Siphiwe Baleka talks Apology to Repair at Tulsa Reparations Summit

“If we want to talk about reparations for Afro-descendant people — whether in North America, South America, Central America, or the Caribbean — we have to start at the origin.

And sadly, as Carter G. Woodson taught us, most of us have been miseducated. We have never actually been taught the origin of what we refer to as the transatlantic enslavement, or the transatlantic trade. We are going to go over that today, and afterward we are going to discuss the legal ramifications that can be of great use to the reparations movement right here in Tulsa.

Now, by a show of hands — how many people in the room are Afro-descendants? Raise your hands. You had an ancestor who was enslaved in the Americas. All right, keep your hands up.

Now, watch this. Keep your hand up if you can tell me — from either your maternal or paternal lineage — where your people came from in Africa, or what language they spoke.

If you know where your ancestors came from in Africa and what language they spoke — what we call the mother tongue — keep your hand up. Good. I see a few hands up. If we were to have all 50 million African-Americans in the room, it would only be — you can put your hands down now — a small percentage that could answer that question.

Unless you have taken an African Ancestry DNA test, or through some remarkable preservation of oral history in your family, more than 90% of us — more than 95%, probably closer to 99% — can no longer identify where we come from or what our mother tongue is.

And that is where reparations starts. Because someone was taken from their family, from their village, from their culture, from their mother tongue, brought to the Americas, and through a violent, manufactured process — that identity was destroyed.

There is a word for that. It is called ethnocide.

And if you cannot identify those people, that mother tongue — that means you continue to suffer from that original crime today. Which makes it an ongoing harm that requires reparations.”