Pan African Dems Attack Reparations Movement
by Nyhiem Way
There is a concerted effort by Pan-Africanists all across the nation to stymie the push for reparations being made by true reparationists in the United States. I personally opine, Pan-Africanist organizations who are aligned with NAARC (National African American Reparations Commission) and NCOBRA (National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America) and by extension, the NAACP and the Urban League, are the single greatest threat to the true reparations movement.
After reading a disinformation missive being spread by an organization named New Georgia Project Action Fund, naming Freedmen as if it is some group formed online as opposed to what it is, an actual legal/political status, we thought that it was high time to respond to these baseless attacks launched by this network of actors consisting of grifting activists, college and university professors and students, along with media types like Roland Martin, and others who are desperately trying to maintain the loosening grip on the Black captured electorate for the Democrat party. This is important because reparationists across the country are demanding the Democrats pass meaningful legislation to help repair the American Freedmen in the same way they have opened up the bank for newly arriving immigrants. Our calls for reparations appear to be a nuisance for top Democrats.
For the record, those of us who are Freedmen conscious like United Sons and Daughters of Freedmen and the various Freedmen centered organizations across the country, along with those who identify as FBA and ADOS, despite disagreements with and within these groups, are not pushing right wing propaganda. These movements are focused on policy and not political party; unlike every prominent Pan-African group who has grown accustomed to subsisting like ticks on the blood-money of the Democrat party as they pretend to fight for justice for American Freedmen.
Source of the Contention
Race, eligibility and money. These three components are at the source of the beef. Let me explain:
Race: Pan-Africanists imprudently believe that reparations legislation should be based on race and racial titles like “Black” and “African American,” in-spite of the fact that several supreme court cases (Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard) have ruled that race based legislation is unconstitutional, not to mention SPD-15 (statistical policy directive) which explicitly states that United States racial classifications should not be “viewed as determinants of eligibility for participation in any Federal program.” Reparations would in fact be a federal program. In spite of this evidence, the Pan-African groups persist with pushing this racial square peg into a legal round hole.
Eligibility: Many prominent Pan-Africans like Ron Daniels (NAARC), who, oddly enough, is a member of the New York City task force for reparations (definitely a conflict of interest), on several instances has been quoted saying “I don’t care if they came here on a plane last week, they deserve reparations too.” Such a statement is a slap in the face to those of us whose families endured slavery, the abject terror after emancipation, Jim Crow, redlining, racial housing covenants, police brutality, economic exclusion, etc. Blacks coming from African and Caribbean countries whose ancestors did not endure the generationally bequeathed badges and incidents of the slave institution of the United States of America can never qualify just as if an American Freedmen moving to one of their countries, would not qualify for its reparative justice.
In August of 2023, after I was invited to speak at a reparations event in Los Angeles, CA, I had a one-on-one debate with former head of NCOBRA, Kamm Howard, who now heads the spinoff organization ‘Reparations United.’ He expressed that he is pushing to have African Americans (Blacks) from other countries be included in our fight for remedial justice. He believes in a tier system where about 10% of those who experienced harms in this country at the hands of European-Americans (whites) should be included in our claim. I vehemently disagreed with this position and simply stated to him that they have the option to return to their own countries. Why migrate to a country that you know has racism and discrimination towards a people that somewhat look like you? He had no real answers to these questions nor several others; neither did he know about the (then) recent Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action and Edward Blum’s attack on Black racial initiatives all across the country.
Even legacy organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League, have joined in the fight against remedial justice for the American Freedmen families in the United States. Many of these organizations are headed by people from either Caribbean or African immigrant descent and they want their people to benefit from something that their families did not endure while enjoying every benefit that the United States has given them to leapfrog us socially. These organizations also serve as Black political front groups for the Democrat party to which they have become wholly obsolete insofar as fighting for justice for our people is concerned.
Money: The grift that keeps on giving. Many of these Pan-African organizations are gatekeepers. They represent what I term the buffer class between those with power and those without it and they use their propaganda platforms (like Roland Martin and Greg Carr), and resources to stay ahead of and in front of, what we can deem as, using old 5%er terminology, the poor righteous teachers.
Many philanthropic organizations which are headed by white Americans and those of other foreign ethnic stock, give millions of dollars a year to these reparations organizations. The McArthur Foundation, for instance, gives millions of dollars to IBW21, the fiscal agent for NAARC and NCOBRA. These groups have maintained comfortable salaries over the decades by pretending to be about reparations work while producing nothing insofar as advancing it. One such group, Liberation Ventures, decided that it was going to use discrimination as its means to blot out the real reparationists across the country, by funding only those pushing “race based” reparations initiatives. As reported in moguldom.com, this philanthropic organization has decided that it will not fund any group pushing for “lineage based” reparations. This means it will only fund those groups aligned with NAARC and NCOBRA who push for race based reparations which will surely be shot down in the Supreme Court when challenged by Edward Blum and his right wing racist group. The Pan-Africans don’t seem to care.
These groups, some of which have existed for a few decades, only became active in the recent fight for reparations. It is possible that they felt that these philanthropic organizations, some of whom could be wholly ignorant to all of this, would stop funding the Pan-African grift and begin to grant resources to those of us who are doing real reparations work. The Pan-Africans have been attacking the true nationwide reparationists network over and over the past 5 years. Pan-Africanists are completely out of touch with the movement and have decided that if they cannot get reparations on their (bad) terms, they will sink the whole ship. Fortunately enough, we are the captains of this battleship and they for certain, can never sink it. The spirit of our enslaved and then Freed-men and Freed-women ancestors are the wind beneath our wings. Nothing can stop us…
To continue reading this article in its entirety, please follow this link: https://medium.com/@nyhiemwayel_26846/pan-african-dems-attack-reparations-movement-b7ce7731289b
