“We’ve already seen that official U.S. law and policy is capable of significant self-correction, though bloodshed has been required,” said Jones. “In the U.S. context, we can be hopeful that justice will prevail because our history is filled with moral conviction that has engendered dramatic self-corrections, from abolition of slavery to fulfillment of the Fourteenth Amendment through civil rights measures including affirmative action remediation ordered by presidents of all ideologies.”
Jones, an expert on discrimination, was a panelist at the three-day interdisciplinary, international conference held at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The event, which concluded on Saturday, featured a spirited series of panel presentations and interactions among scholars, activists and lawmakers who committed to turning their ideas into action.
Jones opened his presentation by declaring America’s legacy of segregated schools and colleges to be “a chain of implication that creeps contemporary.” In speaking about the need for reparations in the United States, he said that the time was long overdue for the victims of underfunded, segregated schools — whose plight was examined in the 1972 book by Yale Law tax scholar Boris I. Bittker The Case for Black Reparations — to receive “direct” financial compensation.
Jones called for Blacks to “reclaim our brains, our traditional values” in order to foster fruitful, nonpartisan and interracial interaction as the issue of reparations continues to be debated.
“What, to me, is paramount is to consider the reality of how Black Americans, always a not-large minority, have from time to time — and in dramatic fashion, through sheer moral authority — forced America to live up to the ideals adopted by the Republic on paper,” Jones told the audience. “America has been situated in what I call a convictable posture.”
On Friday night, Sir Hilary Beckles, a Barbadian historian who is the current vice-chancellor of The University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica and an expert on reparations, said that he believes that support for the idea is gaining momentum and that reparations for slavery are long overdue.
