Today I stumbled upon this brilliant letter written in 1865 by Jourdan Anderson to his former enslaver, Colonel P.H. Anderson. Spoiler alert: Surprise surprise, the enslaver did not respond by paying back the wages of $11,680 owed to Mr. and Mrs. Anderson for the labor stolen from them. I just did the math, and with inflation, the wages alone would be worth $389,914.34 today, not even including the interest that was already owed as of 1865 or any damages for the trauma, violence, and child rape that Mr. Anderson diplomatically alludes to. Their enslaver kept all of that AND the slave labor camp itself (aka “plantation”), passing it down to his own children. Looks like Mr. and Mrs. Anderson’s great-grandkids were still alive as of 2012… and needless to say, they were still without access to the stolen intergenerational wealth that their great-grandparents created.

Whereas I, personally, can trace the clear and specific impact on my life of the financial resources that my own great-grandparents accumulated. I’m no trust fund baby, but part of my personal safety net includes objects of value handed down from that generation and the next which I could turn into cash in an emergency — not to mention the intangible assets of education and middle-class upbringing that I possess because of the financial circumstances that I, my parents, and their parents were born into. All tracing back to my great-grandparents’ generation who immigrated to this country as part of a despised minority but who came voluntarily and were allowed by our government systems to keep what they earned. In contrast to the Andersons.

And that’s the crux of why it still matters that the Andersons were robbed. Their family should be in possession of the benefits of like half a million dollars right now, today. That they have been without it all these years is not ultimately the fault of their enslaver or his descendants; if you want to stop there in your analysis, you’re being lazy. This is not a matter that can be allowed to rest at the level of personal responsibility alone.

A government that allows this magnitude of theft to go unpunished, denied, unrepaired — year after year after year after year after year, for one hundred and fifty-five years, for millions of families like the Andersons — isn’t just accumulating what you might call a different kind of “national debt.” It’s a criminal enterprise at national scale.

#BlackLivesMatter #Reparations #DefundThePolice (and also #equalpayforequalwork given the disparity in Mr. Anderson’s estimation of his wife’s wages vs his own — #intersectionality matters and #BlackWomen matter!)