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Also this issue: Trading Spaces Degas Vu Ballet Lessons 19th Annual Celebration of Black Writing Concerts for the Community Tango Buenos Aires Jeanne Ruddy Dance The Magic Flute |
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February 13-19, 2003
books
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Should America Pay? reconsiders reparations for African Americans.
"The lengths to which Western governments have been willing to go to stop real discussions about both debt and reparations have been amazing and often heartbreaking." With these words, Nontombi Tutu, daughter of Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, explains how she came to agree to write the afterword for Raymond A. Winbush's Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations. The collection lays out the debate over reparations as it currently "rages," including sections of historical and legal political documents. Most importantly, as Tutu says, the book makes a case for discussion -- passionate and ongoing. "The call for justice," she writes, "is being raised from Dakar to Detroit and will not be silenced until there is an honest discussion about it."
The book -- divided into six parts, for instance, "History and Reparations," "Reparations and the Law" and "Reparations and Grassroots Organizing" -- helpfully considers the movement's history (including a timeline). This history includes Republican Thaddeus Stevens' famous 1867 bill, promising each freed slave 40 acres and a mule; activist Queen Audley Moore's 1955 founding of the Reparations Committee of Descendants of United States Slaves and 1962 filing for reparations in California; the 1987 founding of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA); and Representative John Conyers' first proposal for a Congressional commission to study the case for reparations in 1989. (Introduced every year since, the proposal has never made it out of committee.)
While the claim has been articulated in numerous ways, the basic argument is consistent: The United States government and many corporations have benefited from slavery in continuing ways, and black Americans have been systemically -- legally as well as illegally -- denied access to education and other means to achieve the American "dream" of class mobility. Molly Secours, a self-described "middle-aged white woman" who's "jumped on the reparations bandwagon, "recounts the "Big Five List of White Deflections" (my family didn't own slaves, I'm not a racist, reparations will only divide us more, etc.), in order to argue that reparations are one way to address racism and white privilege, in many cases less visible in recent years, but sustained more casually.
The case for reparations, argues Conyers, in an article co-written with Jo Ann Nichols Watson, has precedents, including the redress granted by the U.S. to Japanese Americans, "illegally and immorally detained for three years" during WWII, as well as recompense made to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, South African survivors of apartheid, payments made to Native Americans and, as a kind of parallel argument, the case being made to return self-governance and restitution to the dispossessed indigenous peoples of Hawaii. As well, reparations have been paid to African-American descendants of specific massacres: in Tulsa, Okla., 1921, and in Rosewood, Fla., 1923.
The movement's current incarnation has been jump-started in large part by the 2001 publication of TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson's The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, as well as the Bush administration's recent attack on the University of Michigan's affirmative action admissions policy. The moral case for reparations is bolstered by material recompense, but "cash" is not the principal issue. Writes Robert Westley in "Many Billions Gone," responding to the point that the Michael Jordans and Denzel Washingtons shouldn't be included in any restitution, the claim is "one of entitlement, not need."
Just so, the case, as Winbush's useful book reveals, is being made on legislative and legal fronts, with class action suits being brought on behalf of 35 million African Americans, just this month consolidated for litigation before a U.S. District Court in Chicago, and naming corporations that have benefited from slavery, including Aetna Casualty, Lloyds of London, Lehman Brothers and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco.
Should America Pay? also includes a section of arguments against reparations, by such well-known writers as John McWhorter, Armstrong Williams and Shelby Steele, who argue against continuing, "destabilizing" self-identification as victims by African Americans. This inclusion grants the book its own claim to representing the debate, but the counterarguments here tend to boost the arguments.
Raymond A. Winbush will read Wed., Feb. 19, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th and Vine sts., 215-686-5415.
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