In June, the United States House of Representatives held a debate about reparations to African-Americans. One of the questions in this discussion is why Japanese-Americans received reparations for their internment by the U.S. federal government during the Second World War, yet African-Americans have yet to receive reparations for their ancestors’ enslavement or for other crimes committed against them.
I published an article comparing reparations to Japanese-Americans and African-Americans in the journal, Social Forces, in 2004 after a colleague, Rodney Coates, professor of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University, asked me this question.
