The battle for slavery reparations
Father and daughter convicted in tax case
By Monica Moorehead
The U.S. government and the super-rich
capitalist class that it serves wish that the struggle for
reparations would go away. Instead, this struggle will continue
to manifest itself in various forms as long as the unfulfilled
aspirations for justice and equality exist, as a legal case in
Virginia shows.
Robert Forster and his daughter, Crystal Forster, were
convicted last July for "conspiracy" to defraud the U.S.
government. Both Forsters are scheduled to soon be sentenced in
a U.S. District Court in Richmond, Va.
Taking the advice of her father, Crystal Forster had carried
out a bold act when in 2001: she filed for a $500,000
income-tax refund. She did this as a vehicle for compensation
for the unpaid labor of her slave ancestors.
Upon receiving the refund, she used some of it to pay back
her student loans and to cover the cost of her brother's
first-year tuition at a very expensive college, Virginia
Tech.
The convictions carry a maximum sentence of seven years. The
father stated from jail: "This is not an effort to defraud the
U.S. government. This was purely a protest against the U.S.
government. ....Black people are not treated as humans, but as
things by the U.S. government. We were used as resources to
enrich this country and we get no inheritance from the wealth
we brought." (Associated Press, Oct. 23)
Forster also renounced his U.S. citizenship while in jail.
He was denied the lawyer of his choice when he tried to fire
his attorney and have him replaced by an Indigenous
attorney.
Like most African Americans, Forster has suffered from
racist attitudes most of his life. He had sued the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs hospital for denying him a
promotion because of his nationality. He reportedly felt very
slighted when the courts awarded him only $5,000.
In 1993, the Black-oriented magazine Essence published an
editorial urging Black people to file for a delinquent tax
rebate of over $43,000 per household. The magazine viewed this
amount as today's dollar equivalent of the 40 acres and a mule
that were promised to the freed slaves after the Emancipation
Proclamation of 1863.
President Andrew Johnson, the pro-slavery sympathizer who
succeeded Abraham Lincoln, veteoed the 40 acres and a mule.
Johnson's racist act helped lay the basis for overturning Black
reconstruction in the South.
Forster is a tax return preparer. He took inflation into
account and, for some of his clients, increased the amount
posed in the Essence editorial twelvefold. The Internal Revenue
Service stated that more than 80,000 income tax returns were
submitted in 2001 asking for non-existent slavery tax credits.
The total amount was $2.7 billion.
'They owe us'
The real criminals are not the Forsters but the in-justice
system that keeps alive the legacy of slavery today with
institutionalized racism. The primary victims of this racism
are African Americans, Latinos, Indigenous people and other
peoples of color. Every social institution is tinged with
white-supremacist ideology in order to divide and conquer the
masses.
If this were not the case, there would have been a federal
reparations program in existence long ago. No administration
has even officially apologized for the U.S. policy of enslaving
millions of African people, let alone offered compensation to
the descendants of the slaves.
There are now class-action lawsuits in federal courts where
African Americans are suing U.S. corporations for their past
complicity in maintaining slavery. The lawsuits argue that
corporations such as Fleet Boston Financial, Aetna and CSX are
guilty of commiting crimes against human ity along with
profiting off of unspeakable human suffering. The lawsuits
state that the wealth created by slavery would amount to an
estimated $1.5 trillion in unpaid wages today, considering
inflation.
If the class-action lawsuit is won, some of the plaintiffs
plan to use the financial restitution to establish a collective
fund to provide the decent education and health care that have
been systematically denied to African Americans for
decades.
Is it just a coincidence that people like the Forsters get
caught and convicted, and the rich don't? Absolutely not. There
exist so many legal loopholes that the U.S. super-rich can
manipulate to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes without
being convicted, much less winding up in court.
This is another example of which class benefits from the
capitalist system. It is certainly not the workers, the poor,
the oppressed or what is left of the middle class. It is the
capitalist class composed of corporate heads and investors who
are laughing all the way to the bank.
As long as the horrific legacy of U.S. slavery is alive and
well, the struggle for social equality and justice remains
inevi table. The Forsters deserve the support and admiration of
every working and poor person of all nationalities for taking a
heroic stand against racism.
Reprinted from the Nov. 6, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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