Reparations Revisited

Reparations Revisited

I believe that disproportionate levels of interpersonal and criminal violence in the black community are an affect of a historical process that socialized African-Americans for subservience and denied them the acquisition of cultural capital. It's a legacy of racial slavery and Jim Crow apartheid that was noted as a serious problem as long ago as the 1890s in WEB DuBois's pioneering 1899 book, "The Philadelphia Negro."

 This damaging legacy continues to lengthen because it has not been addressed sufficiently. Our strategies for redress were limited by the conventional wisdom of the time and those strategies have failed to make much change. If we are to make real progress, we must challenge those conventions. I recently came across a 1984 piece I wrote about the funeral of Benjamin Wilson, a coveted high school athlete murdered during a personal altercation, and it struck me how many of the words spoken then, echoed words spoken at the recent funeral of Heaven Sutton, the 7-year-old killed by a stray bullet.


This sickening regularity should help us keep in mind that our problems are structural, multi-dimensional and directly related to policies designed to enforce and encode the racial hierarchy of white supremacy. And, in my view, they can only be redressed by a massive investment of resources, akin to the Marshall Plan the US enacted to bring Europe back from two-and-a-half years of war. The notion of reparations provides a historical justification and conceptual framework for this investment, which would be a comprehensive compensatory scheme focusing on education, housing, jobs training, business development, etc.  And while this notion may seem like an unrealistic pipe dream, the absolute necessity for such a massive investment is not negated by its current political implausibility.


It is a truism of social development that structural problems require structural solutions. For example, the nation of Israel was created largely as compensation for Nazi persecution/extermination of Jewish people. The persecution was specific and so is the remedy, which still remunerates Israel with billions in reparations from people in Germany who had nothing to do with Nazis -- but their specific targeting of Jewish people justifies this specific, multi-generational obligation.


There was perhaps no global crime more savagely destructive or group-specific than the 300+ years of the TransAtlantic trafficking of kidnapped human beings and their race-based enslavement among people convinced of their inferiority. Not only was this commerce of human cargo inherently inhumane, it also obliterated enslaved Africans' ancestral connections and left them totally vulnerable to the degradations of white supremacy. We've been socialized in this hostile environment for nearly 20 generations!!! It's no wonder our lack of self-regard is so deeply rooted. Quite frankly, it's damn near a miracle that we've made it this far.


But, just as Jews, various indigenous peoples of former exploiter nations, Dalits ("untouchables") in India, Roma ("Gypsies") in the Czech Republic and other parts of Eastern Europe, have been awarded reparations for their history of victimization and persecution, I believe no one is more deserving than the African-American progeny of enslaved Africans.


And I believe this society increasingly will understand that the U.S. suffers from wounds of slavery that have been largely unattended and that a domestic Marshall Plan may do the job. Those wounds are a part of a lingering legacy that cripples the nation's potential and even threatens its survival. The American people increasingly will see the folly of perpetuating a system that mindlessly reproduces the forces of its own demise and grow to understand the need to heal slavery's festering wounds. They will begin to realize that the well-being of the entire American project is dependent on redressing this crippling legacy.