Ruminations on the ADOS (American Descendents of Slaves) phenomena

(The ADOS) movement, born on the internet was conceived by Yvette Carnell, a former congressional staffer, and Los Angeles attorney Antonio Moore, two potent web polemicists who, through a lengthy process of on-line interactions, independently came to similar conclusions that African-Americans require reparations for full citizenship and that the program must be narrowly prescribed for American descendants of enslaved Africans.

 

The group eschews the Pan-African imagery embraced by the traditional reparations’ movement, preferring instead to focus on an American-forged ethnicity. The web-based group has established an outsized identity through a mixture of performative pugnacity, aggressive advocacy, and insightful analysis. They frame reparations as the most effective way to address the accrued disadvantages of slavery’s debilitating legacy, including –especially—the widening wealth gap between white Americans and slavery’s progeny.

 

Their data-fueled analysis and cant-free assessment of our prospects without reparations has had a clarifying effect on a discourse that had grown stale. However, it also placed them in rivalry with NCOBRA, which, as noted, is the legacy reparations group in the black community. The crux of the dispute between the two groups concerns the exclusivity of our reparations claim. The ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) argument is embodied in the group’s acronym: only the progeny of Africans enslaved in America are eligible. Those descendants of chattel slavery are products of socialization patterns distinct from those existing in other parts of the African diaspora, which have their own reparations claims.

 

A secondary aspect of the dispute concerns the relevance of Pan-African ideology; ADOS members downplay its relevance, insisting that our American-forged identities embody strengths we have too long ignored while looking towards Africa. A corollary of their position is that African-Americans are a new people; a product of ethnogenesis with a specificity that distinguishes us not only from the European-derived majority but also from other diasporic Africans.

 

The brutal institution of chattel slavery and the indignity of plantation culture was, for generations, the cauldron of our ethnic formation. White supremacy was conventional wisdom; our cultural preferences and aversions were shaped to accommodate that racist status quo. This was a distinct history that produced a specific people, conditioned (and injured) by an inheritance of chronic depredation and flagrant cultural insult.

 

By focusing on the specificity of American chattel slavery the ADOS group seeks to clarify the varied dimensions of white supremacist plunder. Its discourse about accrued disadvantages, especially its emphasis on exploring wealth disparity data through the research of scholars like Duke University economist Dr. William Darity (From Here To Equality: Reparations For Black Americans In The Twenty-First Century, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen), helps contextualize the perpetual racial income gap plaguing the U.S. economy. Darity’s research suggests that the wealth disparity data is the most efficient way to gauge the extent of the economic damage done to slavery’s victims and effectively sets the parameters for compensation.

 

The dispute between the two groups has been bitter, even combative, at times. The Pan-Africanists who dominate NCOBRA and NAARC exalt the ancestral bond they share with African people throughout the diaspora. They argue, as did Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) did more than a century back, that continental unity will ultimately force the West to atone for its millennia of malevolence toward the African world.

 

This in-house acrimony is reminiscent of another time. I vividly recall those Black Panther days in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when we were encouraged to stand our ground whenever confronted by cultural nationalists. In fact, we were instructed to be profanely belligerent. Panthers adopted this combative strategy as a defensive response to the disrespect (bordering on animosity) with which cultural nationalists greeted the Marxist group's boisterous arrival on the “Black Power” scene.

 

Overall, this was a rancorous period; inflamed by ideological disputes and sensibility clashes. People got hurt and the movement suffered. The Panthers and Nationalists eventually reconciled – sort of; at least they managed an effective détente. The lessons of history may be easy to recite but they’re hard to learn.