Socialist Action /September 2000
The Case for Reparations for African
Americans
By PAUL SIEGEL
Randall Robinson, the author of "The Debt,"
is the founder and president of TransAfrica, an organization that has propagandized
and lobbied in behalf of Africa and the Black diaspora, which it has shown
are being despoiled by the policies of the IMF, the United States, and other
Western nations. He recounts some of this in this book, but it is primarily
concerned with speaking out on behalf of African Americans.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Robinson has
an affluent life style, but, unlike many, he has not forgotten his roots.
"Take no comfort," he tells liberal white readers, "from
what you may see as examples of conspicuous black success. It has closed
no economic gap and is statistically insignificant. It is the children of
the black poor, the bulk legatees of American slavery, that we must salvage."
Black insiders-politicians and a few businessmen-have
received favors from the Democratic Party, but the Black masses have received
nothing. Robinson is heart sick at the way Blacks have been so beaten down
that they are grateful for any gesture-Clinton's praying in Black churches,
his appointment of a commission on race relations that after cogitation
merely presented a string of platitudes, his appointment of Black cabinet
members-even though Clinton has dealt devastating blows against Blacks with
his signing of laws supposedly designed to fight crime and to "reform"
welfare.
Unfortunately, Robinson does not propose Blacks'
breaking away from the Democratic Party but merely not allowing it to take
them for granted: "A temporary sobering comeuppance" of Democratic
office holders "would do wonders for us and the Democrats."
Whatever Robinson's political limitations, however,
he gives powerful expression to the idea of reparations for the enormous
crime of slavery, segregation, and discrimination that has incapacitated
African Americans. Reparations is an idea that has come up again and again
from the time of emancipation until today, but it has always been either
ignored or dismissed, sometimes contemptuously, sometimes with embarrassment,
by the white power structure.
Robinson presents it in his own distinctive way.
His book is not a coldly reasoned argument written in an impersonal, academic
manner but rather a series of overlapping essays calling on his personal
life as well as his reading. His intent is to make the reader feel what
slavery and its aftermath did to African Americans, not merely to apprehend
it intellectually.
This is not to say that Robinson does not use facts
and figures in his argument. Although he is not concerned with presenting
a lengthy, detailed historical analysis, he uses selected facts and figures
effectively, often displaying quotations from his sources in boxes outside
of his text to substantiate what he has to say.
Consequences of the Black holocaust
He shows Africa had civilizations for centuries
that were superior to those of Europe, dazzling the eyes of European and
Middle Eastern travellers with their wealth, commerce, architecture, and
learning. It was only with the beginning of modern capitalism and with the
trans-Atlantic slave trade, which sought to justify itself by regarding
Africans as inferior beings, that racism came into being.
An estimated 10 to 25 million died in the awful
conditions of the slave ships that transported them from Africa to America.
The value of the slaves, however, was so great that the slave business wrote
this off as a necessary overhead that could easily be accommodated.
But this human rights crime and the repression
that was part of a system in which slaves produced for a market-a system
more grindingly severe than previous forms of slavery-were not the only
crimes committed in the slave business. The cultural memory of the slaves,
the inspirations of the past that sustain a people, was wiped out.
In holocausts other than the Black holocaust, however
terrible the crimes committed, the victims were not deprived of their cultural
heritage and, decimated and scarred as they were, could resume their lives
with the memories of their previous accomplishments to enable them to keep
going.
But African Americans have to have scholars to
recover their accomplishments. Their memories are only of an enforced inferior
station that is damaging to their psyche and creates a sense of hopelessness.
As Robinson puts it, "Only slavery ... has
hulled empty a whole race of people with inter-generational efficiency.
Every artifact of the victims' past cultures, every trace element of a people's
whole hereditary identity, wrenched from them. ... It is a human rights
crime without parallel in the modern world. For it produces its victims
ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended."
This human rights crime was the source of enormous
profit for the ruling classes of the United States. The exportation of the
cotton that the slaves picked earned more than all the other exports combined.
The value of the 4 million slaves in the South was greater than the value
of all other capital investment, including that in land. Nor was it the
Southern slave owners alone who profited. The federal government through
its tax on cotton also profited.
Business in the North that had ties to the slave
business profited as well. For instance, the Brown family, which endowed
Brown University, acquired its wealth from the slave ships it built and
sold and from its investments in the slave trade.
We may add parenthetically that since the publication
of Robinson's book an African American lawyer and historian, Deadria Farmer-Paellmann,
has found a dozen existing corporations that had been involved in the slave
business, whom she is preparing to sue.
One example is the Aetna Life Insurance Company
of Hartford, Conn., which insured slave owners against the death of their
slaves. Fully aware of the conditions of slavery, it had a rider in its
policy that excluded its having to pay for the death of slaves at the hands
of their owners either through violence or overwork or the suicide of the
slave.
Slave owners, the federal government, and many
Northern businesses profited from the unrequited labor of the slaves, but
the freed slaves were never compensated for that labor. Abraham Lincoln
during the Civil War had supported a plan to pay the slave owners for the
loss of their "property," but his successor, Andrew Johnson, vetoed
a bill for compensating the former slaves.
Instead of the "40 acres and a mule"
that had been proposed to give the landless ex-slaves a start, the federal
government permitted the institution of the Black Codes. Under these codes,
says noted African American historian John Hope Franklin, "control
of Blacks by white employers was about as great as that which slave owners
had exercised."
The Jim Crow laws and other forms of legal and
de facto discrimination locked African Americans into an inferior position
that made it impossible for them to lift themselves up economically.
Closing the economic gap
"If," says Robinson, "African Americans
will not be compensated for the massive wrongs and social injuries inflicted
upon them by their government, during and after slavery, then there is no
chance that America can solve its racial problems-if solving these problems
means, as I believe it must, closing the yawning economic gap between blacks
and whites." For this gap has been built into the social structure
by past and continuing discrimination.
Even the African American middle class suffers
from this gap. College-educated whites have an average annual income of
$38,700, a net worth of $74,922, and net financial assets of $19,823; college-educated
African-Americans, on the other hand, have an annual income of $29,440,
a net worth of $17,437, and $175 in net financial assets. The lack of assets
means that Black families are far more dependent on an uncertain labor market
than are whites.
Because of discrimination in home mortgage approval
rates, African Americans have lost billions in home equity wealth accumulation,
the chief means by which the middle class has built up assets. This is only
one of the ways racial discrimination has contributed to the shaky Black
middle-class economic position. Of course, the situation is far worse for
those below the small Black middle class.
Restitution for the wrongs of slavery and its aftermath
is not a plea for a handout. It is a demand for the payment of an enormous
debt in accordance with a principle recognized by international law and
applied to other human rights crimes.
Robinson's restitution plan calls for the setting
up of a trust fund that would be used for advancing the welfare of African
Americans. The details of the amount to go into this fund, who is to administer
it, and how it is to be disbursed he leaves open. The important thing, he
says, is the establishment of the principle.
Will the white ruling class grant this demand?
Robinson's answer is, "The issue here is not whether we can, or will,
win reparations. The issue rather is whether we will fight for reparations,
because we have decided for ourselves that they are our due."
In this fight African Americans will grow in self-knowledge
and in strength. "This is a struggle," Robinson says in the concluding
sentence of the book, "that we can not lose, for in the very making
of it we will discover, if nothing else, ourselves."
Socialist Action /September 2000 |