “Global Village” was, to-date, the speech that came closest to publicly and unabashedly solidarizing with what the overwhelming majority of the leadership of the “Extra-European” World have been saying and vehemently decrying for several decades now.

In short, the clarion call for “a reparatory justice approach to truth and educational exposure,” by CARICOM’s leadership, as the most effective mode to combating the blistering “Psychological Trauma” precipitated by 400 Years of the Chattel Enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans is one requiring of unreserved global acknowledgment and the active participation of the proverbial International Community in the healing process, as the only surefire means of restoring not only the primary victims the of Chattel Enslavement of Africans to normative health and humanity but, even much more significantly and morally immeasurably, all victims of unprovoked acts of criminal aggression and political victimization across the globe deserve an equal measure of acknowledgment and the necessary rehabilitative attention, if our increasingly fragile and existentially endangered world is to survive and thrive into the foreseeable future.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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