Today’s loveletter will reflect the one I wrote my sweetheart.  I told him I was going to boldly go where I haven’t gone before, that is, on the side of my family tree that comes from Europe.

It is a stressful and painful journey.  According to www.23andme.com, I am only 76.5% sub-Saharan African.  My matrilineal line includes descent from the Ethiopian Jews.  My father’s patrilineal line is Sephardic Jew, and his matrilineal line descends from West Africa and migrated eastward.  However, I am also 20.1% European.  How do I tell my European cousins that we’re related because one of our great grandfathers raped one of my great-grandmothers during slavery? 

We could try to sugarcoat and romanticize it: We could lie and deny to ourselves that the relationship was covert and consensual.  But the truth is that my great-grandmother did not have a choice.  She had no voice.  No choice in whose penis would penetrate her vagina and impregnate her womb.  The white man did not recognize her marriage to any black man.  She had to jump a broom. 

Leviticus 20:10 commands, “And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”  Did the white men know or care that they were raping a Jew, a black Jew?  Did the white men know or care that the laws of Moses would be used to judge them?  How could God punish both the adulterer and the adulteress for my great-grandmother committing adultery against her black husband when she was raped, when she had no choice?  Thus, if the white man wanted her, my black Jewess grandmother was forced to disobey her God and be an adulteress to the black man that she loved and deemed herself married to.  It doesn’t matter if the white master recognized her marriage.  Did God?  Did she?  Did her husband?  Was her husband also a Jew?   

Any children my great-grandmother bore, regardless of who was their daddy, did not belong to her because she was property.  As was her husband.  Her relationship with my white great-grandfather was not about mutual love and respect.  It was about invasion, terror, power, and the anti-Semitic blaspheming of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

I am my great-grandmother’s voice.  It’s time for America to confront and correct its Christian hypocritical past: The American slave trade included sex slavery.  A sex slavery committed by Christians in the name of Jesus.     

How do we correct and repair this past?  How do I approach my European cousins about the rapist in our family tree?     

The Reparations Labor Union stands for repairing and reconciling the past.  Reparations is not just for the descendants of slaves.  It’s to lift the curse off of the descendants of the slave masters.  Exodus 20:5-6 (KJV) reads, “for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.”  Thus, if my European cousins repented and paid voluntary reparations for our great-grandfather’s sin, I must forgive them.  And such would lift their curse. 

You never know when God says a generation, if God was referring to a biological generation of approximately 20 years, or a 100-year long generation, such as God referred to in Genesis 15:13-16.  God is eternal, so God doesn’t measure time the way humans do.

In order to lift their curse, whites must pay reparations.  An apology alone is not sufficient.  Deuteronomy 15:12-14 reads, “If thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, he shall serve thee six years; and in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.  And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.” 

Christians will be judged by their own King James Bible.  Christians claim Scriptural permission to enslave and plunder Africans because, Africans, as the descendants of Ham, were cursed by Noah.  (Genesis 9:20-27.)  The curse of Noah assumes that blacks are Hamitic, whites are Japhetic, and Jews are Semitic and Oriental.  Even if this preposterously Noahic theory of racial divisions happened to be true, it also:

1. Extends the curse to all of the children of Ham and not just Canaan;
2. Assumes that the curse was eternal; and
3. Assumes that people don’t move geographically or interbreed over the course of thousands of years.   

The bottom line is, if Christians are judged by their own Scriptures, then violating those Scriptures closes the loopholes through which white Christians may evade God’s judgment: If even one of the blacks enslaved during America’s participation in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was a Jew, then God can judge America for the entire slave trade for that one’s sake.  And judge Europe likewise. 

I am the voice of my great-grandmothers.  And my great-grandfathers.  Some of whom were Jews, black Jews.  I am inviting the descendants of my former slave masters a chance to be part of God’s mercy extended to thousands who love God and keep God’s commandments.  Lift your curse and be blessed by repenting and voluntarily paying reparations to my people.  Do so before God judges you.