- 5 days ago
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Why Black Americans Should Oppose This Reparation Proposal
From the desk of Matt Murdock, Esq.
Part One: The Global Shell Game and the Acoustic Signatures of Betrayal
The rain in Chicago has a distinct acoustic signature. When it hits the pavement on LaSalle Street, it does not just splash. It drums against the concrete with a heavy, rhythmic percussion that most people simply ignore, tucking their chins into their collars and hurrying toward the shelter of the L train. To them, it is just background noise. To me, it is a topographical map of systemic failure. I can hear the water pooling in the specific, jagged cracks of the sidewalks outside the federal courthouse. These are the same structural fractures the city ignores while its politicians stand at podiums talking endlessly about grand urban renewal. It is the sound of a foundation that was never level to begin with, slowly eroding under the weight of its own unkept promises.
That is exactly what this contemporary international reparations debate feels like to a lawyer who listens to the heartbeat of the streets. It is a grand, sweeping structure being built on a profoundly crooked foundation.
Recently, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo has spearheaded a renewed campaign at the United Nations General Assembly, culminating in the 2023 Accra Reparations Conference. Partnering with the Caribbean Community, universally known as CARICOM, Ghana is pushing for a unified, global reparations fund. The stated objective is to hold European nations financially accountable for the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent, brutal colonization of the African continent. We must evaluate this not as a political slogan, but as a legal maneuver.
This global push directly intersects with the complex dynamics of the international reparations dilemma. Ghana’s approach operates strictly on a state-to-state level. The legal theory asserts that the violent extraction of human capital and natural resources structurally impoverished the African continent. Therefore, it creates a binding legal and moral obligation for European powers to fund African development, initiate massive debt cancellation, and return stolen wealth.
However, when we sit in a law office in the Loop and dissect the tension between Black Americans and Pan-Africans, we see that this continental, state-sponsored approach inherently and dangerously complicates the legal standing of Black Americans. If the international community adopts a generalized Pan-African settlement, it risks permanently overshadowing the distinct, sovereign, and highly specific claims of the descendants of the enslaved living within the borders of the United States.
The legal architecture outlined in the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1865 (officially cited as Act of Mar. 3, 1865, ch. 90, 13 Stat. 507) established a direct, contractual, and statutory obligation between the United States federal government and the newly emancipated. Furthermore, the localized, state-sponsored atrocities such as the Tulsa Race Massacre demonstrate that Black Americans possess highly specific domestic tort claims against the federal and state governments. These claims are rooted in specific lineage, undeniable constitutional betrayals, and the systemic, codified violence of Jim Crow policies. They are not rooted in a broad, continental identity. Thus, Ghana’s Pan-African push, while historically significant on the international stage, creates severe legal friction by potentially subsuming the unique legal identity and direct lineage claims of Black Americans under a diluted, global umbrella.
Part Two: The Genesis and Jurisprudence of Reparatory Justice
The demand for reparatory justice is not a modern phenomenon engineered by progressive think tanks. It spans centuries and is deeply rooted in the immediate, bleeding aftermath of chattel enslavement. We must trace the jurisprudence of this demand to understand the current legal battlefield.
The Early Ironies of Compensation
In the nineteenth century, the concept of reparations was applied with a cruel, inverted logic. Financial compensation was initially paid to the enslavers rather than the enslaved. We look to international examples for precedent. When Britain formally abolished slavery through the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. 4, c. 73), the British government took out massive, generational loans to compensate plantation owners for the loss of their legally defined property. Similarly, in 1825, the French government dispatched warships to a newly independent Haiti, forcing the nation to pay an exorbitant financial indemnity to cover the financial losses of French enslavers. This was a debt that crippled the Haitian economy for over a century, operating under the brutal international legal doctrine of gunboat diplomacy.
The American Origins and the Breach of Contract
In the United States, early claims for restorative justice were highly individualized. The historical record shows the successful 1783 petition by Belinda Sutton, a formerly enslaved woman who secured a pension from the estate of her enslaver in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She did not ask for a global fund. She demanded the specific wages for the specific labor stolen from her bones.
Following the bloody conclusion of the American Civil War, the federal government made explicit promises. The broken promise of Special Field Orders No. 15, issued by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, promised the legendary forty acres and a mule. This was quickly followed by the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau. These actions laid the absolute groundwork for federal accountability.
When those reparatory efforts were violently dismantled by President Andrew Johnson, the late nineteenth century saw the rise of the Ex-Slave Pension movement. This movement was led by brilliant, grassroots organizers like Callie House, who built a mass movement demanding federal compensation for unpaid labor. The federal government did not respond with legal debate. They responded with the criminal justice system, weaponizing the United States Postal Service to charge Callie House with mail fraud simply for organizing a petition for reparations. This is a tactic the federal government has historically utilized when facing domestic liability, turning the claimant into a criminal.
The Modern Paradigm Shift in International Law
The legal debate regarding state-sponsored restorative justice lay relatively dormant in mainstream political spheres until the post-World War Two era. The financial reparations paid to Jewish Holocaust survivors by the West German government, formalized in the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952, established a vital new international precedent. It proved that state-sponsored restorative justice was not just a moral theory, but a legally actionable reality.
In the United States, the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (50 U.S.C. app. Section 1989b), which formally apologized and compensated Japanese Americans for their unconstitutional internment during World War Two, proved that historical redress for civil rights violations was legally and politically viable on domestic soil. By 2001, the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, formally recognized the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. This international declaration set the stage for modern legislative efforts like H.R. 40 in the United States Congress and Ghana’s current campaign at the United Nations.
Part Three: The Parties in the Multi-Jurisdictional Arena
The contemporary reparations landscape is a chaotic, multi-jurisdictional arena. To litigate this conceptually, we must categorize the parties involved into claimants, debtors, and institutional facilitators. You cannot file a lawsuit without properly naming the parties.
The Claimants (The Plaintiffs)
African Nations and The African Union: This plaintiff class is represented by sovereign countries like Ghana. They are demanding restorative justice, massive developmental funds, and the immediate return of stolen cultural artifacts from former colonial powers. Their cause of action is based on the extraction of human life and the subsequent ravages of European colonialism.
CARICOM: This is a formalized coalition of Caribbean nations. They have established a rigorous Ten-Point Action Plan. This plan demands comprehensive debt cancellation, the transfer of modern technology, and formal, legally binding apologies from the European powers that occupied their islands.
Black Americans and Lineage-Based Descendants: These are the communities and legal advocates demanding direct financial compensation, land allocation, and institutional reform directly from the United States government. Their legal standing is based firmly on direct descent from American chattel slavery and the subsequent, state-sponsored disenfranchisement mapped out by Jim Crow laws and federal redlining policies. Their injury is localized, specific, and continuously compounding in places like the South Side of Chicago.
The Debtors (The Defendants)
Former European Colonial Powers: This defendant class includes nations such as Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. These sovereign states built vast, wealthy empires and directly funded their industrial revolutions through the brutal mathematics of the triangular trade.
The United States Government: This defendant must be bifurcated. The federal government is liable for massive constitutional failures and discriminatory federal policies. Furthermore, state and municipal governments bear liability for highly localized policies, such as the deliberate destruction of prosperous Black neighborhoods in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or the fiercely discriminatory housing laws that shaped the segregated map of Chicago.
Complicit Private Institutions: These are the private, corporate entities that directly financed or profited from the trade. They include legacy banking institutions, massive insurance syndicates like Lloyd's of London, and elite academic universities that utilized the literal sale of enslaved human beings to build their prestigious, tax-exempt endowments.
The Intermediaries
International Bodies: The United Nations and various international human rights tribunals operate as the intermediaries. They are increasingly pressured by global coalitions to establish the legal frameworks necessary to move these historical grievances out of the realm of moral arguments and into the binding, enforceable reality of international law.
To comprehensively map this debate, we must examine the defensive postures of the named debtors. Just as the claimants have evolved their strategies from localized paper petitions to massive international United Nations coalitions, the defendants have developed highly sophisticated legal, political, and rhetorical defenses to shield their treasuries from financial liability.
Part Four: The Defensive Posture and the Shield of the Sovereign
Let us break down the exact legal and political defenses the defendants use to deflect the demands for reparatory justice. In the courtroom, we anticipate the defense. We study their motions to dismiss before we even file the complaint.
Former European Colonial Powers and the Regret Without Liability Doctrine
For several centuries, the primary legal defense of European empires was absolute silence. When forced to speak, they asserted that the legal abolition of slavery itself served as the final moral and financial settlement. In the modern era, as intense pressure mounts from organized bodies like the African Union and CARICOM, European responses have shifted toward a carefully calibrated, highly cynical diplomatic strategy.
European nations frequently employ the strategy of expressing deep sorrow or profound regret while explicitly and meticulously avoiding a formal, legal apology. In the eyes of the law, an apology is a dangerous thing. A formal apology can be construed as a binding admission of legal liability, instantly opening the door to massive judgments in international tribunals. For instance, various British Prime Ministers have stood before the public and expressed sorrow for the role the United Kingdom played in the transatlantic slave trade. However, in the very same breath, they have explicitly rejected the concept of financial reparations.
Legally, these European states argue the foundational principle of non-retroactivity. Under international law, this is known as nullum crimen, nulla poena sine praevia lege poenali. This doctrine asserts that a person or a state cannot be punished for an act that was not legally defined as a crime under the law of the jurisdiction at the time it was committed. The defense argues that the slave trade, however morally abhorrent we recognize it to be today, was entirely state-sanctioned and perfectly lawful under the imperial legal frameworks of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.
There are rare, highly calculated deviations from this defense. In the year 2022, the government of the Netherlands issued a formal apology for its role in slavery and simultaneously established a fund of two hundred million euros. This fund was earmarked for awareness and education. However, claimants and legal scholars heavily criticized this action as a unilateral decision. It was made without consulting the descendants of the victims. In the legal community, we recognize this not as true restorative justice, but as a calculated public relations maneuver designed to cap liability and control the narrative.
The United States Government, Legislative Purgatory, and Sovereign Immunity
The United States government faces a highly unique and terrifying legal challenge. They have the descendants of the enslaved living directly within their own borders. This proximity transforms an abstract international human rights issue into a highly volatile, immediate domestic constitutional crisis.
The immediate historical response following the Civil War was the aggressive, violent retraction of early reparatory efforts. As previously mentioned, President Andrew Johnson vetoed vital civil rights legislation and overturned Special Field Orders No. 15. The federal government returned confiscated Confederate land to the former treasonous enslavers rather than distributing it to the Freedmen.
Subsequently, the United States government has historically hidden behind the shield of sovereign immunity. We must define this carefully:
According to Black’s Law Dictionary 1696 (11th ed. 2019), sovereign immunity is defined as a government's immunity from being sued in its own courts without its consent.
This legal doctrine makes it exceptionally difficult for descendants to sue the federal government without the government first passing legislation allowing itself to be sued. The Federal Tort Claims Act provides some exceptions, but historically, the courts have refused to apply those exceptions to historical lineage claims.
A frequent, highly emotional political counter-argument deployed in the United States is the Blood Debt argument. Politicians argue that the American Civil War itself, and the hundreds of thousands of Union lives lost to defeat the Confederacy, served as the ultimate, violent, and final payment of the nation's moral debt.
At the federal level, the legal response has been perpetual, deliberate delay. H.R. 40, a bill designed simply to study and develop reparation proposals for Black Americans, has been introduced in every single Congress since 1989. It has never received a full floor vote.
Consequently, the legal battlefield has strategically fractured into state and municipal jurisdictions. The California Reparations Task Force represents an unprecedented government response. They successfully concluded a multi-year study that legally defined eligibility based purely on lineage. They defined the claimant class strictly as individuals who can demonstrate direct descent from an enslaved person in the United States. They even calculated specific monetary damages. However, actual financial payouts remain totally stalled by budgetary constraints and intense political gridlock.
Complicit Private Institutions, Voluntary Mitigation, and Public Relations Shielding
Private institutions face a completely different legal landscape than sovereign governments. Legacy banks, massive insurance syndicates, and elite universities lack the absolute shield of sovereign immunity. In theory, they can be subjected to massive class-action litigation in federal court.
When descendants have attempted to sue private corporations, they are met with a formidable procedural defense. We must examine the sweeping legal effort known as In re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, 471 F.3d 754 (7th Cir. 2006). This massive consolidated lawsuit was brought against major financial institutions right here in the Northern District of Illinois. The primary, and almost always successful, legal defense utilized by these corporate armies is the expiration of the statute of limitations. The federal courts routinely rule that the plaintiffs are too far removed chronologically from the original tort. The judges argue that the direct perpetrators are long dead, and the current plaintiffs lack the specific standing required to maintain the suit. The courts refuse to apply the doctrine of equitable tolling, choosing instead to close the courthouse doors on the descendants.
Recognizing the immense reputational damage of historical exposure, the modern corporate and academic response has shifted aggressively toward voluntary mitigation. Universities that built their massive endowments by literally selling enslaved people, such as Georgetown University, have begun issuing formal apologies. Banks that accepted enslaved human beings as collateral for business loans have created dedicated scholarship funds or community investment grants.
Legally, this is a brilliant and deeply cynical maneuver. By voluntarily offering millions of dollars in so-called reparative initiatives, these institutions completely control the narrative. They dictate the terms. They cap their own financial exposure. Most importantly, they entirely avoid the dangerous legal precedent of legally mandated, binding, and calculated compensation awarded by a jury.
The Overarching Defense Strategy
Across all three categories of these defendants, the unified, unwritten strategy is blatantly obvious. The goal is to aggressively shift the entire discourse away from binding legal liability. Binding liability demands calculated, compensatory damages paid directly to specific lineages or nations. Instead, the defendants push the conversation toward the soft, controllable realm of moral philanthropy. Moral philanthropy allows the defendants to dictate the exact terms, the exact amount, and the exact recipients of the funds, usually laundering the money under the acceptable guise of development aid or corporate diversity scholarships.
Part Five: The Political Rhetoric as Legal Doctrine
To firmly ground our legal and sociological analysis in the gritty reality of contemporary political discourse, we must examine the exact language used by modern United States politicians who oppose reparatory justice. These verbatim quotes perfectly illustrate the defense doctrines we established in the Murdock framework. We are looking at non-retroactivity, sovereign immunity, and the deliberate shift toward broad economic policies over targeted, lineage-based compensation.
Here is exactly how the political defense shield is actively articulated across the American political aisle.
The Non-Retroactivity and Debt Already Paid Defense
The most common conservative legal defense relies entirely on the idea that current generations bear absolutely no legal or financial liability for the actions of their ancestors. Furthermore, they argue that the debt was already settled in full through historical events like the Civil War or subsequent political milestones.
The premier example of this specific legal doctrine was articulated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell during the historic 2019 congressional hearings on H.R. 40. He stated his position clearly. He argued that he did not think reparations for something that happened one hundred and fifty years ago, for whom none of the currently living population is responsible, is a good idea. He further argued that the nation tried to deal with the original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation, and by electing a Black American president.
Similarly, this exact legal doctrine of non-retroactivity was deployed on the international stage just weeks ago. In late March of 2026, when the United States government voted aggressively against the Ghana-led United Nations resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity and urging reparations, United States Ambassador Dan Negrea took the microphone. He explicitly cited the non-retroactivity defense. He stated that the United States absolutely does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not officially illegal under international law at the exact time they occurred.
The Ideological Indoctrination Defense
At the state level, particularly in conservative jurisdictions actively pushing back against critical race theory and diversity initiatives, the defense strategy shifts dramatically. It moves from a procedural legal argument to an aggressive cultural and political one. In this framework, the very discussion of reparations is framed not as a valid legal claim for damages, but as a hostile political agenda designed to destroy the state.
When blocking the College Board’s Advanced Placement Black American Studies course in the state of Florida in 2023, partially because the academic curriculum included detailed lessons on the modern reparations movement, Governor Ron DeSantis made his position known. He stated that the curriculum is more of an ideology being used under the false guise of history. He claimed that it is somebody pushing a dangerous agenda on the children of his state.
The Divisiveness and Universal Investment Defense
It is a massive sociological misnomer to assume that opposition to reparations is solely a conservative political posture. Within the Democratic party, opposition simply takes a different, softer rhetorical form. The strategy is avoiding targeted, lineage-based financial compensation in favor of broad, race-neutral economic investments. The argument presented here is that direct cash reparations are politically impossible to pass and socially fracturing to the nation.
Senator Bernie Sanders, summarizing the prevailing progressive hesitation toward direct, lineage-based cash payouts during his multiple presidential campaigns, stated his position firmly. He argued that the likelihood of a reparations bill getting through the United States Congress is absolutely null. He stated that he believes it would be very divisive. He proposed that the government should instead be talking about making massive investments in distressed communities. He argued that writing a check is not the best way to address the crises facing the American people.
Former President Barack Obama also articulated this specific political pivot away from direct repair and toward universal social programs. He expressed a profound concern that cash reparations would be cynically used as a permanent absolution for systemic racism. He stated his fear that reparations would quickly become an excuse for some portions of the country to say the debt has been paid in full. He worried this would allow society to avoid the much harder, daily work of enforcing anti-discrimination laws in employment and housing. He argued that the monumental challenge of making sure public schools are not separate and unequal will not magically go away with a single reparations check.
The Murdock Synthesis of the Defense
When we pull all of these quotes together and lay them out on the evidence table, the architecture of the defense becomes crystal clear. Whether it is McConnell’s blunt assertion that the debt was paid in blood at Appomattox, Ambassador Negrea's sophisticated international legal maneuvering regarding eighteenth-century international law, or Sanders’ and Obama’s pivots to universal social programming, the core objective remains perfectly identical.
The unified objective of the United States political apparatus is to legally and politically nullify the Black American lineage claim. They aim to avoid, at all costs, the obligation of direct, calculated, and binding financial restitution.
Part Six: The Doctrine of Unclean Hands and the Ashanti Anomaly
To fully integrate the historical reality of Ghana into our legal framework, we must examine a highly uncomfortable truth. It is a truth that fundamentally disrupts the modern Pan-African narrative being pushed at the United Nations. In the court of equity, where these moral claims are heavily debated, there is an absolute legal principle known as the clean hands doctrine.
According to Black’s Law Dictionary 305 (11th ed. 2019), the clean hands doctrine is the equitable principle that a party cannot seek equitable relief or assert an equitable defense if that party has violated an equitable principle, such as good faith, in relation to the very subject matter of the claim.
Simply put, a plaintiff cannot seek justice or demand massive financial damages if they themselves are intimately complicit in the very tort they are protesting.
When assessing the modern state of Ghana’s current role as the lead plaintiff demanding global reparations at the United Nations, we must look directly at the historical record of the Gold Coast during the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The historical record is cold, brutal, and completely unequivocal. The powerful African empires of that specific region were not merely passive, helpless victims of European extraction. They were highly organized, deeply willing, and heavily enriched business partners in the transatlantic supply chain.
We must review the historical brief on the role the Gold Coast played in the slave trade.
The Perpetuation of the Ashanti and Fante Supply Chains
The transatlantic slave trade functioned as a brutally efficient, globalized supply chain. While European ships provided the transatlantic transport and European colonies provided the final destination, the initial procurement of the human commodity was largely managed by sovereign African states.
We look first to the Ashanti Empire. Emerging in the late seventeenth century, the Ashanti Empire rapidly became the dominant military and economic power in the entire region. They actively perpetuated the human trade by launching aggressive, expansionist wars against neighboring, weaker societies. The prisoners of these violent conquests were immediately commodified and marched to the coastal markets. The Ashanti traded these human captives to European merchants, specifically the British, the Dutch, and the Danish. In exchange for human flesh, the Ashanti received advanced firearms, vast quantities of gunpowder, imported textiles, and heavy brass.
This created a horrific, self-perpetuating cycle of violence. Selling humans bought the guns, and possessing the guns allowed the empire to conquer more neighbors to sell as humans. This is the definition of a joint enterprise under tort law.
We also look to the Fante Confederacy. Operating along the heavily fortified coast, the Fante acted as the wealthy, powerful middlemen of the trade. They completely controlled the inland trade routes from the deep interior down to the coastal dungeons. They strictly regulated the European merchants' access to the inland slave markets. They acted as brokers, taking a heavy financial margin on every single human transaction.
The physical infrastructure of this complicity still stands today. The coast of modern Ghana is littered with dozens of stone slave castles, most notably Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle. While these massive fortresses were constructed by European engineers, they operated entirely on land leased directly from local African rulers. These rulers collected regular rent, heavy taxes, and lucrative tribute for allowing the industrial-scale deportation of their political rivals and conquered neighbors.
The Resistance and the Fractured Front
It is a gross historical inaccuracy to say that Africa sold its own people. This phrase is a lazy generalization because Africa was not, and is not, a monolith. The continent was composed of thousands of distinct, sovereign, and often deeply rival nations.
The true fight against the human trade was almost entirely waged by the decentralized, highly vulnerable societies of the interior. These were the groups who were the designated prey of the Ashanti and the Fante. Their resistance took pressure in the form of desperate, localized warfare. They built fortified hilltop villages to defend their families, or they fled deep into dense, inhospitable environments just to avoid capture by the raiding parties of the larger empires.
Paradoxically, when the British Empire officially outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the Ashanti Empire actively and violently resisted the abolition. King Osei Bonsu of the Ashanti famously questioned why the British suddenly wanted to end a lucrative trade that the prevailing religions of the time permitted. He recognized that the sale of human beings was the absolute backbone of his empire's immense wealth and military supremacy. The sudden cessation of the transatlantic slave trade economically destabilized the Ashanti. This economic collapse ultimately led to the bloody Anglo-Ashanti wars, as Britain shifted its strategy from being a willing trading partner to an aggressive colonizing force.
The Legal Paradox and the Pan-African Dilemma
This brutal history creates a profound legal and sociological paradox in the modern reparations debate. It explicitly highlights the deep, unresolvable tension between Pan-African advocates and Black American descendants.
First, we face the Co-Defendant Problem. Under a strict, rigorous legal analysis, if the European nations are named as the primary defendants for creating and funding the chattel system, the historical sovereign states of the Gold Coast must be named as unindicted co-conspirators. They profited immensely from the initial extraction. They held the keys to the holding cells.
Second, we face the massive Lineage Disconnect. When President Akufo-Addo of Ghana stands at the United Nations demanding billions in reparations from Europe, he is doing so primarily on behalf of the continent that suffered the subsequent, devastating trauma of late-nineteenth-century colonization. However, for a Black American citizen walking down 79th Street in Chicago, whose ancestors were branded and sold out of the dark belly of Cape Coast Castle, the political descendants of the Ashanti and Fante are not their legal proxies. They are not their advocates. They are the direct descendants of the very brokers who sold their ancestors into the transatlantic nightmare.
Part Seven: The Verdict of Blood and Bone, A Closing Argument on the Great Divergence
The rain is slicking the pavement outside my office on LaSalle Street, the kind of heavy, rhythmic drumming that drowns out the elevated train but absolutely cannot silence the structural groans of a city built entirely on top of its own secrets. I do not need a pair of working eyes to see the pattern here. I can feel the vibrations of the hustle deep in my bones. In the federal courtrooms of Chicago, we call this tactic a shell game. On the international stage, they dress it up in suits and call it diplomacy. But whether it is a shakedown in a back alley on the South Side or a grand resolution passed at the United Nations, the underlying legal reality remains exactly the same. You absolutely cannot settle a debt by paying the wrong person with someone else’s blood.
We have finally reached the end of the evidence. The exhibits are marked, the painful testimony is fully transcribed, and the air in this room is thick with the scent of old paper and brand new betrayals. What the government of Ghana is doing at the United Nations, this grand, sweeping gesture for a unified, global reparations fund, is a total masterclass in jurisdictional overreach. It is a calculated attempt to merge two vastly different torts into one massive, unmanageable class-action suit, where the lead plaintiff essentially has dirty hands and the actual, living victims of the American system are not even invited to the negotiation table.
The Doctrine of Unclean Hands Applied
In the court of equity, we live and die by a foundational principle. A plaintiff who seeks equity must do equity. When President Nana Akufo-Addo stands at the podium of the General Assembly, he is speaking for a sovereign state that sits squarely on the blood-soaked soil of the former Gold Coast. My heightened senses do not hear the soaring, inspirational rhetoric of Pan-African unity. I hear the clink of the heavy brass, the snap of the imported textiles, and the deafening roar of the European muskets that the Ashanti Empire eagerly received in exchange for the ancestors of the people currently living in Englewood.
The historical record is a cold, hard fact that cannot be debated away by a UN committee. The Ashanti and the Fante were not the victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. They were its primary shareholders. They were the brokers. To allow the modern state of Ghana to act as the primary, unblemished claimant for reparations regarding the slave trade is exactly like allowing the getaway driver of a bank robbery to sue the bank for the wear and tear on his tires.
The Specificity of the American Tort
The legal architecture of the Black American claim is not, and never has been, a Pan-African claim. It is a strictly domestic, lineage-based suit for specific performance and tremendous financial damages under the Laws of the United States. We are talking about a catastrophic breach of contract that started with the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865 and was systematically compounded by a century of state-sponsored domestic terrorism.
When we talk about the Tulsa Race Massacre, or when we file briefs in cases like Alexander v. Oklahoma, 382 F.3d 1206 (10th Cir. 2004), we are not talking about the abstract concept of colonialism. We are talking about the Fourteenth Amendment. We are talking about the deliberate, violent failure of the state to provide equal protection under the law, as guaranteed by U.S. Const. amend. XIV, Section 1. A Black American whose family was firebombed in Greenwood or systematically redlined out of generational wealth in Chicago has a direct, vertical, and unbroken claim against the United States Federal Government and the local municipal corporations.
By deep contrast, Ghana’s claim is entirely horizontal. It is a state-to-state claim demanding damages for the extraction of resources during the colonial Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century. These are two completely different crimes, committed by different defendants, against very different victims:
The African Claim demands damages for colonial extraction and developmental stagnation.
The Black American Claim demands damages for American chattel slavery, the massive theft of domestic labor, and the systematic, constitutional denial of civil rights.
To maliciously lump these together into a global fund is a legal maneuver specifically designed to dilute the massive, specific liability of the United States. It allows the United States government to comfortably hide behind the divisiveness defense mentioned by politicians across the spectrum. It fundamentally turns a mandatory, legally binding civil debt into a discretionary, tax-deductible foreign aid package.
The Non-Retroactivity Fiction
I have heard the hollow arguments from the politicians. They cling desperately to the idea that because slavery was legal at the time, there is zero liability now. That is a complete lie, and every lawyer who has passed the bar exam knows it.
The law has always fiercely recognized the concept of unjust enrichment.
According to Black’s Law Dictionary 1842 (11th ed. 2019), unjust enrichment is defined as the retention of a benefit conferred by another, without offering compensation, in circumstances where compensation is reasonably expected.
Even if the initial act of enslavement was state-sanctioned, the continuous retention of the immense economic benefit derived from that unpaid labor, the compounded interest of centuries of cotton, tobacco, and infrastructure, constitutes a massive, continuing tort.
The United States government did not just participate in a global trend. It meticulously codified a vicious racial caste system that survived the legal abolition of the underlying practice. The argument that the Civil War paid the price in blood is a deeply fallacious legal defense. A war fought to end an ongoing crime does not miraculously satisfy the civil judgment owed to the victim of that crime. If I burn your house down to the foundation, and then I get into a fistfight with the man who handed me the matches, the fact that I suffered a black eye does not mean I am absolved of the debt to build you a new house.
The Sovereignty of the Claim
The intense friction between the Pan-African push and the Black American claim is not just an academic exercise discussed in law school seminars. It is existential. If the United Nations successfully establishes a global fund, and the United States contributes a fraction of a fraction to that fund as a hollow gesture of goodwill, the federal government will immediately march into domestic courts to argue that the debt has been settled globally. They will file motions to dismiss every single lineage-based domestic suit on the grounds of accord and satisfaction.
But you absolutely cannot satisfy a debt owed to a man standing in Chicago by handing a development grant to a government sitting in Accra.
The Black American identity is forged in the blistering fires of the Middle Passage and the suffocating terror of the Jim Crow South. It is a distinct, undeniable legal class defined strictly by the status of the mother, the brutal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, and the subsequent, calculated disenfranchisement by the United States Constitution. To submerge that highly specific identity under a broad, global Pan-African umbrella is to complete the dark work of the original enslavers. It is the final, total erasure of the specific, sovereign personhood of the descendant.
The Final Summary
The evidence presented is overwhelmingly clear. The defendants, the European powers, the United States Government, and the complicit private institutions, are actively utilizing a unified strategy of defensive philanthropy. They offer carefully worded statements of regret and establish small scholarship funds specifically to avoid the cold, hard math of a legal balance sheet. They enthusiastically encourage the Pan-African narrative because it is broad, vague, and infinitely easier to manage than paying the specific, calculated, trillion-dollar damages owed to the millions of descendants of the American enslaved.
We are standing at a critical crossroads in international and domestic law. We can blindly choose the path of moral philanthropy, where the debtors comfortably dictate the exact terms of their own penance. Or we can aggressively choose the path of restorative justice.
According to Black’s Law Dictionary 1018 (11th ed. 2019), restorative justice is a system that focuses on the true rehabilitation of offenders through actual reconciliation with the specific victims.
True justice demands a rigorous precision that the United Nations simply cannot, and will not, provide. It requires a profound, legally binding recognition of the specific lineage claim. It requires a total admission that the debt owed is not a vague global one, but a highly specific, legally enforceable domestic one.
The rain is still falling hard against the windows of LaSalle Street. The city is still breathing, still shifting its weight on a broken foundation. And the ghosts of the ancestors are still waiting patiently for a legal settlement that does not involve a handshake between the people who originally sold them and the people who eagerly bought them.
I rest my case.
From the desk of Matt Murdock, Esq.
