George,

For over a decade I have been puzzling about if and how to repay the current generation of Americans of African/Native descent for the slave labors of their ancestors. There seem to be several questions: 1) Should reparations be paid? 2) If so, why? 3) What form would they take? 4) Who, exactly, would receive these reparations?

This is a thorny issue. The recent film Lincoln well illustrates the complexities inherent in the USA's failure to deal with the question of slavery in its original Constitution, showing how very difficult it was, even for the Civil War's victors, to abolish this evil institution. The USA elections since about 1980 have shown that polarization around issues of race (the red state- blue state divide) are as vigorous today as they were 148 years ago. (The old "solid South" politics of the Jim Crow era were merely a more vicious predecessor of this modern political divide.)

My friend Uriah J. Fields has written a letter to President Obama asserting that for 400 years, whites in America have received preferential treatment. He goes on to say: "The legacy of slavery, segregation, racial discrimination, disfranchisement and unequal educational opportunities have adversely impacted African Americans. (Therefore, I ask that). during the next four years African Americans become a priority focus of your presidency with the objective of leveling the playing field."

This request bears directly on the above questions, my thoughts on which are:

As to essential Question 2, Why should some form of reparations be paid,, the engraving below, entitled "View of Savannah, colony of Georgia, as it stood the 29th of March 1734," provides ample visual evidence of a fact mostly disregarded today. This fine depiction was sent by town fathers back to England to illustrate for the colony's corporate proprietors how much progress had been achieved during its very first year. We can see idealized commerce, in the form of ships and scows on the river, an embankment ready to disperse and receive trade, and a lovely new urban complex being laid out. A stockade is going up, to protect this "civilization" from the wildness beyond. It is this vast wildness of Nature that we often forget to honor, when we romantically hark back to the founding of our country.

Yet if we observe the two story blockhouse in the left foreground, and assume its height to be about twenty-five feet, we should imagine the crowns of the virgin forest trees to be at perhaps 100 feet. Notice that virgin forest again, vanishing toward the horizon. And remember. this was the approximate physical state of nearly all of North America, east of the Mississippi, circa 1734.

All of that changed in the next 130 years. Totally changed. This is the operational question moderns forget: what does it take to hew down a forests spanning one-third to one-half of the area east of the Mississippi? With almost zero mechanical help. Axes. Mules and shovels to uproot, then clear, the millions of acres of new fields. Who accomplished this, the literal making of America, the creating of our agricultural economy that so rapidly moved us to the forefront of the world?

Generations primarily of enslaved humans accomplished this, at zero wages. They got meager room and board until 1865, and then were held an additional hundred years as essentially landless, under-educated feudal serfs. So. from 1942 when "Columbus discovered America" (a fine euphemism, that), until say 1962, namely about three and a quarter centuries, enslaved Native and African people of color that broke their backs to create our market economies. they got bupkis.

This is one large slice of what UJ Fields calls the "preferential treatment" given to whites for 400 years. So I answer Question 2 by saying: yes, whites have been privileged, inordinately privileged for centuries, to enjoy the comforts of surfing upon the backs of this economic driver, the unpaid labor of people of color.

As to Question 1, Should reparations be paid? Folks alive today - whose ancestors did all that - deserve, finally, their appropriate inheritance. Interest on that labor investment. I answer this query, too, in the affirmative. Question 3, What form would these "repayments" take? Many moderns have engaged loudly in debate over "affirmative action." They assert that the 1964 Civil Rights legislation and its subsequent reforms are the recognition and the substance of any and all reparations due. They say Blacks have gotten preferential treatment for almost 50 years. To this I respond: Get Real. Wake up tomorrow at 4:30 am. Eat some gruel. Sharpen your ax. Locate a tree of about 12 foot circumference. Fell it. Now, you and your mule remove the entire root structure, burn it to ash, and then repeat this process 6 days a week for a year. Most moderns, irrespective of skin color, have never worked with their hands and bodies like this, and simply cannot imagine it.

But once they engage in this hypothetical project. not just for a year, but for a day, they will begin to realize the accumulative labor-gift enslaved people of color gave our country. How to finally repay the heirs of those laborers? Do we repay them by calculating the actual wages of the era when the labors took place? Do we add to that an inflation index? Do we pay 5% interest on the cumulative massive sum? We whites who benefited from inheritances for three centuries become quite defensive when faced with this question. Yet answer it we must.

And Question 4: How, in what form, would these payments be made, and who, exactly, would receive these reparations, whether they be exclusively financial, or otherwise? Uriah Fields proposes a moral, if not a quantitative or structural, answer: "Level the playing field," starting January 1, 2013, for people of color in the United States. What does this imply? Go see the film Lincoln, and notice the economic, political and spiritual challenges inherent in a question of such millennial gravity. Can we achieve a consensus about something this complex, yet so deeply needed?

Can a majority of us elect to rectify the wrongs that yet today enrich our pocketbooks, our intellects, at the expense of those whom America's fore-parents' enslaved?

Richard Freeman Allan(Electronic mail, December 6, 2012)