A number of black people born in the United States of America - many of whom not only simultaneously insist they are not Africans, but also ironically and simultaneously insist on being referred to as African Americans - have begun to insist they are the only people who deserve reparations in America.
This despite all the uncounted millions of Africans enslaved in the Americas, from the North Pole to the South Pole, since the early 1500s.
Complicating matters, some advocates for post-1619 American descendants of slavery citizenship and reparations (ADOS) insist that, especially because they (post-1619 Africans in the 1776 U.S.) are the biblical children of Israel. Therefore, the God of the Bible was speaking of them (the post-1619 ADOS), and only them, in the Genesis story of the 400-year captivity of … well … someone.
According to this line of argument, the post-1619 ADOS - or more accurately only blacks in the U.S.A. (OBITUSA) having been enslaved in America and who thereby are supposedly the biblical Israelites – are therefore singularly qualified for reparations for slavery in America. Because, according to ADOS-OBITUSA, they are the only real African Americans.
But, they will quickly remind you, they are decidedly and definitely not African.
The bizarre theo-political, socio-political and ultimately economic-political semantic contortions, twists and spins being engaged in by the advocates of post-1619 ADOS-OBITUSA challenge even the stellar athletic gymnastics of a Simone Biles.
However, one obvious difference between the stunning athleticism of gymnast Biles and the bizarre display by the advocates for ADOS-OBITUSA is that the former is clearly much more informed, studied, and certainly more disciplined than the entirely self-referential, unthinking and miseducated idiocy of the latter.
CONFUSION
The obvious confusion in the thinking of the ADOS-OBITUSA leadership, advocates and followers is evident from their first steps - in their choice of name. The simple fact they could not bring themselves to put the word “African” in front of the word “American” in ADOS points directly to their anti-Africa and anti-African make America great again (MAGA) agenda.
To declare themselves and their agenda as “African American” immediately puts them among the deliberately-miseducated and nativist “Americans” who still cannot handle the fact that the designation “America” applies from the North Pole to the South Pole. This makes all African-descended people born or living in – or even migrated to – the Western Hemisphere already literally African Americans. Or, as many of my progressive black friends insist is more strategic and accurate, Africans-in-the-Americas.
That kind of internationally strategic thinking is precisely what the divide-and-rule-Africa agents of all colors are extremely hostile towards. And how are those who were slaves in pre-United States of “America” – some of whom were non-African, not to mention the original inhabitants of “America”, along with already too many pre-1916 Africans, whose owners were sometimes black – to be treated
Those are issues which, in themselves, beg the question: Was “America” America before 1776, when the U.S. gained Independence from Britain? It is at that juncture of rational enquiry that the ADOS-OBITUSA position, and the ‘applicable-only-to-Americans-400-year-(1619-2019) prophesy’ become conflated into a mess of subjective religionism, confusing political expedience and opportunistic socio-cultural cynicism.
DAY ONE
African enslavement was in existence in the Americas from the day Christopher Columbus’s enterprise entered the Western Hemisphere in 1492. African enslavement in the West was simply an extension of the trade in Africans-as-slaves by the Portuguese, in Europe, since the early 1400s.
By 1562, slaving ships from the England, such as the SS Jesus owned by Queen Elizabeth I, were trading Africans with the Spanish who controlled not only the Caribbean, but large parts of what is now called America – North, Central and South.
If the leaders and advocates of ADOS-OBITUSA want to be taken seriously, for example in any conversation about reparations – and in order to not so easily blow their cover as merely nativistic black MAGA agents – they will have to do much better than make proposals (allegedly in support of reparations) that include such hilariously absurd and contradictory thinking as advocating guaranteeing “...small business administration loans” to people demanding … ahem ... reparations!
Apparently ADOS has a dream, an Americans-only dream - to which they are entitled - of being exceptional exceptionalists and compliant pet tokens, in an American World of increasingly open and desperate white supremacism.
