Views > August 22, 2006

The Reparations Bandwagon

Hurricane Katrina opens eyes to the need for reparations to repair the race/class divide.

By Salim Muwakkil

The national movement to gain reparations for the descendents of enslaved Africans was a fast-rolling bandwagon until slowed by events of 9/11. Well, it’s accelerating again.

In truth, it’s been picking up momentum since Hurricane Katrina blew the cover off this nation’s well-camouflaged race/class divide. The distress revealed in that storm’s wake moved even President George Bush to urge redress of poverty’s racial disparities. He quickly moved past that urge, but the national conversation continues.

As I see it, the question of reparations for racial slavery and Jim Crow apartheid is one of the nation’s most substantive issues. It’s also one of the most disparaged.

In fact, anything relating to slavery seems to repel white Americans. Whenever someone floats the idea to issue a governmental apology for abetting racial slavery, the notion is quickly condemned.  The last official to suggest such a public apology was former Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio), who proposed a bill for an official apology in 1998 and again in 2000. Hall was flooded with angry mail and the legislation languished.

Americans must lose this aversion if we want to effectively confront the nation’s widening racial disparities. Slavery’s legacy is the primary instigator of those disparities —though its role is hidden to many Americans.

The reparations model provides a conceptual framework to help clarify the crippling affects of that legacy by taking careful account of the structural and intergenerational dimensions of racial advantage and disadvantage. This approach is not concerned with inducing guilt or moral suasion; it defines slavery in terms of unjust enrichment and racially biased distribution of resources. 

Many kinds of capital were systematically diverted from blacks to whites through racial slavery and discrimination for more than 15 generations. This produced a wide racial gap in income and wealth distribution, disparities that were then compounded through many generations.

A comprehensive attempt to redress slavery’s damage resonates with global efforts to compensate history’s victims. Most modern nations now realize that the vagaries of history sometimes produce victims with real injuries: There have been Chilean reparations to the indigenous Mapuche people, Canadian reparations to indigenous Inuits, U.S. reparations to Japanese-American survivors and various Native nations, German reparations to Israel, and more.

The issue is gaining more advocates. Reparations conventions and forums are occurring across the nation.

A group of heavyweight attorneys (including Harvard’s Charles Ogletree and the law firm of the late Johnnie Cochran), formed in 2002 to advocate reparations issues on the judicial front. Several lawsuits are pending and others are anticipated against insurers, railroad corporations and banks seeking reparations for the profits of slavery.

City councils across the country have passed pro-reparations resolutions, including Chicago; Cleveland; Detroit; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Los Angeles and Oakland.

Most of these resolutions urge support for a bill annually introduced by Michigan congressman John Conyers that seeks merely to establish a commission to examine slavery’s consequences and recommend remedies.

At least 12 municipalities (including Chicago, which was the first) have passed slavery era disclosure laws, which require businesses to report on any historical connections to the slave trade. Several mainstream institutions, churches and a number of prominent white Americans also have become reparations advocates. In May 2001, for example, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a two-part editorial supporting reparations. 

“Slavery and the century of government-sanctioned discrimination that followed were national policies that denied fundamental rights—justice, equality, freedom—to African-Americans. It will take a national effort to answer for that,” the paper argued. It was the first time a major publication had come to such a conclusion.

And just last June, Ken Woodley, the winner of the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2006 George Mason Award, urged American journalists to support a national apology for slavery and reparations during his acceptance speech.Woodley, the crusading editor of Virginia’s Farmville Herald, told the audience that the nation needs “a domestic Marshall Plan” providing blacks with education, healthcare and economic development as a form of reparations.

Most recently, a coalition of student groups, reparations groups, social justice advocates and some elected officials (dubbed the “corporate restitutions movement”) launched a student loan boycott against banks complicit in slavery, including JP Morgan Chase Manhattan Bank, Bank America, FleetBoston Financial Corp., Bank One and Wachovia.

The bandwagon rolls on.

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• Reader Comments

  Recently Mr. Silis Muhammad, the Chairman of All For Reparations And Emancipation, delivered the following statement to the 12th Session of the U.N. Working Group On Minorities in Geneva:

  “Greetings Mr. Chairman, Members of the Working Group on Minorities.
  My name is Silis Muhammad.  For well over nine years we have traveled to Geneva.  For nine years we have spoken to you about the Afrodescendant people.  We know that we are a nation of people: history, all the wise scientists, and you, in your hearts, will bear witness that we, Afrodescendants, are an ancient people who descended from Abraham.  We were scattered through slavery, stripped of our original language, culture and religion, living today, suffering the lingering effects of slavery.
  The first time we spoke at the UN, to the Working Group on Minorities, concerning our human rights, you began seeking to find a way for us to fit into the definition of the ICCPR, for we mimic the mother tongue, culture and religion of our slave-masters’ children, having been robbed of our own.  The Working Group on Minorities received a wisely worded mandate from the Sub-Commission, to consider the ‘lingering effects of slavery.’ Over the years the Working Group did consider the lingering effects of slavery and you have the results today.  Leaders of Afrodescendants, about 250 million of us, met in La Ceiba, Honduras in 2001, and again in Chincha Peru in 2005, under the protection of the UN, in the sight of Nations, and affirmed our commitment to one another.  This was done in the presence of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
  We want formal UN recognition of our self-chosen name, Afrodescendants.  We want restoration to the human families of the Earth.  For the sake of simple justice, and to correct a grave error, O United Nations, hear our prayer!  In error, the UN granted recogntion, restoration and reparations 60 years ago to a scattered people who claimed to be the seed of Abraham, the victims of 400 years of slavery.  The result of that grave UN error is ongoing war and terror for the entire world today.
  We, Afrodescendants, are the scattered orphan children, descended from 400 years of plantation slavery.  Our recognition by the UN would not bring war and terror.  It would, instead, correct a grave wrong and bring the truth to a suffering world.  It has been our prayer that the Sub-Commission and the Working Group on Minorities would be our symbolic ‘dry land,’ allowing us, the slave descendants, to cross our symbolic ‘red sea.’
  The good works of the Working Group on Minorities and the Sub-Commission cannot go unnoticed unless the Human Rights Department fails 250 million souls altogether.  We call upon the United Nations to do the right thing, for the sake of peace, and for the sake of all Nations of the Earth.  The pathway of the slave-descendants’ collective human rights, recognition and restoration must be protected and assured.”

  The above statement by Mr. Silis Muhammad is submitted by Malik Al-Arkam.  For the best in-depth coverage of our Reparations Movement please read each issue of Muhammad Speaks newspaper and visit www.AllForReparations.org.

  Posted by mathrise on Aug 22, 2006 at 10:49 AM

  This is a loser. People everywhere could come up with some claim of reparations due to them for the raw deal their accestors got.

  I suggest you read, “Enough” by Juan Williams and get on with life in the real world.

  Posted by whattheheck on Aug 22, 2006 at 12:15 PM

  Don’t worry, WTF.  No one’s gonna confiscate your property.

  Posted by Major Major on Aug 22, 2006 at 4:40 PM

  An official apology from the government, acknowledging the evil effects of the slave trade upon millions of African-descended people as well as the whole of American culture, might be entirely appropriate, but how meaningful is an apology, really? The risk is that it would stand by itself and become little more than a gesture, i.e. possessing little substance beyond the words themselves.

  Admittedly, many might find such a gesture highly meaningful in a way that I do not. For that reason alone, it is worth doing. But reparations are another matter.

  I’ve expressed my misgivings about reparations before. Who, exactly, would be eligible to receive reparations? Should it be based upon some percentage of African ancestry in one’s bloodlines? Would wealthy or middle-class Af-Ams receive reparations too? What would be the cut-off point between “deserving” and “not deserving”, and how would disputed deserts be resolved? Who, exactly, would pay, and in what form? Would it be in the form of government programs assigned only to benefit those of African descent (presuming they “make the cut” of eligibility)? Would it be in the form of cash? Either way, from where would it come? A new tax? Government bond sales? Mass printing of notes? Electronic credits? I’ve asked questions like these quite a few times and received no real answers, almost as though the actual practicalities of the issue have no place in the discussion of it.

  I hope I don’t have to conclude that because I’m a paleface, my questions aren’t taken seriously. That would be ignorant and, more to the point, mean. Had about enough meanness in connection with skin color already, have we not?

  If there was an authentic effort to redress modern grievances based on the generations-long crime of slavery and segregation laws, I think it would best take the form of social investment in schools and neighborhood businesses, halting the easy access to firearms, and implementing rehab programs for addicts as part of reforming drugs policy. Economic opportunity, schooled minds, and reduced burden of violence and racially imbalanced incarceration rates might be worth something; they could be worth a lot.These wouldn’t be directed exclusively at African-Americans, but they would benefit poor or marginalized people most and might therefore benefit the category of African-descent people (if you prefer to think of people as being categorized) to a greater proportion because they are more often poor or marginalized.

  Obviously measures like these would not erase past injustices, but they might allow today’s people some kind of stepping off point away from the endless grind of alienation and bitterness (which, in my experience, plenty of Af-Ams have already stepped away from, without reparations). At the very least, those who have a little gumption and the will to use an opportunity properly could benefit. We can’t do anything for people of the past, but we can and should make it possible for today’s generation to not be hobbled by that ugly past. It seems to me that it would be in everyone’s interest, whether brown or pink of skin, and would certainly be more logical and practical than strictly race-based giveaways, which will only infuriate those who aren’t on the “deserving” list and in any case are unworkable when it comes down to the actual doing of it.

  Maybe then we can begin the long task of unhooking from the racialist paradigm, which hobbles everyone, even those of us who don’t believe in it any more. Now that’s a bandwagon I’d love to see people jumping on! If only.

  Posted by Kuya on Aug 23, 2006 at 2:17 AM

  “This is a loser. People everywhere could come up with some claim of reparations due to them for the raw deal their accestors got.

  I suggest you read, �Enough� by Juan Williams and get on with life in the real world.

  Posted by whattheheck on Aug 22, 2006 at 12:15 PM”

  This is another “House Negro” comment justify imperialism, sexism, and genocide. First question-What about the Native persons of this continent? I do not remember those being toosed aside from England being undesirables to recylce that crap over here and using religion to do it. Juan, John McWother,Armstrong,Ward,Condi, and Colin love to speak well of their masters while they shine their boots with their butts. This country was built, like England,Holland,Belgium, and Spain on Free and exploited labor. The US never wants to admit to the crime, it sort of conflicts with that american dream stuff. Heck, the only reason they let white women vote because giving those former slaves the right to vote conflicted with the propaganda of “darkies, monkeys, ect” whom were perceived to have a lower standing than dogs. So look into the mirror if you support racism. I’m glad Harriett Tubman did not take your view and say-"Damn I have a geat job, I should tell eveyone to stay and enjoy the free housing, whip -lashing, castration, breaking up of families and sexual violence from my slave master, oops, I mean pasionate love making for his sexual benefit!”

  Posted by chicagocaesar on Aug 23, 2006 at 3:53 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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