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Now and then I ask friends and fellow critics: ‘How much is enough?’
I did so again this week after colleagues in the thinking and writing business started questioning whether President Joe Biden’s decree pardoning Marcus ‘Mosiah’ Garvey “is” or “goes” far enough.
Successive Jamaican governments have – for decades -been calling for the US to ‘pardon’ Garvey for the set-up ‘mail fraud’ charge he was jailed for in 1923 in Atlanta, Georgia.
That was White America’s response to Garvey’s formation of the largest Black organization in US (and world) history — the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League (ACL) — and the Black Star Line for repatriation to his followers’ ancestral African homeland.
I hear the collective disgust about ‘how’ the pardon was given, but I still hold that this is a case where we should take what we’ve got until we can take (or get) what we want, or demand.
I understand the vast legal differences between ‘a pardon’ and ‘an exoneration’, but I also think this case should be treated as a step forward, instead of some Garvey advocates sounding like halfway rejecting it.
Same with how the region’s Reparations Movement has responded to how Queen Elizabeth II — in her last year (or two) — instructed or allowed her son Charles and grandson William, to make public utterances, in the Caribbean and before Commonwealth leaders, about the Royal Family being ‘Sorry’ for its role in trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery.
I welcome counsel re the legal differences between ‘An Apology’ and (what I call) ‘Royal expressions of sorrow’, but here too I still ask: Why hasn’t King Charles been asked or encouraged, by us, to carry on where his mother’s legacy left off?
The UK’s Conservative and Labour Parties and the Republicans and Democrats in the USA are singing from the same hymn sheet on the issues of Reparations for their lock-stock-and-barrel roles in Native Genocide and Slavery.
Less than a decade before the 2034 celebration of the bicentenary of Britain’s Abolition of Slavery, the current Labour government and the opposition Conservative Party both loudly agree the UK shouldn’t pay a Black cent in Reparations.
Likewise, all the welcomed public discussion on Reparations for African Americans in the Democratic Party during its 2020 presidential campaign led to some progress – and eventually the Black Lives Matter movement took shape under Biden.
But while awaiting Reparations for Slavery, Black Americans are also still waiting for the ’40 acres and a mule’ promised to their forefathers who fought for America’s independence in 1776.
So, even if we disagree with the circumstances of Biden’s Garvey pardon and reject Britain’s two major parties’ joint rejection of CARICOM’s Reparations demands, should we now encourage President Trump to rescind his predecessor’s pardon, or give up on plans to take the UK, USA and all nations that benefitted from Slavery to the highest world courts and international and regional human rights bodies?
Honestly, methinks not!