How Reparations Should Work

Unpaid Reparations

In 1942, during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt signed “Executive Order 9066”, which allowed the military to deny due process to American citizens in the name of national defense. This order forced over 120,000 people of Japanese decent, most of which were American citizens, from their homes, jobs and sometimes families, into government controlled internment camps. Half of the “campers” were children who were treated no differently than hardened criminals, with facilities that were surrounded with barbed wire and armed guards. In the almost four years that these camps were in service, many Japanese Americans died due to inadequate medical care. Some even died at the hands of American soldiers who said that they resisted orders. With all of this one would believe that this had prevented the “horrible japanese spies” from completing their plans of “domestic espionage and sabotage” as was stated in Executive Order 9066. To this day there is not one documented piece of evidence that shows that a Japanese citizen went through with espionage.

To attempt to right a national wrong, The United States Congress passed the Civil Liberties act of 1988, also known as the Japanese American Redress Bill, which acknowledged that a “grave injustice was done” and ordered congress to pay each victim of internment $20,000 in reparations, which summed up to about $1.2 billion over the corse of ten years of payout. Each of the reperations were sent with a signed apology letter from the President. This event marks the first formal form of social reperations within the United States. Since this has happened many people believe that there are more people in need of reperations such as African Americans and Native Americans.

African Americans for the most part believe that reperations are long over due. After over two hundred years of “unpaid servitude”, why would reparations be any less than necessary? After the Civil War had ended, the United States government promised to pay a form of reparations to all freed slaves in the sum of 40 acres of land and a mule under Order No. 15. which was approved by Union General William T. Sherman. However, after white land owners expressed their fear that blacks may actually acquire wealth and power from the already dead land, the order was stopped by President Johnson after President Lincoln had been assassinated. The fact that the land was not given to all or most of the freed slaves, as promised, gives the African American community more of a reason to want for unpaid, and what some feel as owed, reperations. “I'm not bitter, neither am I cruel But ain't nobody paid for slavery yet. I may be crazy, but I ain't no fool. About my forty acres and my mule...”(Brown, 1972). Some feel that if something had been done to right the great wrong during the U.S. reconstruction of the late 1800’s then reparations would not be needed. To many it seems quite unfair that one group can get reparations from the government when another can not, even when the events share the same common aspect; the degrading of a specific culture.

Many would argue against any form of reperations to both African Americans and Native Americans. One of the biggest reasons is that many believe that these events happened too long ago. Where many of those in the Japanese intern camps were still alive to receive their reparations, there are no living victims of slavery nor