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*There are 300 million people in America. The top five percent of those people - listed every year in Forbes Magazine - control sixty percent of the wealth. The other 285 million people work for the companies the five percent control.
I know those are a lot of numbers to digest, but money equals power in America. So when I read articles about wealthy people giving away their fortunes to charity it begs the question: If there’s so much leftover money in the profit pot, why not use some of that money towards reparations for slave labor instead of just giving it all to charity?
Dozens of modern-day companies such as R. J. Reynolds and CSX have ties to the slave trade. Even founders of prestigious universities such as Brown, Harvard and Yale have blood on their hands. They can’t deny history, but some conservatives argue that too much time has passed making the pain of our forefathers irrelevant.
In case you tend to agree, you should read about the child slave labor market that exists today on plantations on the Ivory Coast. Today’s child slaves are mostly exploited in turning out products to be exported and sold in the West, including the United States. The Ivory Coast is where nearly half of the world’s cocoa is produced. Cocoa is used to make chocolate and other sweeteners.
In 2003 Americans consumed sixty percent of the chocolate produced in the world. Each year we spend more than seventy-three billion dollars on products that include cocoa.
Kanye West and others have spoken out about modern-day slave labor. But while everybody can’t afford to rock diamonds from the mines of Sierra Leone, most people would agree confection rejection is a challenge with which we can identify. Even if the U.S. government and some private companies won’t settle their debts and make reparations a reality, the least we should do is save ourselves some coins and pounds. Also, our actions might save a child from exploitation.
Instead of spending all your time working for other people and making them wealthy, use your creativity to build a family business that will create an inheritance for your children’s children.
Steffanie Rivers is a free-lance journalist in the Washington, DC metro area. You can send her feedback at teamtcbadvertising@hotmail.com