More Mailbag on Slavery and Reparations

From Error503 Blog

Ono Ekeh's blog has been discussing slavery reparations of late, with emotions high on both sides. And here, I use some vivid examples for the sake of rhetoric. I'm leaving some of the sloppiness unrevised, as a penance.



dear Ono Ekeh -- I cherish the wit & the grace & the good humor with which you deflected my recent criticism of your posts on slavery reparations! It is an issue on which both sides have emotional responses, mixed in with a bit of reason.



Two ideas that might merit comment or further exploration:



(1) Haven't slavery reparations already begun to be made? I refer, of course, to affirmative action. It's not a large sum of money, it's not 40 acres and a mule, but it is something -- and not of negligible significance. (Whether affirmative action as currently constituted is always & everywhere just is a question that I'll place to the side for a moment.)



(2) You speak of "corporate responsibility." This notion can have its dangers. Let us ask: Are there any sins, collective or individual, in the last 40 years or so, for which African-Americans need to make reparations, need to acknowledge as having been wrong? To choose from fairly recent history: Do non-blacks living in Los Angeles have the right to demand reparations from the African-American community for the damage & loss of life incurred during the 1992 [riots? Or do] African-American rhetoricians who display anti-white hostility need to be held liable for the murderous actions of Colin Ferguson on 7th December 1993?



You raise many interesting questions & issues. But there are perils to the groupthink in which we can all get stuck. And there are very grave perils to what I would call "governmental penance." (Russia felt the need to do penance for the injustices of the Czars, and the medicine she inflicted on herself -- 75 years of bleak nihilistic dehumanizing Communism, with gulags & camps of torture and slave labor -- was far worse than the disease.)



In the first draft of my post addressing your views, I was going to say [in a fit of high dudgeon, to be sure!] that slavery reparations are as defensible as the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979. But there is a wonderful logic to it: the Irish Republicans perceive injustice in the way Northern Ireland is treated by "the British," and decide to assign "corporate responsibility" to England's powers that be -- and to inflict a fatal wound on the royal family by killing Prince Charles's uncle! This is where a certain brand of groupthink gets us.



But you will doubtless say that whites have been guilty of an insidious groupthink (racism) for hundreds of years, & that we can't blithely brush off the past, turn on a dime, & switch to the color-blind society in 10 seconds (or 40 years) flat! And there, perhaps, you have a point. And a rather sharp one. But I don't have the answers. And I'm suspicious of some of the answers that I've heard, from left and right, from white and black.



Your thoughts are thoughtful, even when they inspire disagreement.


Haven't reparations been made already, i.e., affirmative action?

I'll use the image of building a house. It takes a lot of time and man (and woman) power to set the foundations, put in the walls, wiring, lights, appliances, etc. On the other hand, ask yourself how much time it takes to tear down a house? Relatively not much time at all. Or think about a relationship with a friend or loved one. It takes time and a lot of human resources to build a lasting friendship or relationship, but it doesn't necessarily take long to destroy them. For instance, an unfaithful spouse can destroy a solid marriage in three months, with a series of trysts. My point here is that tearing down is not too difficult, but building is.

A further point is that we have to remember that African American families and communities were torn apart continuously for centuries. Economically, what this means is that families, as part of communities, cannot begin to build wealth. For instance, say a German family arrived in the US in 1854, very poor and destitute. They, being first generation, probably worked their tails off just to get by. But we can expect that the next generation would do a little better and also probably were fortunate to receive a little inheritance from their parents, even if was shoes or shirts, those wouldn't have been insignificant then. By the time we get to the fourth and fifth generation, that family and the community would have built up some wealth. (And we need not get stuck on the word "wealth" by it, I do not mean rich, I simply mean having possessions.) This is what the American dream is about and what has been the case with many immigrant communities.

How does this all relate? The African American community was torn down and hammered incessantly for 200-400 years. Anything that is going to be done to even begin to repair the damage and rebuild and restore the community is going to have to take a very long time, possibly generations. And just as the tearing down was instituitionalized, which is what enabled it to continue so long, so also the rebuilding has to be institutionalized so that it does not run out of steam as justice is brough to fruition.

The African American community has not had the possibilty, by and large, to build the sort of families and wealth I spoke about in the above example, because, as slaves, children were routinely bred and sold and the slaves had not human life to speak of. The other aspect that we can't measure quite easily is the psychological toll and the destructive effect slavery has on culture. As human beings we need families, friends, communites and a healthy environment in which to thrive. We also need liesure to develop our culture and the freedom to express our dignity in our cultures. These factors are just as important as any in the building and passing on of wealth from generation to generation and in the development of wealth in communities.

The first and, believe or not, most important thing that the government needs to do is offer an apology to the African American community. An official apology has not surfaced and probably won't in this climate because the U.S., as is the U.K., is concerned with liability issues. Programs like affirmative action are good steps and the kind of thing that should be done and they would have to be continued for a long time. The other issue is that any programs established would have to be organic so that they can evolve with the current needs.But the thing about reparations is that they have to be addressed as such and it wouldn't work if we point to programs after the fact and say that that's reparations. Remember, affirmative action and similar programs are actually designed to address current problems with current, not past, racism. It is conceivable that the African American community could retroactively accept affirmative action as a program towards reparations but either way, someone would have to still bite the bullet, offer an official apology and initiate steps.

On the "corporate responsibility" issue, no one is exempt from this sort of reckoning, so if a "corporate body" acts a certain way then that body should be held accountable. Now, note that a mass of individuals does not a "corporate body" make. The African American individuals who engaged in the shameful activity in the LA riots should be punished for their actions as should anyone who would engage in such activity. Because it was not an official body, or "corporate body" of African Americans, and because such actions are not endemic to African Americans, there is no reason that one should suggest that all African Americans be held liable. Now, if for instance, the NAACP and let say the Nation of Islam and the Fourth Street Baptist Church officially called on their members to engage in such destructive behavior, then those organizations, including should be held liable as organizations. So the distinction between individuals and corporate bodies should be maintained.

Furthermore, anit-white racism is no less evil that anti-black racism, there are differing factors here traditionally between the two, but anti-white racism should be aggresively prosecuted. However, no one is calling for reparations for racism, people have a God given right to be racist if they so chose. The reparations are for the consequent injustices and not the racism per se.

The example of Russia, which responded to the Czars with communism doesn't quite work because it is a different kind of situation(apples and coconuts). Even if we took this example to heart it would mean simply that we need to do "government penance" the right way not the way the Russians did it, that would be the lesson there.

As for the assasination example given in the case of the Irish, reparations is not revenge. Reparations is a case of a government actively working to rectify wrong done as opposed to the victims taking matters into their own hands in an unjust manner.

I find this civility and quasi-rational discourse disconcerting, I actually prefer shouting matches, mass condemnations and finger poining!