As I write, people of African ascent are streaming across borders in the same way as Latin Americans at the US border. They are moving from turmoil and uncertainty to a promise of change. Significant numbers are dying in that effort. The destination countries pronounce on who is eligible to enter and who is not. None take any responsibility for the conditions back in the source countries. Groups within the destination countries are even more explicit about not accepting more immigrants and limiting the rights and entitlements of those already present. This article is not to address the many reasons for desperate people to take dangerous trips. Instead, it is about a specific group: American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS) attempting to deny reparative US resources to persons whose ancestors were never enslaved in the US. This is another form of anti-immigrant sentiment and part of a global wave of conservatism that promotes racism, a kind of ethnic isolationism and a peculiar nationalism. But more so, it is an attempt to disentangle ADOS from the larger body of trafficked humans and effectively absolve the US of any responsibility for the systems of exploitation that fed and feed the global devaluation of all lives and Black Lives in particular.
On occasion these isolationist ideas are expressed in the thought and action of African descendants themselves. We usually dismiss as ignorant those of African descent, Black people, who show contempt for other Black people for no reason except their otherness. So, it was particularly harsh and head-shaking to hear noted scholar, Dr. Cornel West, at a recent Howard University Sunday sermon, express support for Yvette Carnell’s position that being ADOS is different from DOS elsewhere because of the level of White supremacist terror experienced in the US. Carnell argues this difference is such that no reparation or support from the USA is owed to any African except those descended from people enslaved on US soil. Yvette Carnell is one of the leading voices in the ADOS movement. We can only infer that Dr. West agrees with that and the rest of Ms. Carnell’s positions; including that Pan-Africanism is dead.
In that speech Dr. West stated that Africans in the Caribbean and elsewhere did not experience Jim Crow or the KKK and that unlike others, ADOS were enslaved by their own country. The US (unlike other countries) enslaved its own people i.e: after independence. At first blush, the reasoning seems fair. I did the work and felt the pain and I should be paid. Or, my ancestors suffered through slavery and Jim Crow in the US and the US state owes me. The argument falls apart when it seeks to restrict any US reparations in any form to ADOS and claims Jim Crow for their US selves. To expose this false position, one need only look at the role of the Britisth Colonies in North America, and what would become the US, in the expansion and maintenance of slavery along with its export and support of apartheid everywhere. Reparations are due to those victims, some who never set foot in the US, and their descendants too.
When in September 1751 George Washington arrived on the island of Barbados, he integrated into a society carved by 'American' and British born colonists. The USA did not exist and the American Revolution less than two decades away. Instead, there were British colonies with little political difference be it Massachusetts Bay, Virginia, Nevis or Barbados. But already benefits from appropriating African bodies and labor were enjoyed by those that would become American and what would become America. Over the next four months Washington and his brother Lawrence dined nightly with Gedney Clarke,Sr. a Massachusetts-born enslaver and planter and cavorted with others of White British, American, and Barbadian born gentry. Clarke and his family were deep in every aspect of human trafficking across the Atlantic and the lands those captives cultivated including plantations in the Dutch administered Demerara and Essequibo.
While Antigua, Barbados, Nevis and other countries in the Americas never ‘enslaved’ Africans, slavery thrived in those colonies. Many of those plantations and their produce belonged to 'Americans'. The ADOS position reveals a lack of understanding of this fact, history, global capitalism, and its companion white supremacy. Instead, that position serves to perpetuate the historical structure and divisions of ethnicity and nationality set up by imperialism, colonialism, neo colonialism and maintained now as globalization. This is the very thing the otherwise impressive Dr. West has been fighting. This ought to be a major setback for him.
Islands like Nevis, Antigua and Barbados claimed independence as of 1983, 1981 and 1966 respectively. The British ended slavery in its West Indian colonies in 1838. For the US it is 1776 and 1865. Using these dates as a basis for some material difference in oppression of Africans is the narrowest possible understanding of that history. Carnell poses the narrowest possible interpretion of that period of trafficking African bodies to the Americas. Narrowly constructed arguments are used to ensure benefits go to the narrowest group and usually the group of the constructors; in this case West and Carnell. But that history irrevocably intertwined Africa, Europe and the Americas in a global enterprise in ways such a narrow argument can not undo. 
Those meals the Washingtons enjoyed with the Clarkes were cultivated, prepared and served by captive labor of African ascent. The servers were no more Barbadian than the Washingtons or Clarkes were 'American'. That would come. The relation was of captive and captor. Similarly, Clarke’s estate in Massachusetts (Bay) was maintained on the backs of these Africans. This history had to be ignored, by Dr. West and others, in finding some separate and peculiar ‘American’ slavery; a slavery separate and apart from the enslavement system which the USA had a major hand in creating and maintaining
Today, the same exploitative relationship continues among the regions, including Africa, of material resources and people except ‘captive’ is no longer used. The people are no longer in demand. Their children are held in cages at borders. The material resources are demanded and/or annexed. This history ought to frustrate any attempt to differentiate the kinds of exploitation suffered by African people in Africa or the Caribbean vis a vis the USA and wherever plantation society evolved. Nevertheless, the ADOS movement makes claims that reflect little appreciation of this history and continuing global exploitation. Perhaps, if you sit at the center of global capitalism, there is no need to teach or know global history. Its easy to draw nationalistic conclusions when that’s all you have been taught.
It is as if ADOS is an attempt to create a new ethnicity that is separate from the rest despite suffering the same injustice. Given the universal contempt shown all people of obvious African ascent, there is little more painful than a segment of the group identifying itself as separate from the larger body. This ideological secession, like most secessions, is intended to secure more resources for that group at the exclusion of the rest of the larger body. More specifically, some descendants of people enslaved in the USA have determined that US resources must be restricted solely to those once captive in the United States. Further, they argue even if you were born in the US but your ancestors were enslaved elsewhere then you should seek help and reparations in that country. Former Attorney General, Eric Holder, would be denied since his parents are Barbadian. President Obama would be denied because he is not ADOS. The movement would argue he is not descended from any slave, anywhere, and not entitled to reparations anywhere. Malcolm X and his children would receive a half share on account of his Grenadian mother. DNA testing would not suffice in enforcing these ideas and identifying ADOS.
The idea of the US experience being peculiarly unique is not new as we will see later. It’s instructive, I argue, that President Donald Trump is the most prominent proponent of US peculiarity sometimes described as American exceptionalism and the foundation from which ADOS grows. President Trump is not talking about all of America when he bleats "MAGA" but only the US Americans. Of course, he means White. He, like ADOS, would deny all benefits to President Obama, since he was born 'elsewhere' and probably in one of those S'hole countries. Incidentally, all the non-ADOS seem to be from Trump's S'hole list.
To help clarify the point, this group rejects ‘African’ as part of their name. They have reverted to the historical and moral equivalent of Negro. Instead of African American, they self identify as American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS), and the sole beneficiaries of any resources handed out by the US and at the exclusion of any other African descendants; enslaved or not. In one naming ceremony ADOS erased important African history and simultaneously absolved the US of all its debts and sins incurred against Africa and its people everywhere except maybe those enslaved in the the USA. As Walter Rodney painfully explained about our miseducation on identity and oppression in his San Francisco speech that “Africans who had been raped from the continent mysteriously disappear and become Negro”. They are now ADOS.
Not all ADOS’ support the ADOS movement: as fewer Americans support Trump than not. Not all USDOS share the view of ADOS. It is unknown as to how many do. What is known is that Pan-Africanism, despite the protestations of the ADOS leadership, continues to dominate the landscape wherever people of African ascent reside including the USA. For proof one need only see Omali Yeshitela’s recent presentation at Oxford University and the number of its shares on social media. I attended the June 8th 2019 People of the Sun 30th Annual Tribute to the Ancestors of the Middle Passage at Coney Island in New York. It is solely to commemorate and honor those of the middle passage, their children and parents. The African Diaspora Ancestral Commemoration Institute held the same honor on the same day in Washington DC. This year, I and thousands plan to attend the 48th annual 4-day International African Arts Festival in Brooklyn, New York beginning on July 4th with the theme “We Are All As One”. I can list another dozen such events in June alone. These are Pan African organizations. Whatever ADOS is attempting, it does not honor that truth. However, nascent and weak ADOS may be, it is a sufficiently dangerous concept that needs to be refuted at its infancy.
We are all allowed to create alternative histories to fit and support whatever positions we hold. But we should also expect critique. African enslavement was not the only force in shaping the US and the Americas. Indigenous Peoples and indentured servants played a role. The land belonged to the Indigbnous People. And this is not to pronounce that all of Africa had the same history or that there is nothing peculiar about individual nations, such as they are, in the Americas and elsewhere. It is undisputed that Africans captive in the US helped build the US into the empire it has become. Moreover, without that unpaid labor it is unlikely the US would be the empire it is today. It is also undisputed that African enslavement was made possible by a collective of Europeans with white-supremacist ideas, and their descendants; and that those descendants control the wealth and institutions that is the US empire today and the larger ‘developed’ world. Their socio- politico- economic position is universally intertwined as is that of African descendants.
It would require some intellectual magic to separate relationships so intertwined for Europeans and Africans and of which despite Dr. West’s considerable gifts he is not yet capable. After Clarke’s unexpected death in 1764 his son Gedney, Jr. ran into financial difficulty, sold the Demerara and Essequibo holdings, and with the proceeds bought property in Tobago and Grenada. The family had relatives in Jamaica and sold and bequeathed captives among each other. We address each other as brother and sister because we might be just that. It is untrue that those practices used to enslave Africans in the US were and are peculiar to the US. It is untrue that US planters and slaveholders operated one way in the US and another way elsewhere. Moreover, much of the suffering of Africans outside the US including of those Descendants of Captive Africans (DOCA) was made possible through US might and assistance. Whatever may be the goal of ADOS, the historic record must be based on facts.
African enslavement in every location across the planet accrued to the benefit of the US Treasury and by extension the quality of life on offer in the US. It still does. Gedney Clarke repatriated his money to Salem, Massachusetts. His ships were built in New England. They took his rum and molasses to Europe and to Africa. They brought captive Africans and salt goods to the rest of the Americas. They sold the bodies, the surplus, to whomever and wherever. It was and is as a result of a global enterprise.
White supremacy has been a companion to all of those –isms and all maintained by US might. The US was not alone. Hopefully, I show the inseparability of Europeans in the enterprise and the inseparablity of Africans as its victims but also the primary role of the British Colonies and the British Colonies that became the US in that period of genocide and exploitation. Victimhood is not a pathology. It is a fact. Gedney Clarke practiced the same type of White supremacy in Barbados, Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice as he practiced in Massachusetts. These families funded the American Revolution from the profits made in Barbados and elsewhere. The tax burden attached to these profits were sufficient to consider revolution. These families intermarried and moved freely among the different colonies including the Thirteen Colonies on the US mainland. Often they brought their captives. These ‘business’ men and women did not benefit solely from British West Indian slavery but off the Dutch and other European possessions and from wherever they found the exploitation of unpaid labor. The price of a human being was a commodity influenced by world events and major players as it is today with coffee, soyabeans and corn. Humans could be dumped too; to save on subsidy and insurance claims. These enslavers would fund wars even when not directly involved. They not only supported the American Revolution with money earned on Africans everywhere, but made further profits from supplying those armies as well as foreign armies. 
Without being too semantic, the ‘American’ in ADOS is a misgiuded attempt to claim a name assigned by Europeans to the entire of two continents and some: North, South and everything in between. What is meant, of course, is US descendants of Slaves (USDOS). We know this because African ascendants from the Organization of American States (OAS), Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada are excluded from the ADOS group. Quite apart from ‘America’ dismissing the existence of native populations, and other African descendants in ‘America’, more worrisome is the use of slave as a description of yourself. I wrote earlier about the equivalence of ADOS to ‘Negro’. Africa was not raped of slaves or Negroes. Humans were stolen and trafficked. Human traffickers referred to their captives as slaves. To claim that name for yourself is to set the struggle to full freedom back into the 15th century. I am channelling Malcolm X’s arguments about the importance of the ‘X’. Some have travelled so far backward that they now claim not only the individual plantation names assigned by the traffickers, but the collective name: slave.
But in addition to the reactionary acceptance of imposed names, the use of ‘American’ reflects a kind of entitlement we have come to associate with the US itself in that they would claim the name America(n) for themselves. They ignore the fact that two and one half continents carry that imposed name. No one is marching in protest against the US co-opting a colonial name for itself. But its is an indication of the sense of its entitled-self in the region. And it seems ADOS operates as a function of that entitlement.
Dr. West and Ms. Carnell are wrong on the absence of Jim Crow and White terror outside the US. They seem unaware of the US involvement, then, and continuing, in similar practices in the Caribbean. It is inconceivable that these patriarchal patriots who a century before burned independent thinking White women as witches in Salem, Massachusetts would treat Africans in Barbados or anywhere any better. Clarke's US estate was in Salem.
As a consequence of that global racism and an example, even today, residents are barred from some beaches in the Caribbean, including Jamaica. This remains a constant struggle. In Barbados a movement developed to reclaim beaches where all the beaches are supposedly public. Europeans, many from the US, are the patrons of these exclusive beaches. But this right to the best of the land did not begin with Caribbean independence. It existed before the US when still a collection of British colonies.
George Washington’s stay in Barbados changed him in profound ways and led to profound change in America. The changes did nothing for the enslaved. Through Washington's diary and archived letters, we know that the relationship between he and Clarke continued until the latter’s death in 1764. Clarke was also the uncle to Sarah Washington: George’s brother Lawrence’s wife. She was the daughter of William Fairfax of the Virginia Fairfaxs and his mulatto wife Sarah. Fairfax had served in the Caribbean as did many of those Virginia ‘gentlemen’. From all accounts the Barbados trip, being the sheltered Washington’s first outside of Fairfax County, Virginia, presented a first glimpse of the wider world and the might of the British Empire. Impressed by British fortifications on the island to protect its golden egg, Washington began to seriously study military matters on hs return.
When in early 1763 Cuffy led a revolution of captive Africans to end enslavement in the Dutch administered colony of Berbice, Clarke sent 5 ships and 300 mercenaries to help turn back the revolutionaries. He did not want revolution spreading to neighboring colonies Demerara and Essequibo where he held captives on 11 plantations. Cuffy and his revolutionaries defeated the Dutch at Fort Nassau and seized the seat of government. They destroyed the infrastructure of a profitable operation and presented an example of successful revolution that had to be stopped. With decisive naval help from Clarke, the Dutch were able to hang on for a year and gather sufficient resources to turn back the revolution. But Berbice never recovered from that revolutionary war and the Dutch eventually ceded it to the British. Clarke died before the end of that war and the trials that followed, but money he expropriated from the backs of captive Africans was used to turn back African freedom in Berbice and elsewhere. He was running slaves to the Dutch colonies without the required permission from the Dutch West India Company: a thief and a smuggler. Reparations are due to the descendants of Cuffy, his revolutionary army, and those whose freedoms Clarke and others delayed. The US Department of Treasury needs to satisfy that bill, help erase that sin and cleanse the collective souls of its citizens. 
This was not lost on George Washington with his growing understanding of world and military affairs. He practiced his skills against the Indigenous populations. He immersed himself deeper in military matters and would lead his own revolution a decade after Cuffy
This close association with the Caribbean and major American born or based traffickers did not begin or end with the Clarkes and Washingtons. It had begun long before as men in service of the British Crown and continued into the new federation of the USA up to the present. Here is where Dr. West attempts a sleight-of-mind with the claim that no other captives were held by their own country. By inference he means captives were citizens nowhere else except the US; the American Revolution and its Constitution of the United States of America though it made all men equal would not apply to African USDOS’. But we know those same US born or based planters, some resident some absentee, continued their enterprise in the Caribbean through all of it. To add salt to the wound, in 1838 the British crown compensated them, paid reparations, to slaveholders with holdings in the British West Indies including the Clarkes. Clarke’s heirs held about 100 captives then and received over £1200 the modern equivalent of about £1m.
Neither the American Revolution nor its civil war ended the exploitation of Africans anywhere, in Africa, its lands, Africans in the British West Indies and those lands under the new federations. It intensfied the exploitation. The writing was already on the wall. The number of revolutions and rebellions and pressure from sympathetic Europeans signalled a coming end to the enterprise of human traffic. The traffic intensfied to maximize profits before the end. So, it is with great trepidation that I listen to arguments about the special nature of US slavery and the separate claim for the ADOS at the exclusion of other African ascendants born in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Gedney Clarke was not alone in repatriating his wealth to the US.The children of Caribbean based planters returned to attended newly chartered schools like Harvard. Only they could afford it. Their parents paid towards the endowments of those schools. In 1817 Harvard Law School was founded by a gift from Isaac Royall, Jr., a wealthy planter and human trader with plantations in Antigua. This eminent law school recently recalled its crest, 2016, after protest from students against the school's after it was found to be taken from the crest of the Royall family, who had sold some of its Antigua holdings in1937 after the African Uprising of 1936 and retired to Medford, MA with 27 of their trusted captives to enjoy the benefits of the local aristocracy.
From “Columbia University and Slavery”, that schools project to find its true history, disclosed that even after 1865, US civil war and emancipation, the USA benefitted from economic ties to Cuba and Brazil where slavery continued until 1886 and 1888, respectively. Its buildings still carry the names of profiteers from trafficking in humans. Havemeyer is the family that owned the Domino sugar factories that exploited slave labor in Cuba and Brazil long after abolition in the US. West and Carnell may claim Jim Crow peculiar to the US after emancipation. They are wrong. US based business exploited sharecropping and other unpaid labor practices within the USA while doing even better in Cuba and Brazil. Behind the Havemeyer Building on campus is Chandler Hall named after chemistry professor Charles Chandler an avid supporter of the Havermeyers’ sugar project. Havemeyer Street in Brooklyn marks the rum production center of that period. Hamilton Hall of course is named after the schools most prominent alumnus Alexander Hamilton: from the Caribbean Island of Nevis. There is no need here to elaborate on the seminal role of Alexander Hamilton in US history as advisor to George Washington and founder of the US treasury from which any reparation would emanate and especially given his resurgence.
I do not claim men like Clarke, Hamilton and Royall as Caribbean. Their presence in the Caribbean had more to do with the profits from slavery than the regions good climate. They either held Africans captive, traded in African bodies, or showed their willingness to advocate for the plantocracy and against Africans in captivity. The point is solely to show the interconnectedness of the ruling elites and the empire they built on the backs of Africans irrespective of where their chains were tethered.
Jim Crowism was always difficult in the Caribbean given the relative low numbers of Europeans in relation to non-Europeans. They were not in the majority, as in important parts of the US mainland and could not mount a sustained attack with the Klu Klux Klan type outfits, but that is what made Jim Crow necessary. Cuba before the revolution, was that not Jim Crow? In Demerara, as recent as the 1950s, pictures of the membership in social clubs like the Georgetown Club, no less, show no one of obvious African ascent. The golf courses and tennis lawns reflected the same as golf courses and tennis lawns everywhere else in Europe and the Americas: White only.
The banks and insurance companies picked up where the traffickers left-off. These were the children of former slave owners flush with reparation money from Britain, first in the 1830s, and from the US a generation later. Are we to believe that former human traffickers now in charge of the money treated former slaves equally. Even today interest rates in the Caribbean are double that in the US and I mean the ADOS community in the US. Compound interest compounds problems.The AIG scandals and Wall Street subprime meltdown was global and still to be fully assessed for Africans outside the USA. All proceeds were repatriated back to the US or its offshore havens.
Nevertheless, Caribbean men and women, descendants of the enslaved would serve in the segregated armies of the imperial wars Europeans fought among themselves. My own father lied about his age to enlist and serve in the segregated navy protecting allied convoys bringing the essential supplies for the war effort in America and Europe during the 2nd World War. Those veterans could not get a job at the local branch of Barclays or Colonial or any banks anywhere in the region and on account of color code set in place by imperialism colonialism, neo colonialism and,even now, globalization.
Noted African American author and actor, the late Julian Mayfield, tells a story in his unpublished book “Burnham of Guyana” of an obviously African woman meeting an obviously African, Forbes Burnham, the then Prime Minister of independent Guyana. The meeting took place outside the Watooka Club in Linden also in Demerara in the early 1970s. Seeing the woman walking past the entrance staring in awe at the buildings and grounds, Prime Minister Burnham invited her in as his guest. Momentarily stunned by such a suggestion, she asked whether he was sure. He assured her that he was sure and that he was the de facto head of state. She was not convinced and declined his invitation. Years of Jim Crow had so conditioned her, that she could not conceive of entering such a place except as the help. This is part of what Ms. Carnell's lament that ADOS has not had the perceived benefit of Africans in powerful positions and suffer from some psycho-social deficit relative to Africans from outside the US. If she only knew how effective neo colonialism has been in channeling any self identification through the usual white supremacist institutions.
I understand some African descendants wanting to identify with power. It comes with some privileges. It's a kind of ‘passing’ -American is American- entitling the passer to global privilege, sole access to any crumbs and maybe some protection from state violence. That American power can promise loans to Ecuador and coerce its leadership to give-up Julian Assange. Assange is believed to have helped expose US complicity and war crimes in ongoing war zones like Syria, Yemen and Iraq that have felt the might of that power. Regime change is real. It could announce a new president of Venezuela without holding the elections its venerates as democracy. It can move capitals, draw borders anywhere, build walls, anything.
It is the strangest thing listening to people of African descent explain why we are not all similarly situated. They have rehashed and presented some of the same racist ideas offered by enslavers and the Klan, including the coded language. And like some White folks, seem unaware of the meaning and impact. Don't expect anything from us they say. Get your own. This is the other side of the coin of respectability politics. It is respectability politics for the 'othered' Black people. How different is ADOS claims from the birther claims of Donald Trump and company.
USi-centricity is a troubling aspect of the current commission discussing Rep. Sheila Lee’s sponsored bill (H.R.40) for a commission on reparations. Hopefully, Puerto Rico and The US Virgin Islands will not be ignored as happened after hurricane Maria. But this is global. Maps of Africa or the Caribbean will list the various European colonizers of each country, but never show US business and political interest involved in everything including enslavement, and everything that followed as it did in the mainland. The US attended the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 that divided Africa among European nations. Missing from the discussion is the US role in Africa, Panama and the Panama Canal, interventions in Haiti, in Grenada, Jamaica, Domincan Republic, Chile and Guyana to name a few. We are not in control of any of our oil fields, sugar, rice or bauxite. Prices are set abroad. We are the sharecroppers of our resources. Africans everywhere, in the whole of the Americas and Africa, have had to contend with racism and exploitation similar to Africans in America and as a consequence of US action. Could we seriously think of compensating a child for kidnapping and exploiting that child and with no thought of her siblings and her mother.
Today, the one percent are the biological and ideological children of the one percent that was Clarke, Washington, Hamilton and Royall. Inequality forces the 99 percent into a conflict among each other. Aggression is directed at the politically and economically weakened. The weakened fight among themselves. Recent immigrants fight intended immigrants. Crips fight the Bloods. ADOS fight the rest. We flee out of Kingston, Lagos and Tegucigalpa for the same reasons ADOS fled Mississippi. Except, the terror looks like us in the street. No sheet is necessary. Boardrooms and hedges work better. We blame ourselves.
The pain is that we use something created to oppress us against us. Constraints placed on all of us are, by a sleight-of-mind, shifted and placed against non-USDOS and to deny them any loose change handed down by the ones who benefitted and continue to benefit most from corrupt practices. Imperialism loves to exploit differences. Know your real enemy. It is one of the reasons we find ourselves in this condition. We ought to know the real reason. I believe Dr. West knows better. If not, we are in more trouble than I thought.
