What America Owes Black People
YOUR CHECK BOUNCED, AMERICA. REPARATIONS IS JUST US TRYING TO CASH IT
by Michael Eric Dyson
“B****h better have my money,” the songstress snarls in hypnotic cadence. “Pay me what you owe me.” For many people, Rihanna’s 2015 anthem serves as the soundtrack to the movement for Black reparations.
Her tune profanely echoes Martin Luther King Jr.’s urgent cry to the nation in 1963 in “I Have a Dream,” his most famous oration, addressed to the March on Washington. “We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” King declared, arguing that in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers “were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” But when it comes to Black Americans, America defaulted, giving “the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” Still, Black folk refused to believe that “the bank of justice is bankrupt,” that there was inadequate currency in “the great vaults of opportunity.” Hence, Black folk had “come to cash this check.”
To paraphrase Rihanna, Nation better have my money.
When it
