1. Reparations, Transformation, and Reconciliation toward Remedying Massive Oppression

2. Reparations: The right of a people to seek redress for centuries of Continued Massive Oppression

The physical, mental, and social health of a people are directly determined by their political, economic and cultural position in society. Africans in America – often referred to as African Americans, Afro-descendants, African Descendants, were injured in unspeakable ways from the Holocaust of Enslavement and Colonialism through today’s prison slavery, disenfranchisement, and disparate treatment within every agency and institution within the U.S. governmental system. This workshop will explore the intergenerational and cumulative impact of these injustices and the logical and appropriate remedies.

The United Nations created the Human Development Index to approximate how nation-states are socially progressing. The Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy created sixteen social indictors to determine how a nation is doing in creating social health.(using four categories-children, youth, aging and all ages-with such specified indices of infant morality, teenage suicides, unemployment, poverty, and alcohol related traffic fatalities, to name a few).

This workshop suggests that, although these aggregate calculations fail to assist African Descendants in Western countries in assessing their social health strengths and weaknesses, they do point to the necessary principles, practices and paradigms that can inform a new scholarship to better understand social health within oppressed African communities, its relationship to historical trauma and the necessary policy, public health and programs to provide optimum health.

The purpose of this workshop is to introduce the notion that the social health of our communities contains the foundation of our healing, and therefore must be placed as an internal priority if African people are going to transcend current health indices, i.e. child abuse, substance abuse, homicide and suicide.

Against the back drop of the United Nations World Conference against Racism Declarations of 2001 and program of action, this workshop will summarize this massive undertaking within the demand for reparations, transformation, and restoration of African peoples’ humanity. This workshop will equip participants who wish to assist in the Reparations Movement, which ultimately is a movement for the transformation and humanization of the world.