REPAIR WHAT? (continued):

Two Jobs and a Sense of Hope: A Young Man From Mali Discovers a Tough Life on a Time Clock (Anne Hull, December 11, 2002, Washington Post)

The toilet is stuffed with paper and flooded. Adama Camara retrieves the mush from the water. He's assigned to clean the men's restrooms on Concourse A of Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport. Swabbing the floor, he's always careful not to let the strings of the mop touch the wingtips and loafers around him. He puts in new paper towels. He wipes down the latrines and then mucks out the stalls.

Adama does not complain. He will only say, "The people stink."

He speaks four languages but works quietly. He's often mistaken for a black man in the Deep South's sense instead of a newly arrived immigrant from west Africa. One day he's scouring the men's bathroom across from Gate A-19 when a black American walks up. The stranger looks at him and asks, as if to shake Adama awake, "Man, why do you work in here? This is nasty."

It took Adama a while to figure out what the man meant, why he was so bothered.

Displayed under glass at the Atlanta airport is Martin Luther King Jr.'s preacher robe, his watch and his handwritten letters with words scratched out, the words begging for a new day to dawn.

Here it is almost 40 years later and a young black man is scrubbing toilets in the gateway to the South.

For Adama, an immigrant from the threadbare country of Mali, cleaning bathrooms for $6.23 an hour is better than marching off to the diamond mines of Sierra Leone.

Thomas Sowell has made the case that the main reason for the permanent underclass of native blacks may be that they never experienced this kind of first wave immigration and it has had a devastating effect on subsequent generations. That's the basis upon which I'd support some form of "reparation". Posted by Orrin Judd at December 11, 2002 9:12 AM