Howard Law Professor Justin Hansford addressed the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent last week and called for the establishment of a United Nations Reparations Tribunal that could order the payment of reparations to African Americans.
Professor Hansford objected that white lawyers and politicians have been allowed to control this debate in the United States for too long:
But so far we have left it to the scholars of the past, the lawyers of the past, the white scholars, white lawyers, to determine the bounds of our legal imagination, to determine the narrow structures that we will use to determine what justice looks like for our own people.
So I come to you today with a novel proposal, that we begin to think our own thoughts, propose our own vision of justice, and implement that justice, as part of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.
It is not clear what Professor Hansford meant when he suggested that a United Nations program for reparations should not only be crafted but “implemented” by people of color.
Professor Hansford notes in his address that the United Nations previously recognized the need for reparations for victims of racism and cultural genocide.
The speech to the United Nations is part of growing calls for action on reparations after years of study and proposals. As task forces in states like California have issued recommendations for payments, the demands are presenting a challenge for Democratic politicians who have long campaigned on such payments as a moral imperative. That bill has now come due but politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have sought to pivot away from demands from his own Reparations Task Force for massive payments.
It may be too late for this effort as activists demand actual payments, including up to $5 million for each eligible citizen in cities like San Francisco.
Now Professor Hansford is calling on the United Nations to order such payments by the United States. It is an interesting pitch to countries that were directly involved in the slave trade or enslaved other people in their own histories. Reparations would appear to apply to many of the same countries and might be looked at with some skepticism and concern in their own capitals.
Professor Hansford is a scholar who has written extensively on critical race theory. He has been an advocate for not only reparations but “police abolition”:
“Well, yes, when I think of police abolition, I think that it’s the right word. I think about the abolitionists that we saw in the 19th century — Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass — and their work, which was our destiny as a people, to be free. And I think that’s part of the same tradition. I think that it’s the same work. I think that the systems that we’re facing today are continuations of the systems that the abolitionists in the 19th century worked against. So, yes, I support that. I think that has to be the ultimate goal.”
I have serious objections to these views, but value the debate. Indeed, part of the effort to combat the intolerance for opposing viewpoints at schools like Howard University is to allow a more robust debate on these issues.
Reparations is a debate that we should have as a nation, including in Congress. Recently, Democrats introduced a bill demanding $14 trillion in reparations. I have major misgivings over the legal and policy basis for such payments, but welcome any forum for a free and civil debate. The United Nations did not offer an opposing view on this question, which is often the case on our campuses.
Professor Hansford called on the United Nations to stop “cultural genocide” and to end the “continuation of slavery” through means like “mass incarceration” in the United States.
The Biden Administration nominated Professor Hansford to work with the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) for the 2022-2024 term. Hansford is the only American representative.
Here are Professor Hansford’s remarks:
Wish Prof Turley and other well know legal experts would not just report but decry these grifter efforts as highly unjustifiable, ultimately unconstitutional, and not possible from any practical point of view.
These continual demands from such reprehensible, elite grifters only increase unjustifiable frustration & anger in many blacks, who are in fact lucky to be here, and provide justification in lame brains for robbery & theft of which in democrat-run cities we’ve seen too much of. In fact, this might be these anti-white hater’s & grifter’s real goal.
Indeed. Some official body somewhere has stated blacks are “owed” $1-5million/cranium, so it will be entirely unsurprising for them to be walking around fixated on **why** they aren’t getting that million-dollar check (can only be whitey’s fault)!
Czechs need to demand reparations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire which forbad using Czech in public, only German. That caused Czechs to resort to puppet shows in taverns where Czech could be spoken. Czech puppets during the Nazi era were so annoying with their comments that the Nazi jailed one of them in the 1930’s. What’s needed nowadays is a return to puppetry which mocks the prevailing foolishness.
If reparations are being handed out, Czechs deserve a cut. My late mother recalled how in 1920’s & 1930’s Chicago her cousins were often anguished because they were called “Bohunks” or “Mushroom Pickers”. And
late in my mother’s life, one of her acquaintances, whose father was connected to George Crile of the Cleveland Clinic, recalled the deprecating view her father had of Czechs or Bohemians. It’s much, much harder to find a group that has NOT been shunned or discriminated against at one time or another. Since we all deserve reparations from numerous past wrongs, let’s declare a truce and call the whole thing off. Get back to living life in real time.
Don’t the Italians owe us all something for the Roman Empire!
You owe us for Michelangelo, Botticelli, Vivaldi, etc.
“etc.” . . .
Galileo, Alberti, Cellini, Vesalius (by adoption), Volta . . .
According to Dr Fauci’s, “The Reaper”, “Follow the Science” type Idiot Followers, NIH, NIAID, HHS, CDC, DOD, etc., Galileo would have been Burnt Alive at the Stake because Galileo had a different view of the “Science” then the “Bought n Paid Off” Govt Narrative of the “Accepted Science”.
Reparations are certainly owed to the millions of families ripped apart, generation after generation, by the Great Society programs that have made it easier for men to abandon their children and the mothers of their children. These programs have produced communities dominated by out-of-wedlock births, drug addiction, violent crime, poor educational achievement, and never-ending poverty.
Specos
Yes! LBJ, The Great Society Programs have enslaved generations of Americans into poverty. The decimation of the nuclear family, continues, even today, as govt seeks to strip parents of their power to rear their children as they desire. Dependency, is the goal of Democrat Party policy.
Reparations are long overdue the Irish who were kidnapped by the English, transported to the West Indies and Caribbean colonies and sold as slaves in the 1600’s. The United Nations should include the Irish in this reparation’s tribunal.
I believe that it is of paramount importance for the survival of our great society to implement reparations and wheel alignments
The hustle never ends
I think Prof Hansford should start with requesting reparations from the African tribes that sold people to the European traders. Then he can move on to the European countries that began the Trans-atlantic slave trade. Spain, The Netherlands (Dutch), France, Portugal. He would have to then include every North African country and the Mediterranean countries since the old slave trade routes ran from central Africa to Mali northward (I believe Timbuktu was a major way point). He should probably include the countries from whence the Vikings raided Britain and Ireland and brought captives to be sold in the markets of Northern Africa and the Middle East. Oops, sorry, those people were white, doesn’t count.
The point is that practically every country on the globe was involved in slavery in some way going back thousands of years. He would better serve “his people” by working (for a start) to ensure that they receive the best education possible from the earliest years. But that would include taking to task the political party to which he is most likely affiliated…the blue one…since they control practically every educational system in the country.
Where do I send the bill for the enslavement of my ancestors in Egypt?
EconIsEasy…….exactly!
I agree with the sentiment of ‘Anonymous’ above. Slavery has been practiced on the world since the start of humanity, even in biblical times. It’s a culture/tribal thing. Reparations does not make any sense. As a society we should look to the future and use the past as guidance for what to do and what not to do, treat every human being as equal and let the chips fall where they may.
We still have places that are named after people who played large roles in the slave trade, examples include New York and Yale. New York City and State are named after the Duke of York. He and his brother, King Charles II (whose name-sake is Charles III of England, etc. and clearly does not know his name-sake’s history) were the founders of the Royal African Trading company which had a royal monopoly on all slave trading to the British colonies in the Americas. Yale is named after Elihu Yale who head the East India Company’s operation in Madras which was involved in trading slaves. He was also a documented abuser of Native Americans. The list is long.
I agree with Vernon Jones of GA who recently stated that no one here in the USA has ever been a slave or has ever owned a slave.. we need to move beyond this to the Present, where we all live in Freedom together (Reality) to-day. Every nation in History has had to deal with the problem of slavery. i.e., fact: my great great grandfather was a Greek sailor who was beheaded by a Turkish fleet for refusing to be a slave on their ships.. ergo.. we see that ANY demands for reparations for the past are simply Ridiculous as it just keeps old paradigms alive and spinning, blocking the Progress we have all made as a Human Race..
I’ll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that Hansford is a Communist. Stokely Carmichael, the architect of Black Power, was/is one, as were all of the leaders of the various “movements” of the 1960s. They keep stirring the pot th reparations to keep American blacks under their yoke. As far as reparations go, they should have paid to slaves, if anybody, and that’s questionable. Blacks and others seized on the reparations thing after they were paid to Japanese-Americans Earl Warren and FDR thew into internment camps during World War II. They claim that blacks are “held back” because of slavery but the reality is that they are generally of lower than average IQ and lack the ability to do anything beyond manual labor. Blacks have been catered to since the 1960s, even to the point of having their own “fields of studies” of which Hansford is a product. Karl Marx was a big supporter of Abe Lincoln and he encouraged him to use the Union Army to free slaves rather than reunify the country. Marx saw freed slaves and Northern factory workers as the ticket to a Communist revolution in the United States. W.E.B. Dubois, in particular, bought into Marx’s plans (he was a Communist) and his followers have been pushing it on the black population for the last century.
The Democrats’ preening on race and reparations has come back to bite them. 80% of whites oppose it, 80% of blacks want it (surprise, surprise!). The only thing standing between racialists and a pot of gold is harsh reality. Let the Democrats campaign on giving $5-million to every black in America. Let Joe Biden be the leader of that campaign in the coming months. Let’s see how much of the Democratic party remains after the next election.
Okay, Joe. Time to put up or shut up.
Israel should demand reparations from Africans.
IF this ever become a law from Congress, the IRS would need more than the new 84,000 agents the last Congress authorized to collect ANY taxes from the 88% who will foot this bill. I guess it’s good to talk about the possibility of reparations so that we can discuss the “Tom Foolery” of such a notion. Unlike our ignoring of the “Global Warming Charlatans” as idiots . . . and now they have beaten the government down and have taken over the Pedo Joe Biden Administration. No new gas cars sold by 2035 in CA and other states, where are the spending bills for massive electrical grid expansion? Obama is trying to collapse our system through his minions in government . . . It appears to be working.
Obviously his research is quite biased and definitely one sided. I see where he specifically excludes every other non-white race or ethnicity that engaged in slavery, which pretty much involved all of humanity since civilization first began. Latest research has stated that 10.7 million african slaves survived the voyage of the middle passage to the new world. Of those approx 4-5 million went to Brazil, Millions more to the gold and silver mines of western south america, another million to Jamaica, and various other British, French, Spanish and Dutch slave colonies in the carribean. 390,000 to the British colonies of North America, ending in 1808.
This also does not for account millions shipped north from subsaharan africa to North Africa and millions more from Eastern Africa across the Indian Ocean to the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and what is now Indonesia. Starting before Europeans even found the east coast of africa.
And then there were all the other millions who were not African and slaves also.
Of course I can say that since I did not go to Harvard and I’m not faculty at Harvard but I can obviously do better research.
Correction since I obviously can’t read and misread Harvard for Howard.
The discussion for Professor Hansford and the Race Baiters is always one way. Always….
Skyraider…………that’s because it’s never a “discussion”…..it’s a monologue.
Let’s hope the world sees the irony in an American professor asking countries whose history is steeped in slave trading to demand reparations from countries who actually ended slave trading.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Why is it always the elites who “made it” in this “systemically racist system” who spout the most idiotic garbage? In a fair debate, maybe the opposing side would be able to present actual evidence that there is, in fact, no “cultural genocide” except what is being perpetuated by the left on what remains of western art, science and values. In a fair debate, we could also talk about the “mass incarceration” the left always likes to cite as evidence of genocide against blacks. They never present all the data, however, like actual crime statistics showing blacks as the majority perpetrators of homicide and robberies, despite their minority population status. Commit more crime and you will be imprisoned at higher numbers. It’s not rocket science, but apparently at Howard they have skipped the academic basics and went straight to hyperbole, hysterics, exaggeration and outright lies.
And Xi laughs.
I am certain that at some time in the past at least one of my ancestors was enslaved or oppressed by someone, and I still suffer the trauma of that enslavement or oppression. I demand that the UN order every government on earth to pay me reparations.
Race baiters trying to compel 88% of the population to make the other 12% rich.
Realistically, it is about a few grifters building careers on the backs of the greedy, the naive, and the cynical.
Let’s start with the fact that Howard University is a racist institution.