AB-3121 Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans –Community of Eligibility Panel Testimony by Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, Founder of the National Black Cultural Information Trust – March 29, 2022 2:45pm ET
Thank you for having me. It is an honor to speak before this historic task force.
My name is Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor; I am a descendant of Africans that were enslaved in Georgia and South Carolina. The oldest known ancestor on my maternal side is John Hamilton, born in 1853, and his wife Delaney, born in 1857, both designated as “Mulattos” in the 1880 U.S. Census and “Black” in later census records. Their granddaughter Flossie Hamilton is my maternal great-grandmother. When she married my great-grandfather George Wilder, slavery had been abolished. However, like many other African Americans living in the South, Flossie and George were not allowed to live freely due to the oppressive system of sharecropping that made many Black families indebted and criminalized for seeking to leave. So they fled in the middle of the night with their children to Augusta, Georgia, where most of my maternal family resides today.
Flossie and George are not distant relatives that I learned about through other people. I spent time with them growing up as a young child. Though decades removed from the plantation, George still feared that white men were coming to get him. Though he was free, my great grandfather never fully felt or lived freedom, constantly experiencing post-traumatic stress, which passed down to this family as epigenetic injury.
I bring up their story because it highlights two significant factors of importance concerning the community of eligibility: lineage and harms. For reparative justice, both lineage and harms should be considered, with special prioritization towards harms-based reparations.
Concerning Lineage and Special Consideration to Direct Descendants
Lineage is important to reparations discourse because our lineage was subjected to ongoing terror and systemic oppression. However, the concept of lineage should not be limited to the system of chattel slavery. This limited description minimizes and or erases the historical, ethnic, and cultural identities of both our ancestors and ourselves, which is essential for understanding and identifying the harmed communities. African Americans are a mixture of descendants of various African ethnic groups. Over time, with shared experiences, cultural fusion, and combined progeny, African Americans became an ethnic group through the process of ethnogenesis. And we are also part of a larger ethnic identity consisting of the greater African Diaspora with other Africans that endured the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and merged identities in the Western World also through ethnogenesis.
These expansive ethnic identities, though more recently affirmed and identified, emerged before the formation of the United States and continued forming following the construction of the United States (as various African ethnic groups continued combining and creating communities during and after the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade). This expansive ethnic categorization is often referred to as African descendants, Afro-Descendants, and or People of African Descent, institutionalized and officially recognized by the United Nations. The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action adopted at the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, and ongoing Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.
Understanding “People of African descent” as a special category and African Americans as an ethnic group among this category of Trans Atlantic Slave Trade Survivors is a critical factor in better understanding lineage and how to navigate potential issues concerning “race-based” and “race-neutral” legislation.
Concerning the Community of Eligibility, Black Immigrants, and Black American Migrants
Reparations should be implemented through a streamlined non-invasive approach that gives as many African Americans the opportunity to receive remedies as possible. Strict mechanisms of approval that would force families to take DNA tests and endure extensive genealogical background searches should be avoided. This would be an invasive, time-consuming, and costly strategy that potentially excludes African American families that refuse to submit DNA or refuse genealogical background searches. Furthermore, the assertion that everyone can or will trace this ancestry (independently) does not account for accessibility and or disability issues.
Many who disagree with limiting eligibility to the enslavement era do not disagree in order to dilute or harm African American justice claims but to protect it. Specifically, in the case of Black Californians, much attention has been given to the question of Black immigrants, and not enough attention has been given to descendants of Black American migrants from Southern States. The majority of Black immigrants arrived in California within the last 50-30 years. Additionally, according to State Immigration Data Profiles (2019) of the Migrant Policy Institute, 26.7% of Californians are foreign born with just 1.8% being Black (less than 2%). The vast majority of the Black immigrant population (78%) in California arrived in the last 30 years; only 22% have lived in California for more than 30 years. They are therefore easily distinguishable regarding qualifications for reparations for chattel slavery if California were to take a tiered harms-based approach.
On the other hand, Black American Californians face their own uphill battle concerning limiting eligibility to chattel slavery. Many Black Americans in California are, in fact, not descendants of persons enslaved within the state of California. Instead, many are descendants of persons enslaved in Southern states of Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, etc. Their families later migrated to California during the Great Migration from 1910 to 1970, especially during and following World War II. Suppose eligibility was limited only to the enslavement era. In that case, the State of California could likely decide only to provide reparations for Black Californians that can provide proof of descendancy from persons enslaved within the state. This would be the next logical step and not a far-fetched scenario. In this case, many Black American Californians, would not qualify for reparations in California.
However, by recognizing reparations as inclusive of the era of enslavement, the U.S. Apartheid System, and ongoing systemic racism, African American Californians would be safely protected and covered under reparations initiatives and eligibility claims.
Concerning Harms
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress published, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of The United States against the Negro People asserting that the United States violated the U.N. Genocide Convention. Current-day reparations advocates like Nkechi Taifa have also declared that the harms endured by People of African descent in the United States fit the definition of genocide according to the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Taifa even coined the term “‘institutional genocide’ as a framework through which to analyze the evolving jurisprudence of international human rights doctrine to selected conditions impacting Black people in the United States.” World Conference Against Racism declared slavery and the slave trade “crimes against humanity.”
The harms that our ancestors experienced and their descendants experience are more than about lost wages or the racial wealth gap; they care about our civil and human rights. They are about the vestiges of historic government-sanctioned violence against People of African descent and systemic oppression that, after chattel slavery, also made us victims of mass incarceration and prevented us from access to housing, healthcare, education, and banking. Thus, to fully close the door on these horrific chapters in history, reparations should not be limited to the era of enslavement, or eligibility should not be limited to proof of lineage during the period of enslavement. It must also include the U.S. Apartheid System and ongoing systemic racism. The eligibility for harms against people of African descent in the United States was ongoing and inclusive. Thus, the remedies must be ongoing inclusive, or we risk extending the injuries instead of repairing them.
For media inquiries, email info@nbcit.org.
Recommended reading:
The National African American Reparations Commission’s Preliminary 10 Point Reparations Program: https://reparationscomm.org/reparations-plan/
CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice https://caricom.org/caricom-ten-point-plan-for-reparatory-justice/
Racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System: Institutionalized Genocide? by Nkechi Taifa https://www.acslaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Racism_in_the_U.S._Criminal_Justice_System.pdf
The Harm Is to Our Genes: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance and Systemic Racism in America https://www.ncobraonline.org/harmreport/
Column: They say California stole their ancestors’ land. But do they qualify for reparations?https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-09/california-reparations-task-force-debates-eligibility-black-people
Slavery in a Free State: The Case of California https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-in-a-free-state-the-case-of-california/ African Americans in California: A Brief Historiography https://www.jstor.org/stable/25177592?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3Aa614a9a92adb2af4c06bf13da7e1c035&seq=2
World Conference Against Racism: New Avenues for Slavery Reparations? https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1673&context=vjtl
We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People (1951) https://depts.washington.edu/moves/images/cp/1.%20We%20Charge%20Genocide%201-28.pdf
World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance https://www.un.org/WCAR/durban.pdf California Immigrant Data Portal Recency of Arrival https://immigrantdataca.org/indicators/recency-of-arrival#/?breakdown=3&geo=02000000000006000
California Immigrant Data Portal: https://immigrantdataca.org/indicators/foreign-born#/
Migration Policy Institute: State Immigration Data Profiles https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/state-profiles/state/demographics/CA