Rickey Nelson Jones: Descendants of enslaved Africans are owed reparations

Forcing upon people the option of work or death is more than just slavery. It is assuming the role of God. However, people are not God. Therefore, racists embrace one of the highest forms of wickedness possible and violate God’s First Commandment. What racists in 1619 (and now) do not grasp is this: Their hearts are evil and their minds dwell in delusion.  Reparations counter that evil and undermine the delusion by returning what was wrongfully taken from innocent people, namely, their blood, sweat, body, mind, years, and tears. Intellectually and historically, we are “beyond” debating the properness and overdue nature of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans. The correctness of reparations is evident in the following acts which recognized the need to “make whole”: payment to Japanese Americans  interned during World War II; payment to victims of the  Nazi Holocaust by Germany; post-Civil War legislation activated in 1865 providing 40 acres and a mule for formally enslaved Africans; and in 1989, U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ House of Representatives Bill 40 to establish a commission to develop proposals for African American reparations.The bill continues to be introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and  Sen. Cory Booker). The arguments against...