Should America Pay? by Raymond A. Winbush

What he has demonstrated is that while a national paralysis of will may exist at the present time, there is no lack of national guilt and interest in this theme.

Randall Robinson's The Debt has been one of the most popular and important books written on the subject so far because he has captured the warrants for reparations in very clear and accessible language. I am of the opinion that the discussion and debate surrounding reparations has only recently occurred in any serious way therefore, this essay is offered as an attempt to raise some of the philosophical ideas that might govern such a discourse. There are those who will immediately say that the people of the United States will never accede to reparations. While the argument for reparations is a Pan-African one, we are most interested in this essay with the discourse surrounding the enslavement and its consequences in the American society. Almost a decade before the powerful book 'The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, written by Randall Robinson in 2000, America laid out the economic bases of the debt owed to African Americans. In his 1993 monograph Paying the Social Debt: What White America Owes Black America, Richard America makes a forceful argument that reparation for Europe's enslavement of Africans in the United States is an idea whose time has arrived. Until lions have historians, hunters will be heroes. Molefi Kete Asante The African American Warrant for Reparations: The Crime of European Enslavement of Africans and Its Consequences

Should America Pay? by Raymond A. Winbush