A Case for Reparations

Reparations are not about rewriting history. They are about confronting what history produced.

For the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the legacy of slavery and colonialism is not an abstract chapter from the past. Denmark controlled the islands for more than two centuries before transferring the Danish West Indies to the United States in 1917 for $25 million. The people whose homeland was being transferred were not parties to the treaty determining their political future.¹

That history matters because political status has consequences. The United Nations still lists the U.S. Virgin Islands as a Non-Self-Governing Territory—a designation reserved for territories whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government.²

For twenty years, the African-Caribbean Reparations and Resettlement Alliance (ACRRA), under the leadership of Shelley Moorhead, has pressed the case that justice requires more than remembrance. It requires dialogue, accountability, repair, and the exercise of self-determination.³

Reparations should not be reduced to a single payment. Reparatory justice can include restitution, compensation, institutional reform, development, cultural restoration, guarantees against repetition, and measures that strengthen communities harmed by slavery and colonial rule. United Nations human-rights experts have recognized reparatory justice as a legitimate response to the enduring consequences of enslavement and colonialism.⁴

The case for reparations is therefore a case for completing unfinished business. It asks governments and institutions that benefited from colonial systems to confront the consequences those systems left behind—and to engage descendants as partners in determining what meaningful repair should look like.

This is not about remaining trapped in the past. It is about refusing to allow the past to dictate the future.

For the Virgin Islands, reparations can become a pathway toward dignity, economic restoration, political empowerment, and self-determination. The first requirement is simple: truth must be acknowledged. The next is harder—but necessary.

Justice must follow.

Footnotes

1. U.S. Department of State, Convention Between the United States and Denmark for the Cession of the Danish West Indies, signed August 4, 1916.
2. United Nations, Non-Self-Governing Territories and Special Committee on Decolonization proceedings concerning the U.S. Virgin Islands.
3. African-Caribbean Reparations and Resettlement Alliance submission to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 2025.
4. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, materials on reparatory justice for Africans and people of African descent.