Tag: history

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The Case for African-American Reparations

This was originally a paper I wrote for a Sociology course over at UCSD back in 2012. Even after the passage of several years, I still consider what I articulate in this paper to be representative of my current views on the topic.

Are Black Americans owed reparations for the oppression they have suffered throughout American history? Many if not most White Americans would say no, whereas many if not most Black Americans would say yes. The question of reparations is a racially polarizing one, and since Whites form the demographic majority and socioeconomically dominant ethnic group in America, this has meant that reparations have never been paid. This payment is long overdue. Since Black Americans have suffered from and continue to suffer today an ancient legacy of racial oppression, a reparations program for them is long overdue.

The most commonly cited objections to reparations for African-Americans’ suffering are that slavery ended too long ago and that many White Americans’ ancestors never owned slaves, therefore absolving Whites as a collective of any responsibility over the issue. The former argument would be valid if slavery was the only historical crime against Black Americans and if modern Blacks did not suffer from its effects, but neither of these conditions have been met. The oppression and unfavorable treatment that Blacks received continued even after slavery was formally abolished and still affects the modern Black experience. As for the second argument, while Whites as a whole may not have been guilty of slavery, they have benefited from a racist social hierarchy that favored them over Blacks. This is not a question of making White people feel guilty about what a few of their ancestors did over 150 years ago. The fundamental issue is one of healing a larger legacy of racism that elevated Whites about Blacks.

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Staff of the Red Sun

An illustration I did for my short story “Staff of the Red Sun”.

Egypt, 1942 AD

The limestone door ground over the gravelly earth as the diggers pushed it open. The grating noise would not have been the most pleasant for most men to hear, but for Friedrich von Essen, it was music to his ears. After untold weeks of watching these chattering Arabs gouge a pit out of the desert beneath the roasting sun, he had found it at last.

The thought of presenting this discovery to those fools back in Berlin made him smirk with glee. Even the Führer himself, eager as he was for any leverage in the war, had shown a bit of hesitance before sponsoring the expedition. Even if Friedrich ended up finding nothing inside this tomb, he had at least confirmed its very existence.

A faint yet acrid smell flowed out from the black depths beyond the doorway. The Arab diggers jumped back with startled shouts and whimpered among themselves, their normally bronze faces slightly blanched.

Underneath the howl of the wind, Friedrich thought he had heard a soft whisper. It must have been one of the dozens of men behind him, but it did make the back of his neck prickle.

“What do those inscriptions say, Professor von Essen?” Colonel Hermann Schmidt pointed to the string of hieroglyphs chiseled into the entrance’s lintel.

“Oh, those simply identify the tomb as belonging to Nefrusheri,” Friedrich said. “Why?”

The colonel’s tanned face had turned a shade paler as well. “I only wanted to make sure it wasn’t something like a curse.”

“Oh, don’t believe such sensationalist rubbish. Curses aren’t as common on Egyptian tombs as you think. You might find a few in tombs from the Old Kingdom, but that’s about it.”

“Fair enough, Professor. I would’ve expected a fearsome sorceress like your Nefrusheri would have something protecting her resting place.”

Friedrich glanced back at the darkness within the tomb. If the departed sorceress truly possessed the sort of power he sought, it would seem strange if she had not taken measures to defend it somehow. What those would be, he could not even guess.

On the other hand, he could not let fear and paranoia keep anyone away. Not when there was a war to win and a world to conquer.

“In case she does, bring your men over here,” Friedrich said. “We’ll go in together.”

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Why Europeans are Almost 1/3 African

Did you know that European people can attribute almost a third of their ancestry to additional migrations out of Africa?

It should be common knowledge by now that human beings in their modern form, Homo sapiens, first evolved in Africa. Exactly when we emerged on the scene remains uncertain (recent fossil discoveries suggest it may have happened over 300,000 years ago, a hundred millennia earlier than we originally thought), but whenever it was, most of our species’s history of existence would have played out on the so-called “Dark Continent”. It would have been no earlier than 70,000 years ago — and possibly as soon as 55,000 years ago — when the ancestors of all people outside of Africa would wander out of the continent and colonize the rest of the habitable world.

This would not have been the first dispersal of hominin apes out of Africa, mind you. Much in the press has been made of the fact that between 1–7% of modern human ancestry outside our ancestral continent comes from the descendants of earlier emigrants such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans. What may not be so widely publicized, however, is that the famous “Out of Africa” migration between 70–55,000 years ago would not have been the last movement of Homo sapiens from Africa into Eurasia and beyond, either. There is, in fact, a plethora of compelling evidence that humans from Africa continued to venture out and leave a permanent genetic mark on the ancestry of their Eurasian kin— even the “white” peoples of Europe.

I don’t mean a light dash, either. Almost one third of European ancestry descends from African admixture within the last 55,000 years.

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