Slavery, Racist Violence, American Apartheid:
The Case for Reparations

I may state to all our friends, and to all our enemies, that we has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. And then didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything? And then didn't the large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? . . . I say they have grown rich, and my people is poor.

--Bayley Wyatt, a freedman from Yorktown, Virginia in Roy Finkenbine (ed.), Sources of the African-American Past (London: Longman, 1993), p. 88.

 

LIKE THE PROVERBIAL COMET, over the last year the demand for reparations has blazed across the political skyline. Few current issues burn as brightly among African Americans. The movement's surging growth has predictably provoked renewed opposition. Recently critiques of the escalating reparations movement have come from two very different sources: from Adolph L. Reed, Jr., a justly-respected African American radical, and from David Horowitz, an unrespected neoconservative ideologue.

Last February, Horowitz published an anti-reparations advertisement in several college newspapers across the country. His factually challenged advertisement provoked a storm of controversy. Despite his intentions, Horowitz has helped move African American reparations into the headlines and the consciousness of the American public. Horowitz's diatribe has served to re-energize a nascent Black student movement and to transform college campuses into sites of struggle. Furthermore, his ad has helped force the mainstream media to remove the shroud covering the struggle for reparations, thus making audible the claims of African American ancestors.

Consigned to leftist circles, Reed's article in the December issue of The Progressive has not had nearly the popular impact of Horowitz's advertisement. Nevertheless, it is an important intervention. It inflamed Black nationalists and radicals, sparking a brief but necessary discussion among them. In addition, because many white leftists view him as a courageous and critical African American radical voice, Reed's arguments are likely to contribute toward consolidating white liberal and leftist opposition to reparations.

On the surface, the conjunction between Reed and Horowitz seems paradoxical, if not surreal. Yet, when it is considered that reparations has historically been aligned with African American nationalism, it is not surprising that its opponents come from both sides of the political spectrum. Although Reed and Horowitz both oppose reparations, their opposition is rooted in vastly different interpretations of United States history and political commitments. Moreover, an immense chasm separates their arguments. Reed's article supplies a serious but sketchy critique, while Horowitz provides an under-articulated melange of fraudulent assertions. Nevertheless, their analyses have one thing in common. From their very different points of view, both Reed and Horowitz evince hostility toward political expressions of African American identity, especially those that explicitly reflect nationalistic perspectives.

This paper has three interconnected objectives: (1) to explicate Reed's and Horowitz's arguments; (2) to contextualize their arguments; and (3) to suggest an alternative reading of the reparations movement. The first, explication of their arguments, has two aspects: explanation and critique of their positions. The second objective requires that their arguments be located in the current socio-historical and political moment. The third objective attempts to meet the requirement that social analysts move beyond rejection toward projection: that is, that social critics offer an alternative to the theories and practices that they repudiate.

Reparations: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

AFTER LINGERING ON THE POLITICAL MARGINS FOR DECADES, activists have at last pushed reparations to the center of discourse in the African American community.¹ Currently, liberal civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) have joined nationalist and radical associations like N'COBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, and the Black Radical Congress in calling for reparations. Moreover, reparations activists have recently made successful forays into traditional politics. In addition to Representative John Conyers' perennial introduction of a bill, H.R. 40, asking Congress to examine the issue, several city councils, including those of Chicago, Dallas, and Detroit, have passed pro-reparations resolutions. Moreover, reparations activists are diversifying their targets. In an innovative action that transcends the State, New York Attorney Daedria Farmer-Paellman is aiming lawsuits at Aetna, Inc. and other multinational corporations. At this historical juncture, reparations appear as one issue that can unite African Americans across class, gender, generational, and even ideological fissures.

To understand what's at stake for Horowitz requires a thorough analysis and contextualization of his ad, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks are a Bad Idea for Blacks -- and Racist Too." The ad was initially published as part of his pamphlet, The Death of the Civil Rights Movement, a diatribe against Rev. Al Sharpton's "Redeem the Dream" March to end to racial profiling. A vociferous attack on Black activists and a fevered defense of racial profiling, Death declares race, by which he means racism, dead. In Horowitz's color-blind perspective, group parity is irrelevant, because race is a fiction. He wants the public to believe that because race is an unscientific concept that it is also a non-existent social reality. From this perverted position, he logically concludes that contemporary Black activism is unnecessary. Therefore, he portrays activists as self-serving con artists and the African American people as their dupes. The pamphlet's purpose is to spark racial hostility, to mobilize opposition to the elimination of discriminatory policies and practices. Horowitz is the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing. He is the prototypical "color-blind" liberal or neoconservative who would abolish the race concept, that is racial classification, while maintaining the inequities produced by racial oppression.

Both Horowitz and Reed recognize the growing popularity of the reparations movement. According to Horowitz, he published "Ten Reasons" because reparations "is fast becoming the next big 'civil rights' thing."² Whereas Horowitz is content to acknowledge the movement's escalating significance and denounce it, Reed's concerns are more important. He is interested in analyzing the reasons for the movement's rise. Although bemused, he acknowledges the movement's increasing importance, which he attributes to the sharp decline in support for affirmative action. Furthermore, he suggests its ascent is a response to retrenchment. However, he later undermines this assumption by speculating that the "demand for racially defined reparations" is being promoted by the capitalist media to undercut the construction of a social movement built "across race, gender, and other identities." Reed's initial point is the relevant one for me, because it recognizes that the sudden elevation of reparations to the center of African American politics is a response to contemporary conditions.³

The reparations movement's emergence is conditioned by contemporary neoliberal and new paternalist policies. These revanchist approaches establish the contours of the current conjuncture, what can be called the New Nadir. Economic marginalization, political destabilization, fragmentation, and economic and political incorporation characterize this period of retrenchment. The dominant economic trends in the New Nadir era involve the deproletarianization and subproletarianization of African American workers; hypersegregation; increasing mathematical and technological illiteracy; the economic incorporation of elites, and the subsequent acceleration in class stratification. The leading political tendencies include the resurgence of State terrorism and private racial violence; racialized incarceration; new forms of disfranchisement; and political fragmentation via demographic diversification and the promotion of Black conservatives.⁴ Thus, reparations represent a more general shift toward militant and nationalistic, if not radical, strategies within the Black Freedom Movement.

Adolph Reed has provided an appropriate heuristic by which to categorize the various aspects of the demand for reparations. According to him, reparations demands represent the confluence of three factors, material, psychological, and symbolic. Material components refer to justifications for reparations that are premised on the structural aspects of racial oppression. Examples would include labor exploitation, racist violence, de jure and de facto discriminatory State policies, and non- exploitative economic oppression. The symbolic element focuses on memorializing injustices via apologies, monument building, and the reconstruction of instruction. Whereas the symbolic component is aimed at the general U.S. public, the psychological element specifically targets African Americans.⁵ I will frame my interrogation of Reed's and Horowitz's arguments via this classification schema.

Refutations and Rationales of the Material Basis for African American Reparations

THEIR ANTITHETICAL READINGS OF U.S. HISTORY and diametrically opposed political understandings are most visible concerning the material basis for African American reparations. Reed, with some ambivalence, seems to accept the material foundation for reparations. Horowitz completely rejects reparations, especially its material basis. Eight of the "Ten Reasons" constituting his opposition can be construed as material factors. However, he does not initially challenge the normative foundation upon which the movement rests, what Robert Westley calls "the principle that the victims of unjust enrichment should be compensated."⁶ His strategy is positivist, thus he empirically contests self-generated concerns, rather than establish a philosophical basis for his opposition. Consequently, he asks, "Who Owes the Debt?" instead of "is a debt owed?"

The problems with his presentation here pervade the rest of his discussion. He is prone toward both minor and gross factual errors. More importantly, he decontextualizes his information. According to Horowitz, "There is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery." He reaches this conclusion because of African and Arab involvement in the slave trade and the existence of "3,000 African American slaveholders." (Actually, the 1830 census lists 3,777 Black slave owners, not 3,000 as Horowitz carelessly states.) His discussion of Black slaveholders is illustrative of how he manipulates data to distort history. The existence of 3,777 Black slaveholders is meaningless without knowing the total number of slaveholders. In 1850 there were 348,000 slave holding families (the Census Bureau collected the data on families, not individuals). Thus, the three thousand, seven hundred and seventy-seven Black slaveholders comprised only about one percent of slaveholding families!⁷ Second, African American slave owners were a statistical reality that tells us nothing about actual social relationships. Although some Black slave owners held others in bondage, that is asserted rights of ownership and exploited slave labor, most did not. They were people of some means who purchased family and friends from bondage, but never imposed master-slave relationships.

Furthermore, stripped from its socio-historical and legal contexts, and from existing power relations, the participation of Africans in the slave(ry) trade is trivia, at best, and duplicitous, at worst.⁸ That is, without the context we do not know what this information means and when contextualized it generally mean something other than what Horowitz implies. Scholars of the slave trade generally acknowledge the role of power relations as a coercive factor stimulating African participation. As Walter Rodney pointed out in his classic text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Europeans controlled the international slave trade. Without excusing the role of kings and other African elites, their involvement should be understood in the context of the actual power relations.

Even given the role of Africans, Arabs, and African Americans, Horowitz's conclusion is deceptive. He offers a negative interpretation, concluding that, "no single group is responsible." Yet, this scenario cries out for a positive one, i.e., that several groups were responsible. Moreover, the participation of multiple ethnicities does not mean that all participated or benefited equally. Furthermore, as citizens African Americans are seeking recompense from the governmental and corporate entities that still exist in the United States--not from an ethnic group.

Horowitz continues this faulty line of reasoning in his third and fourth propositions. In his third point, he makes three assertions. First, he contends that nationally only a minority of whites owned slaves. Second, he claims only one in five whites in the antebellum South was a slaveholder. Third, he posits that 350,000 Union soldiers "died in the war that freed the slaves."⁹ His first claim is correct; nationally, only a minority of U.S. families owned slaves. In 1790 23 percent of the U.S. families owned slaves and only 10 percent in 1850. However, his second claim is inaccurate. In 1790 72 percent of southern families owned slaves. In 1850, in the South Atlantic and the East Central sub regions, 31 and 32 percent did.¹⁰ In his third declaration, Horowitz deliberately misleads the reader by blurring the issue. The Civil War did precipitate abolition, but it was not fought for that purpose. The North fought to preserve the Union. It became a war to end slavery only when Lincoln realized that victory necessitated destroying the Confederacy's capacity to wage war, that is removing its most productive resource, Black slaves.

Continuing his effort to exonerate whites of responsibility for slavery, he contends in his fourth point that most contemporary U.S. citizens do not have a "lineal connection to slavery."¹¹ His argument is quite devious. First, he uses the ambiguity inherent in the term "lineal" to manipulate the reader. Second, he cynically attempts to pit African Americans against recent immigrants of color and other oppressed ethnicities. Third, he ignores claims for the segregation and contemporary eras.

Although Horowitz means simply a direct connection, for many readers lineal suggests a heredity relationship. Of course, most Americans are not biological descendants of slaveholders, but all white Americans have benefited from the legacy of racial oppression--white privilege and Black exploitation, exclusion and subordination--albeit to differing degrees based on class, ethnicity, and gender. Planters, small slaveholders, and capitalist manufacturers, exporters, investors, and insurers of slave-produced products benefited from the exploitation of slave labor. During the century from 1865 to 1965 the same groups, plus industrial capitalists, benefited from the superexploitation of Black labor.

Horowitz's second argument violates the basic principle of political incorporation. When one becomes a citizen of a State, that person automatically accepts the benefits and prior obligations of that State. Moreover, if Horowitz believes this argument then he should apply it consistently. Does it apply to reparation payments to Native Americans and Japanese Americans? Does it apply to the nation's general debt? Should a portion of the tax monies used to pay the country's debt to domestic and foreign lenders be repaid to recent immigrants because they were not citizens when the debt was accumulated?

THIRD, HE ARBITRARILY LIMITS REPARATIONS TO COMPENSATION FOR ENSLAVEMENT. It is on this basis that he argues post-slavery immigrants are not liable for reparations. Although post-slavery European immigrants were brutally exploited and endured ethnic discrimination, like the Irish and Germans before them they often expressed their rage by replicating their treatment on Blacks. Even so, by World War II the Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, and Poles were becoming "white" and have since enjoyed the full benefits of whiteness in a white supremacist country. Whether native or immigrant the vast majority of white middle and working class Americans, have benefited from the exclusion of Blacks from professional and civil service jobs, unions, and governmental programs. For instance, African Americans were denied the opportunity to participate in the 1862 Homestead Act that transferred hundreds of millions of acres to white citizens and European immigrants. Additionally, Blacks were practically excluded from the 1935 Social Security Act because almost all worked as farm laborers or domestics. Furthermore, from the 1940s to the early 1960s white homebuyers obtained low interest Federal Housing Authority loans, a program from which Blacks were also excluded. Finally, as contemporary scholarship indicates, whites continue to benefit from racial discrimination in employment, loans, housing, and healthcare. Consequently, the demand for reparations is not just for enslavement, but for exclusion, discrimination, and the racial violence that characterized the era of segregation as well as for contemporary disparities.¹²

His final argument facilitates a transition to his allegation that African Americans also benefited from slavery. On the one hand, he claims that few contemporary whites benefited from slavery. Yet, on the other he asserts that contemporary Blacks have. If the present wealth of the United States resulted from slavery, as he posits, then whites as well as African Americans would be beneficiaries of slave-produced wealth. These arguments implicitly contradict each other; he cannot have it both ways.

In charging that African Americans benefited from slavery, Horowitz makes numerous errors. First, he proceeds as if wealth accumulation produces positive impacts across society. This illogical argument suggests that the quality of life of the slaves of wealthy masters was better than that of impoverished slaveholders. Relationships of domination and exploitation are parasitic, not mutually beneficial. That is, the slave trade and slavery enriched European nation-states and the U.S. (particularly the class of slaveholders, slave trading merchants and manufacturers) but impoverished Africans and African Americans. Horowitz can only make this argument in the abstract. Actual data reveals that African Americans' percentage of U.S. wealth has stayed roughly the same, about one percent, since the antebellum period. Furthermore, he limits his discussion of "benefits" to a narrow economic argument. Thus, he circumvents discussing the effects of racial oppression, particularly racist violence, especially its role in producing stressors that undermine Blacks' physical and psychological health.¹³

As empirical support for his position that African Americans benefited from slavery, he offers an estimate of the difference between African Americans' and Africans' per capita incomes. This is an ahistorical and spurious comparison. It is ahistorical because it ignores the role of five centuries of slave trading and colonialism in producing contemporary African poverty. It is spurious because of the vast differences in the gross national product of African nation-states and the U.S., which are largely the consequence of that slave trade and colonialism.

Horowitz's discussion here presages his eighth and ninth points. In them he identifies the ways in which African Americans have already received reparations, resulting in what he calls Blacks' debt to the U.S. First, he contends that Blacks' inclusion in Great Society social programs constituted reparations because these programs made monetary and other transfer payments toward "redressing historic racial grievances."¹⁴ This is absurd! He is either unaware or ignores the multiple roles social programs play in U.S. society. On the one hand, Great Society-initiated programs were ostensibly designed to abolish poverty. Programs, such as AFDC and food stamps, were class-determined minimum subsistence programs. Historically, whites, including white Latino/as, have made up the overwhelming majority of aid recipients, although the proportion of African Americans in these programs has been disproportionate. Nevertheless, Horowitz's discussion rips the programs from their broader public policy context. Great Society programs were part of Keynesian economics, the country's policy of using government spending to stimulate economic growth--employment and consumption. In addition to increasing levels of purchasing, these programs also created well paying government jobs for a predominately white middle class. On the other hand, some programs were designed to specifically address discrimination: racial, gender, ethnic, and religious. That is the point: no government program has sought to solely benefit Blacks. Specifically, in its short and contested existence affirmative action has provided opportunities not only for Blacks, but also for a broad and diverse segment of Americans, including white women and white men over fifty-five years of age.

Persisting in his distortion of the past, in point nine he misrepresents the history of the abolition movement, in both the U.S. and Britain. Two points are important: (1) his crude one-sided interpretation of abolitionism, particularly in Britain; and (2) his denial of Black agency. Continuing his Manichaean view of history, he presents the British Anti-Slavery Movement as entirely an exercise in humanism. He simply extends his argument concerning Union soldiers and Christian abolitionists in the U.S. to Britain. In reality, the British anti-slavery movement was a mixture of humanitarians and imperialists. More important, British abolitionism drew its impetus from a complex mixture of humanist sentiments, economic motivations, and fear of slave rebellions. Horowitz misses these nuances because his purpose is to exaggerate white humanitarianism and deny Black agency. Therefore, he mentions 3,000 Black slaveholders, but omits any mention of thousands of Black abolitionists, and numerous slave revolts, and the participation of 186,000 Black Union soldiers from his account. He belittles the life and death struggle waged by African Americans and their allies throughout U.S. history by calling hard-won rights gifts! Because his goal is to present African Americans as indebted, ungrateful children, he omits any discussion of Black self-activity. In sum, this argument approximates those who called for compensation for the slaveholders!

An aspect of Reed's argument converges with Horowitz's assault on African American agency. By attributing the re-emergence of the reparations movement to State policies alone and suggesting that its current popularity is due largely to capitalist media promotion, he denies or belittles the accomplishments of reparations activists. The mainstream media picked up the issue only after they could no longer ignore it. For more than a decade, media moguls ignored H.R. 40 and the overall reparations movement. The media took notice after activists targeted city councils and corporations, and high profile liberals such as Randall Robinson of TransAfrica and Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree became advocates.

AFTER ASSERTING THAT BLACKS AS A COLLECTIVE GROUP benefited from slavery, have already received reparations in the form of welfare, and in fact owe the U.S., Horowitz then attempts to use class to undermine support for reparations. He posits his class-over-race thesis by contrasting the Black middle class and West Indian immigrants to the so-called African American "underclass." First, he asserts that slavery and "the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination" have been insufficient barriers to success because they have been successfully hurdled by "the black middle class majority." That members of the Black middle and capitalist classes suffer racial discrimination is widely documented in past and current employment, housing, and loan discrimination suits. Class status does mitigate racial oppression, but it does not alleviate it. The combination of rejecting contemporary racism and African American agency blinds him to the dominant process by which the Black middle class is created and recreated. Historically the minority that has attained middle class position has generally done so by taking advantage of the ephemeral opportunities generated by Black social movements. Members of those classes best positioned have made the most advances. Horowitz tries to use Oprah Winfrey and the few wealthy Blacks to shift attention from race to class. Thus, he seeks to use socioeconomic status to negate a claim based on racial oppression. Nevertheless, according to Westley, "the claim is one of entitlement, not need."¹⁵ Although, the claim is based on the unjust treatment of African Americans as a collectivity, the basis for redistribution among African Americans should be need.

Horowitz is unwilling to acknowledge the continuing significance of racism. This leads him to conclude that the current conditions of the alleged "underclass" are a consequence of "individual character."¹⁶ The wealth index that measures accumulated assets over a lifetime offers some insight into this question. Currently, the median net wealth of Black households is about 12 percent that of whites; but only 1 percent if home equity is deducted. This is extremely important since Blacks were initially excluded from government sponsored home-ownership programs. Furthermore, that much of this discrepancy is due to inheritance underlines the historic accumulative nature of African American poverty. The roots of African American poverty are located in failure to provide reparations upon emancipation, their subsequently incorporation into the southern economy as sharecroppers and domestic servants, and a century of segregation. Thus, his attempt to substitute class for race is cynical. To blame most Blacks for not surmounting racism is analogous to questioning the character of Holocaust victims because a few Jews managed to escape!

On the surface, his comparison between West Indian immigrants and African Americans seems to have merit. Yet, a closer analysis reveals the spuriousness of this comparison. Horowitz's discussion is ahistorical and superficial. He implicitly treats all slave systems as the same. West Indian immigrants are the descendants of slaves, but they come from slave systems that differed markedly from U.S. slavery. Because African slaves greatly outnumbered whites in the West Indies, the white working and yeoman farming classes were minute; therefore a large number of slaves acquired valuable skills. More important, most contemporary Caribbean immigrants are the products of independent countries and were socialized in societies controlled by people of African descent.

In his fifth proposition, Horowitz explores another kind of comparison. Here he argues that African Americans' reparations claims are "not comparable" to those of Jewish and Japanese Americans. He dismisses African Americans' reparation claims because he contends that, unlike Jews and Japanese-Americans, Blacks are not survivors of the wrongs for which they seek retribution. Horowitz frames his argument in terms of what legal scholar Eric K. Yamamoto calls "traditional remedies law," which seeks to identify specific individual victims and abusers.¹⁷ However, Black demands for reparations are based on group, not individual rights. According to Westley, "the central claim for Black reparations is redress for exploitation through government sanctioned white supremacy."¹⁸ From about 1641 to 1965, federal and state law classified individuals by race and distinguished rights and opportunities on that basis. Group membership, not individual merit, determined one's role, position, and status in the economy, polity, and civil society. Individuals assigned to the African category were treated as a separate and subordinate group.

To his credit, Horowitz endorses reparations for victims of the massacres in Rosewood and Tulsa (he erroneously states Oklahoma City), and the Tuskegee experiment. This, however, is in keeping with his narrow and inaccurate reading of just reparations payments. He seems oblivious to compensations to corporate groups, including persons who were neither direct victims nor their immediate descendants. For instance, since the establishment of the Indian Claims Commission in 1946, the federal government and numerous state governments have paid reparations to persons other than survivors or their immediate descendants. During the 1980s several Native American nations received reparations in the form of money and land for actions that occurred a century or more ago. For instance, in 1986 the Ottawas of Michigan received $32 million based on an 1836 Treaty.

Psychological Ramifications of Reparations: Alienation or Efficacy

REED'S PSYCHOLOGICAL CATEGORY FOCUSES ON REPARATIONS ACTIVISTS' VIEWS on the effects of slavery and racial oppression on African Americans, what psychologists call internalized racism. They believe the struggle for reparations, and acquisition of even its symbolic demands (apology, memorialization, public education, etc.) contributes to African Americans' psychological health. In contrast, Horowitz contends that talk of reparations contributes toward the development of a victim mentality among African Americans.

The title of his seventh "Reason," "Reparations Will Increase Victim Mentalities, Negative Attitudes and Alienation Within the Black Community," underscores this point. However, interestingly, his argument actually subordinates the concerns advocated in the title. In its body, he declares the struggle for reparations is counterproductive because it will alienate new immigrants from African Americans. Not surprisingly, he posits a universalistic argument, charging that African Americans' pursuit of reparations will heighten racial animosity. This is classic victimology: blaming those resisting oppression for increasing racial hostility. This argument is flawed on several levels. First, Horowitz treats the new immigrants as a monolithic block. He does not take into account their U.S. racial designation, their racial classification in their homeland, or the racial politics there. For example, many Latino/as are African descended. Second, Horowitz fails to understand that the most decisive process affecting relations between African Americans and new immigrants is U.S. racism.

The concerns expressed in the title are a subtext, albeit an important one. Horowitz's essential point is that a focus on grievances will "burden" African Americans with a "crippling sense of victimhood."¹⁹ First, Blacks have been and continue to be victimized by differential group power relations. Recognition of past and present racial oppression is necessary and psychologically healthy. Horowitz has it backwards. The Black struggle for justice, equality, and self-determination--including reparations--is empowering. Participation produces positive self-esteem, a sense of political efficacy, and cognitive liberation. Horowitz seems to single out African Americans for special treatment. Has reparations created a "victim mentality" among Jewish people, Native Americans, or Japanese Americans? Alternatively, is this psychological defect something that only afflicts African Americans? The problem is not that Blacks possess a negative victim mentality, but that Horowitz is unwilling to honestly confront the centuries of racial oppression to which African Americans have been subjected.

Reed approaches the issue of psychological damages quite differently, distinguishing between two parts of the psychological factor. He identifies the "damage thesis" and a consciousness-raising component. He is not concerned with the development of a victim mentality among African Americans. His concerns are the reverse. According to him, aspects of the reparations movement, especially its Afrocentric wing, have accepted the "damage thesis," the view that slavery and subsequent oppression produced rampant pathologies among African Americans. Their response, according to Reed is consciousness-raising aimed at abating, if not eliminating the psychological defects that afflict most middle and working class African Americans. Reed rightly rejects this pathological interpretation of the African American people. Unfortunately, the "damage thesis" is not limited to a sector of the reparations movement but pervades a broad segment of the liberal civil rights and nationalist movements, especially the Nation of Islam.²⁰

ASPECTS OF THE MOVEMENT'S CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING TROUBLE REED. First, he doubts whether people can be mobilized around historic grievances. Second, he is ambivalent toward efforts to organize around ascriptive identities. There are two problems with Reed's first opposition. One, the African American reparations movement is organizing around grievances of past generations, but these include injuries suffered by previous but currently living generations. Moreover, the movement's logic relates the legacy of racial oppression to contemporary impoverishment, racist violence, and socioeconomic discrimination. In these senses then reparations is not about soothing the spirits of the dead. Second, the campaign for reparations is demonstrating a capacity to mobilize a broad cross-class group of Black people. Reed may doubt its possibilities; nevertheless reparations activists are "mobilizing popular support . . . to alter the patterns of public policy or economic relations," Reed's criteria for a social movement.²¹ Although he accepts the general need for social movements to instill "an understanding of history," Reed is uncomfortable with the reparations movement's attempt "to stress or create a sense of racial peoplehood as the primary basis for political identity."²² This concern reflects his philosophy of questioning notions of community built on ascriptive identities. In contrast, Reed advocates a politics based on class position over a "politics of recognition." This is similar to the class-over-race position advanced by Horowitz, although they flow from different logics and serve different politics.²³ Nevertheless, here his universalistic perspective borders on negating African American peoples' collective identity and their right to independent political organization.

Over the course of nearly five hundred years African descended people have forged a collective identity, an identity constructed in dialectical interaction between the State, various political economies, and Black civil society. These forces have cemented a collective African American ethnic or national identity with a set of common interests, though other identities have constructed competing and often fragmenting interests. Acknowledging the existence of crosscutting multiple identities does not mean that African Americans do not compose a particular class of citizens. The Black community's political weaknesses, particularly its lack of democratic decision-making processes, or the misuse of the concept by charlatans, does not make the community's existence a mystification.²⁴

Discussion of Horowitz's last assertion fits nicely here. Whereas Reed questions the community's existence, the logic of Horowitz's argument reiterates a tired assimilationism. Manipulating African American historical shibboleths, Horowitz calls upon Blacks to join in the conservative exultation of the U.S.'s "multi-ethnic social contract."²⁵ Inclusion in Horowitz's multi-ethnic America, however, comes with a price. He arrogantly demands that Blacks abandon autonomous political action and accept the patriots' interpretation of U.S. history. He charges that pursuing independent political action, such as reparations, will only further isolate American Americans. His antipathy toward African American nationalism and radicalism is quite raw here.

His assertions here are as duplicitous and dumb as those that preceded them. The U.S. social contract is multi-ethnic, inclusive of European ethnicities and is in that sense a "racial contract," as philosopher Charles W. Mills maintains.²⁶ Black isolation, geographically, socially, and politically is not primarily a consequence of Black politics. Rather it is a result of racial oppression. Blacks' isolation is an outcome of white- (especially capitalist-) created segregation, subordination, and deprecation. Moreover, in his entire consideration of African American's place in U.S. history, he avoids the issue of symbolic acknowledgment of slavery, or Blacks' contribution to U.S. development.

Symbolic Recognition: Apologies, Monuments, and Public Education

ACCORDING TO REED, SYMBOLIC ACTIONS TAKEN IN THIS CATEGORY SEEK to reeducate the U.S. population via public education. These initiatives include everything from Presidential and congressional apologies to the construction of monuments, and educating the public about the horrors of slavery. Surprisingly, neither Reed nor Horowitz advocates any of these actions! Reed of course supports memorializing African American historical experiences. His point is to contrast the hollowness of statues compared to statutes. In this regard, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott claims to have had an epiphany while watching visitors at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. According to him, the experience seemed to produce "emotional healing." Senator Lott reasoned that a monument honoring African American contributions could produce a similar effect. Reed's point is well taken, but it carries both a sense of realpolitik and a cynicism. Reed fails to address the political value of symbolism. Lott clearly hopes to accrue political benefits from his gambit. More to the point, if symbolism was completely vacuous, then why did Bill Clinton, the modern master of symbolic politics, and a superb manipulator of African Americans' sentiments, refuse to apologize? If apologies are meaningless, then why has House Concurrent Resolution 96, Ohio Representative Tony Hall's proposal for a governmental apology, languished in Congress? The failure to apologize is especially revealing since Congress has issued apologies before, to Japanese- Americans in 1988 and to Hawaiians in 1993.²⁷

Conclusion

FROM THEIR TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES, Horowitz and Reed both evade the central moral principle undergirding the reparations argument--"that the victims of unjust enrichment should be compensated," according to Westley.²⁸ Specifically, does the U.S. owe African Americans? Horowitz engages in obfuscation. Skirting the issue, he claims that if a debt exists "it is not at all clear who owes it." He then proceeds to cloud the issue by identifying African and Arab slave traders, and African American slaveholders, everyone but people of European descent. In cruel and childish attempts to recast the blame, he charges that African Americans benefited from enslavement and in fact owe whites for emancipation! In his zeal to discipline Blacks for challenging U.S. reality and for rejecting the hypocritical American dream, Horowitz fails to consider the debt America owes Blacks.

Reed, on the other hand, is a strong advocate of Black rights. His apparent acceptance of the material basis for reparations can be read as an endorsement of the principle of reparations. Nevertheless, he does not explicitly do so. Thus, his position seems unclear. Instead of opposing the principle of reparations, he focuses his discussion on its presumed impracticality. Reed's approach is to raise a series of practical and technical difficulties. His ambiguity or opposition rests on three foundations: pragmatic, strategic, and political. His pragmatic, strategic, and political oppositions are mutually reinforcing, but they are not equivalent. The major basis for his opposition to reparations is political. Essentially, he views it as divisive. He also believes it expresses the essentialist view of African American people, and represents the anti- democratic liberal elite-brokerage model of Black politics. Pragmatically, Reed believes reparations is a dead end. At one point he asks, "How can we imagine building a political force that would enable us to prevail on this issue?"²⁹ He also implies it is nearly impossible to identify the class of citizens entitled to reparation payments from the U.S. government. This difficulty troubles Reed because it presents opportunities for "quacks" to enrich themselves via genealogy and DNA schemes. While his interpretation of U.S. history commits him to support structural arguments for reparations, it also leads him to oppose them strategically. Contending that the current period is a moment of crisis, similar to the industrializing era and the Great Depression, Reed argues for a class- over-race approach. He believes the "common circumstances of economic and social insecurity" engendered by this historical moment offers real potential to build "broad solidarity across race, gender, and other identities."³⁰ Thus, he contrasts an universalist approach to the particularity of what he calls the politics of "public acknowledgment" and "psychobabble."³¹

Among the problems with Reed's political opposition to the reparations movement is that the form of universalism he advocates here seems to negate African Americans' need for autonomous organizations. At this historical stage, it is impractical to think that Blacks will readily abandon the institutional infrastructures that compose Black civil society. Moreover, Reed seems to accept it as a foregone conclusion that this particular manifestation of independent African American action cannot contribute toward building a broad multi-racial coalition. Yet, the history of the Black Freedom Movement clearly indicates that autonomous Black organizing has not only advanced the causes of African Americans, but has made great contributions toward political and economic democratization of the U.S. The Black Freedom Movement has been at the crux of every progressive social change in the nation's history. African Americans have been the most thorough and determined fighters in the struggle to expand democracy and socio-economic security beyond white male elites. The Black Freedom Movement has served as the inspiration and model for the new social movements that are challenging the American nightmare. Because he views the reparations movement as an expression of the "elite-brokerage model" he cannot see its possibilities. I think he reaches this conclusion because he privileges Randall Robinson in his analysis. Horowitz makes the same mistake of focusing on Robinson's book, The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks. The reparations movement is a broad movement into which liberal elites have only recently entered, albeit at the head. Nevertheless, the movement is a contested space that includes revolutionary nationalists, social democrats, and Marxists.

Whereas Reed cannot see the possibility of reparations being an opening to meaningful dialogue and social transformation, Horowitz simply wants to maintain the racial status quo. His one-sided analysis obscures the potentially positive aspects of reparations. Finally, the payment of several hundred billion dollars in reparations could ultimately benefit all Americans. Reparations would enable the rebuilding of Black civil society, the transformation of inner city ghettoes, the rebuilding of urban infrastructure, and go a long way toward eliminating poverty. Reparations represent a way to repair the past, a means "to rebuild relationships through attitudinal changes and institutional restructuring."³²

However, the practical significance of the reparations movement may lie in its contribution toward creating the space to address one of Reed's central concerns--the undemocratic decision-making process currently hegemonic in African America. The struggle for reparations has the possibility of generating the type of conversation and community organizing that would destroy the elite-brokerage model of Black politics. How can the struggle for reparations revitalize the Black Freedom Movement and reconstruct the Black community? First, it offers a means by which Blacks can coordinate their social capital to rebuild, revitalize, and redirect African American civil society. By social capital, I refer to webs of social relationships that exist among African American people. These relationships are rooted in common experiences with rac(e)ism, in common norms and values derived from African American culture, and in the myriad multiple connections that evolve from kinship, neighborhood residence, and from common membership in organizations and institutions. Second, the struggle for reparations necessitates an internal dialogue about the process of political and economic decision-making. For instance, how would the Black community determine what reparation proposal to pursue? How would we decide on a process for allocating resources and redistributing wealth? For me, reparations are simultaneously an objective but more importantly a means for strengthening and democratizing Black civil society. The struggle for reparations has the potential to politically mobilize a broad cross-section of Afro-America. Mass participation is the key to creating a strong participatory democratic culture throughout Afro-America. Finally, I contend that rebuilding and transforming African America's autonomous institutional structure is the key to Black liberation and a radical transformation of the United States.

References

Marcellus Andrews, Political Economy Of Hope And Fear: Capitalism And The Black Condition In America (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Ronald Bailey, "The Slavery Trade(ry) and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England," Social Science History 14 (Fall 1990), pp. 372-414.

______, "The Slavery Trade(ry) and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in New England," in The Meaning of Slavery in the North, ed. Marty Blatt and David Roediger (New York: Garland Press, 1998), pp. 3-31.

Roy L. Brooks, ed., When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States: An Historical View, 1790-1978 (Washington, D.C., Department of Commerce, 1979).

Charles M. Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience (A Chronology) (Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1999).

Edward Countryman, Americans: A Collision of Histories (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).

Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).

Roy Finkenbine, ed., Sources of the African-American Past (London: Longman, 1997).

C.L.R. James, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World," in C.L.R. James, The Future in the Present: Selected Writings (Westport, CN: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1977), pp. 235-64.

Donald Aquinas Lancaster, Jr., "The Alchemy and Legacy of the United States of America's Sanction of Slavery and Segregation: A Property Law and Equitable Remedy Analysis of African American Reparations," Howard Law Journal 43 (Winter 2000), pp. 171-212.

Edward Magdol, A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedman's Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977).

Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane, "The Political Economy of the Black World: Origins of the Present Crisis," in African Sociology-Towards a Critical Perspective: The Collected Essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), pp. 405-21.

Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Benjamin Quarrles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

Roger L. Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Adolph Reed, Jr., "Introduction," and "The Curse of Community" in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: The New Press, 2000).

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981).

Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

Robert Westley, "Many Billions Gone: Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations," Boston College Law Review 40 (Dec. 1998), pp. 429-76.

Eric K. Yamamoto, "Racial Reparations: Japanese Americans Redress and African American Claims," Boston College Law Review 40 (Dec. 1998), pp. 477-523.

Notes

1. Salim Muwakkil, "Hot Off The Fringes: Tide May Have Finally Changed On Reparations," Chicago Tribune, Oct. 30, 2000; Michael Crowley, "On The Hill: Debt Relief," The New Republic, Nov. 6, 2000; Amber Austin, "Activists Discuss Slave Reparations," AOL News, http://www.aol.com, AP-NY Jan. 23, 2001. return

2. The Death of the Civil Rights Movement (Los Angeles: Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 2000), p. 30. return

3. It is now clear that the alleged prosperity of the Clinton years bypassed most African Americans and majority of other people of color. See Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Black America Was a Loser During the Clinton Years" BET.com http://www.bet.com/HEADLINES/0,1821,C-1-75-181888,00.html, Jan. 19, 2001; Geralda Miller, "Minorities Behind in Economic Boom," AOL News, AP-NY-02-22- 01.

   Affirmative action is on life support and the current U.S. Supreme Court is likely to pull the plug in the near future. Nevertheless, in the late 1990s and the early 21st century several transnational corporations lost millions in class action racial discrimination judgements. Texaco agreed to pay $176.1 million for a 1997 suit involving approximately 2,000 Black workers. Two years later in 1999 Coca-Cola Co. settled a racial bias case filed in 1999 by agreeing to pay $192.5 million to 2,000 African American employees. Norfolk Southern Corp. accepted a consent degree to settle a 1993 suit involving 7,700 Black workers by agreeing to pay $28 million for race discrimination. Suits are currently pending against Microsoft for $5 billion and Office Depot for a sum rumored to be larger than the amount filed against Microsoft. See "Coke to pay $192.5 million to settle race suit," AOL News, Reuters, Nov. 16, 2000; "Coca-Cola names civil rights lawyer as general counsel," AOL News, Reuters, Jan. 24, 2001; "Office Depot denies race bias allegations," AOL News, Reuters, Feb. 28, 2001. return

4. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "Racial Formation and Transformation: Toward a Theory of Black Racial Oppression," Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 3 (Winter 2001), pp. 25-60; Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, "Strategies for Black Liberation in the Era of Globalism: Retronouveau Civil Rights, Militant Black Conservatism, and Radicalism," Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 29 (Winter 1999), pp. 25-47. return

5. Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Case Against Reparations," Progressive, Dec. 2000), p. 17. return

6. Robert Westley, "Many Billions Gone: Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations," Boston College Law Review 40 (Dec. 1998), p. 436. return

7. After 1840, the number of Black slaveholders and the number of slaves held by them declined precipitously. Charles M. Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience (A Chronology) Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1999, p. 100. return

8. Ronald Bailey, "The Slavery Trade (ry) and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England," Social Science History 14 (Fall 1990), pp. 372-414; Ronald Bailey, "The Slavery Trade (ry) and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in New England," in The Meaning of Slavery In the North, ed. Marty Blatt and David Roediger, (New York: Garland Press, 1998) pp. 3-31. return

9. Horowitz, p. 35. return

10. Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States: An Historical View, 1790-1978 (Washington, D.C., Department of Commerce, 1979), p. 12. return

11. Horowitz, p. 35. return

12. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), and "Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of 'White Ethnics' in the United States," in Toward the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 181-198; Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); James R. Barrett and Dave Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the 'New Immigrant' Working Class," Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 1997), pp. 3-44; George Lipsitz, "Law and Order: Civil Rights Laws and White Privilege," in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 24-46; Donald Aquinas Lancaster, Jr., "The Alchemy and Legacy of the United States of America's Sanction of Slavery and Segregation: A Property Law and Equitable Remedy Analysis of African American Reparations," Howard Law Journal 43 (Winter 2000), pp. 186-98. return

13. Herbert Sapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Charles David Phillips, "Exploring Relations Among Forms of Social Control: The Lynching and Execution of Blacks in North Carolina, 1889-1918," Law and Society Review 21 (1987): 361-74; Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "'A Warlike Demonstration': Legalism, Violent Self-help and Electoral Politics, in Decatur, Illinois, 1894-1898," Journal of Urban History 26 (July 2000), pp. 591-629. D. R. Williams, Y Yu, J. S. Jackson, and N. Anderson, "Racial Differences in Physical and Mental Health," Journal of Health Psychology 2, (1997), pp. 335-51. return

14. Horowitz, p. 42. return

15. Westley, p. 471. return

16. Horowitz, p. 39. return

17. Eric K. Yamamoto, "Racial Reparations: Japanese Americans Redress and African American Claims," Boston College Law Review 40 (Dec. 1998), p. 488. return

18. Westley, 471. return

19. Horowitz, p. 41. return

20. For an elaboration of this point see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, "Providence, Patriarchy, Pathology: The Rise and Decline of Louis Farrakhan," New Politics no. 22 (Winter 1997), pp. 47-71. return

21. There is, however, a tension, if not a contradiction, between Reed's arguments in "Why Is There No Black Political Movement?" and those articulated in "The Curse of Community." See Adolph Reed, Jr., Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 3, 3-9, 10-13. return

22. Reed, "The Case Against Reparations," p. 16. return

23. Horowitz, p. 37-40; Reed, "The Case Against Reparations," p. 16; Reed, "Introduction," and "The Curse of Community" in Class Notes, pp. xxi, vi-xxxviii, 10-11. return

24. Reed, "The Curse of Community," p. 11. return

25. Horowitz, p. 45. return

26. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 32. return

27. Janelle Carter, "Lott Considers Monument for Blacks," AOL News, AP-NY Feb. 15, 2001; Janelle Carter, "GOP Courting Black Vote," AOL News, A- NY Jan. 26, 2001; "U.S. House Republicans reach out to black voters," AOL News, Reuters, Feb. 23, 2001. Concerning the issue of apologies, see Howard W. French, "The Atlantic Slave Trade: On Both Sides, Reason for Remorse," in When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 355; originally in New York Times, April 5, 1998, sec. 4 (Week in Review), p. 1; Congressman Tony P. Hall, "Defense of Congressional Resolution Apologizing for Slavery," in Brooks, pp. 350-51; originally appeared in Congressional Record, 105th Congress, 1st Session (June 18, 1997), pp. H3890-H3891; "Clinton Opposes Slavery Apology," in Brooks, p. 352; originally appeared in U.S. News & World Report, April 6, 1998, p. 7. return

28. Westley, p. 436. return

29. Reed, "The Case Against Reparations," p. 15. return

30. Ibid, p. 16. return

31. Ibid, p. 17. return

32. Yamamoto, p. 521. return

Contents of No. 31

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