The terrorist hijacking of U.S. commercial airliners that killed over 6,000 Americans was aptly described by Minister Louis Farrakhan, head of the Black Muslim Nation of Islam, “1,400 Muslims work in the World Trade Center and are missing or dead. The perpetrators killed Black and White and Asian and Hispanic and Jews and Christians and Agnostics and Hindus and Buddhists. This why it was a crime against humanity.” Products of affirmative action and now chief foreign affair strategists, Black U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Black National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have taken the leadership in the days following the attacks. “Tragedy did not discriminate and we have come together to respond as a color-blind society,” states Harold Brooks, the Black head of the San Francisco Red Cross whose staff has been working diligently at the world trade center site in New York City.

Just a few days prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, many had felt the impacts of another kind of hijacking at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The Arab States insisted that the final declarations include Israel to be named as a racist state, which had prompted the United States and Israel to walk out on the conference earlier, adversely affecting he proceedings. “However, we did reclaim our original purpose of attending,” states Delegate Barbara Scott, board member of the San Francisco Black Chamber Of Commerce who traveled to Durban for the conference. Referring to the final declaration by the 6,000 delegates from over 130 countries, “Slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity,” she cites, noting that the declaration states that some governments have taken the initiative to apologize and pay reparation where appropriate. It was reported at the conference that Europeans shipped about 12 million Black slaves from Africa to the United States, Caribbean and South America from the 1500s to mid-1800s.

While discussions of reparations occur, African Americans are hijacked in daily life particularly in California. Black children are hijacked by biased SAT tests on their way to college. Blacks are hijacked on their way to employment by discriminatory practices. California State Proposition 209, banning affirmative action, hijacks budding Black businesses on their way to the market place. And the freedom of Black men is hijacked, typified when a Black man with two convictions for residential burglary, is sentenced to 25 years to life under California’s three strikes law, for stealing a pair of sneakers. African American reparations for the holocaust of 246 years of bondage and another century of legalized discrimination may be small when today’s value of racism is assessed.

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