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Readers write: What’s missing from the reparations conversation

Letters to the editor for the July 10 & 17, 2023 weekly magazine. Readers reflect on the complexities of reparations – and Kissinger's legacy.

  • By Monitor readers

Reparations and individuals

The June 19 Weekly issue on reparations was excellent, but in some ways avoids the real question, which is, how do you evolve into a community where respect and acceptance are created?

In combat, you need to see your fellow soldiers not as Black, or Jewish, or Irish, or white, but as men. (There were no women in the field when I served.) And you needed to see these men as individuals and to both accept and respect them.

As a futurist, I see signs that this is happening, but slowly: people helping others, marriages and relationships based on love and friendship, the movement of women into leadership.

I am working with a released prisoner who is Black. He is employed and is trying to help others who have been released and who want to work. I asked him what he wanted most. He replied, “Respect.” I added, “Acceptance.”

How this is accomplished in the short run is a challenge. But that is the right question.

Bob Chernow
Grafton, Wisconsin

Systemic solutions

There is something missing from the reparations coverage and the argument that reparations should be paid to “repair” the damage done by the system of chattel slavery and legal racial subordination. 

Since this was a systemic harm, the remedy should also be systemic, not individual. Institutions involved with education, health care, employment training, and small-business development should be the focus of reparations, not checks to individuals.

Victor Goode
New York

Room to learn

Thank you for the recent stories regarding reparations. I thought I knew quite a bit about this important subject, but learned even more through the articles.  

It is rare for a news organization to have such thorough coverage from several perspectives on one topic. I am grateful for you choosing this subject as well as the in-depth manner in which you “taught” us.   

Kristan Smith-Park
Harvard, Massachusetts

Wisdom from Kissinger

I didn’t know former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was still contributing to the world (“Kissinger’s questions for America” by Ned Temko, in the June 26 Weekly). I always appreciated his approach to world issues. I was interested in his comments as well: We as a nation cannot seem to get ourselves together, as noted, especially, after the debacle of the Vietnam War. When I viewed the traveling Vietnam War memorial, it was tragic for me to see the names of my high school classmates.

These days, we cannot seem to find a solution to our southern border, nor our relationships with China and Russia. Mr. Kissinger was right: We “can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it.”

Sue Carol Helten
Douglass, Kansas

Kissinger’s legacy

I have found it to be ironic that the Monitor is providing a platform for Mr. Kissinger when he continues to elude any accountability for his part in the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, a situation that led to the death of American journalist Charles Horman, the son of a Christian Science practitioner, Edmund Horman.

“Disappointing” barely describes my reaction.

Joan Gaylord
Bedford, New York

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Dear Reader,

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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