Advertisement
In recent months, momentum for black reparations has continued to build. In June 2002, members of the New York City Council held hearings to discuss whether a public commission should be established to examine the question of reparations. A coalition of largely black nationalist groups sponsored a "Millions for Reparations" at Washington's National Mall on August 17, which despite a disappointing turnout, still attracted national media coverage. At the demonstration, Congressman John Conyers criticized members of Congress for their failure to endorse reparations. Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, linked the reparations cause to the empowerment of young African Americans, declaring that our children "deserve a better future."
When black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter came out to attack reparations, it was no surprise. But in recent weeks, other prominent African Americans embracing liberal and even progressive views also expressed a variety of reservations about the black reparations demand. Writing in the urban issues magazine City Limits, educator Hakim Hasan warned that reparations represented a significant "danger, namely that black Americans, flush with compensation-we won!-would likewise avoid any sustained, collective introspection." Hasan grimly predicted that "if Martin Luther King's image can sell telephones ... then a Macy's Reparations Day sale, is not farfetched." Progressive historian Robin D.G. Kelley raised similar reservations. "The focus on slavery alone," Kelley observed, "misses the whole point about how racism worked through the 20th century to now to enrich whites at the expense of people of color." Kelley worried that "some massive payment without the elimination of racism will be used to shut all black people up...."
Wade Henderson, the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, expressed support for the general concept of black compensation for enslavement and racial oppression, but opposed "making payments to individuals." Henderson believed that any kind of financial reparations "has to go to some publicly chartered institution that is set up to eradicate the two most persistent problems black folks face: education and economic development." USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham was even more critical, declaring that the reparations movement "is in many ways a head without a body." He noted that three of the most prominent spokespersons for "the reparations cause"-Johnnie Cochran, Randall Robinson, and Charles Ogletree-did not speak at the Washington, D.C. demonstration. Wickham claimed that reparations advocates had refused to address the "Achilles' heel" of the movement of "how the payout should be paid.... Instead of working to bridge this troubling gap of opinions, too many advocates of reparations continue to dance around it." Wickham warned that "their soft shoe on the payout question widens the divide over what should be done."
The criticisms of Wickham, Henderson, Kelley, and others have to be taken seriously and convincingly addressed. First, and perhaps foremost, is the fact that white racism is structural in character, and is largely grounded in institutional processes rather than by individuals' behavior. Racial prejudice is reproduced by America's basic institutions-economic, educational, social, and political-of our society. The racial myths of white history are used to rationalize, explain away, and justify white supremacy and black inequality.
What reparations does is to force whites to acknowledge the brutal reality of our common history, something white society generally has refused to do. It provides a historically-grounded explanation for the continuing burden of racial oppression: the unequal distribution of economic resources, land, and access to opportunities for social development, which was sanctioned by the federal government. Consequently it is that same government that bears the responsibility of compensating those citizens and their descendants to whom constitutional rights were denied. Affirmative action was essentially "paycheck equality," in the words of political scientist Ronald Walters; it created millions of job opportunities, bud did relatively little to transfer wealth from one racial group to another.
One-third of all African-American households today has a negative net wealth. The average black household's wealth is less than 15 percent of the typical white household's. Most of our people are trapped in an almost bottomless economic pit from which there will be no escape-unless we change our political demands and strategy from liberal integrationism to a restructuring of economic resources, and the elimination of structural deficits that separate blacks and whites into unequal racial universes. "Reparations" transforms the dynamics of the national racial discourse, moving from "handouts" to "paybacks." It parallels a global movement by people of African descent and other Third World people to renegotiate debt and to demand compensation for slavery, colonialism, and apartheid.
Wickham's argument that reparations advocates must articulate with one voice how and when the compensation should be paid is a seductive trap. Every social protest movement throughout history that has endeavored to achieve a broad strategic goal generates many different tactics and organizations to achieve it. It is only through the political struggle to win reparations-in the courtroom, in the media, at the grassroots level-will the specific reforms and measures for implementation take shape.
"Economic reparations" could take a variety of forms, any of which could be practically implemented. I favor the establishment of a reparations social fund that would channel federal, state, and/or corporate funds for investment in nonprofit, community-based organizations, economic empowerment zones in areas with high rates of unemployment, and grants or interest-free loans for blacks to purchase homes or to start businesses in economically depressed neighborhoods. However, there are other approaches to the reconstruction of black economic opportunity. Sociologist Dalton Conley has suggested the processing of "individual checks via the tax system, like a refundable slavery tax credit." Major corporations and banks that were "unjustly enriched" by either slave labor or by Jim Crow-era discriminatory policies against African Americans could set aside a portion of future profits in a trust fund to financially compensate their victims and their descendants. Universities whose endowments were based on the slave trade or on slave labor and/or companies that were unjustly enriched by racial segregation laws could create scholarship funds to give greater access to African-American students.
It would be dangerous and foolish for the proponents of reparations to quarrel among themselves over the best approach for implementation at this time. Over a generation ago, there were numerous divisions within the Civil Rights Movement, separating leaders and rival organizations. They all agreed on the general goal, the abolition of legal racial segregation, but espoused very different ways and tactics to get there. The same model should be applied to reparations. Any effort to impose rigid ideological or organizational conformity on this diverse and growing popular movement will only serve to disrupt and destroy it.
As I have written previously, the greatest challenge in the national debate over African-American reparations is in convincing black people, not whites, that we can actually win. The greatest struggle of the oppressed is always against their own weaknesses, doubts, and fears. The reparations demand is most liberating because it has the potential for transforming how black people see themselves, and our own history.
When black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter came out to attack reparations, it was no surprise. But in recent weeks, other prominent African Americans embracing liberal and even progressive views also expressed a variety of reservations about the black reparations demand. Writing in the urban issues magazine City Limits, educator Hakim Hasan warned that reparations represented a significant "danger, namely that black Americans, flush with compensation-we won!-would likewise avoid any sustained, collective introspection." Hasan grimly predicted that "if Martin Luther King's image can sell telephones ... then a Macy's Reparations Day sale, is not farfetched." Progressive historian Robin D.G. Kelley raised similar reservations. "The focus on slavery alone," Kelley observed, "misses the whole point about how racism worked through the 20th century to now to enrich whites at the expense of people of color." Kelley worried that "some massive payment without the elimination of racism will be used to shut all black people up...."
Wade Henderson, the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, expressed support for the general concept of black compensation for enslavement and racial oppression, but opposed "making payments to individuals." Henderson believed that any kind of financial reparations "has to go to some publicly chartered institution that is set up to eradicate the two most persistent problems black folks face: education and economic development." USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham was even more critical, declaring that the reparations movement "is in many ways a head without a body." He noted that three of the most prominent spokespersons for "the reparations cause"-Johnnie Cochran, Randall Robinson, and Charles Ogletree-did not speak at the Washington, D.C. demonstration. Wickham claimed that reparations advocates had refused to address the "Achilles' heel" of the movement of "how the payout should be paid.... Instead of working to bridge this troubling gap of opinions, too many advocates of reparations continue to dance around it." Wickham warned that "their soft shoe on the payout question widens the divide over what should be done."
The criticisms of Wickham, Henderson, Kelley, and others have to be taken seriously and convincingly addressed. First, and perhaps foremost, is the fact that white racism is structural in character, and is largely grounded in institutional processes rather than by individuals' behavior. Racial prejudice is reproduced by America's basic institutions-economic, educational, social, and political-of our society. The racial myths of white history are used to rationalize, explain away, and justify white supremacy and black inequality.
What reparations does is to force whites to acknowledge the brutal reality of our common history, something white society generally has refused to do. It provides a historically-grounded explanation for the continuing burden of racial oppression: the unequal distribution of economic resources, land, and access to opportunities for social development, which was sanctioned by the federal government. Consequently it is that same government that bears the responsibility of compensating those citizens and their descendants to whom constitutional rights were denied. Affirmative action was essentially "paycheck equality," in the words of political scientist Ronald Walters; it created millions of job opportunities, bud did relatively little to transfer wealth from one racial group to another.
One-third of all African-American households today has a negative net wealth. The average black household's wealth is less than 15 percent of the typical white household's. Most of our people are trapped in an almost bottomless economic pit from which there will be no escape-unless we change our political demands and strategy from liberal integrationism to a restructuring of economic resources, and the elimination of structural deficits that separate blacks and whites into unequal racial universes. "Reparations" transforms the dynamics of the national racial discourse, moving from "handouts" to "paybacks." It parallels a global movement by people of African descent and other Third World people to renegotiate debt and to demand compensation for slavery, colonialism, and apartheid.
Wickham's argument that reparations advocates must articulate with one voice how and when the compensation should be paid is a seductive trap. Every social protest movement throughout history that has endeavored to achieve a broad strategic goal generates many different tactics and organizations to achieve it. It is only through the political struggle to win reparations-in the courtroom, in the media, at the grassroots level-will the specific reforms and measures for implementation take shape.
"Economic reparations" could take a variety of forms, any of which could be practically implemented. I favor the establishment of a reparations social fund that would channel federal, state, and/or corporate funds for investment in nonprofit, community-based organizations, economic empowerment zones in areas with high rates of unemployment, and grants or interest-free loans for blacks to purchase homes or to start businesses in economically depressed neighborhoods. However, there are other approaches to the reconstruction of black economic opportunity. Sociologist Dalton Conley has suggested the processing of "individual checks via the tax system, like a refundable slavery tax credit." Major corporations and banks that were "unjustly enriched" by either slave labor or by Jim Crow-era discriminatory policies against African Americans could set aside a portion of future profits in a trust fund to financially compensate their victims and their descendants. Universities whose endowments were based on the slave trade or on slave labor and/or companies that were unjustly enriched by racial segregation laws could create scholarship funds to give greater access to African-American students.
It would be dangerous and foolish for the proponents of reparations to quarrel among themselves over the best approach for implementation at this time. Over a generation ago, there were numerous divisions within the Civil Rights Movement, separating leaders and rival organizations. They all agreed on the general goal, the abolition of legal racial segregation, but espoused very different ways and tactics to get there. The same model should be applied to reparations. Any effort to impose rigid ideological or organizational conformity on this diverse and growing popular movement will only serve to disrupt and destroy it.
As I have written previously, the greatest challenge in the national debate over African-American reparations is in convincing black people, not whites, that we can actually win. The greatest struggle of the oppressed is always against their own weaknesses, doubts, and fears. The reparations demand is most liberating because it has the potential for transforming how black people see themselves, and our own history.