Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations
482
Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations
482eBook
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Overview
Growing interest in reparations for African Americans has prompted a range of responses, from lawsuits against major corporations and a march in Washington to an anti-reparations ad campaign. As a result, the link between slavery and contemporary race relations is more potent and obvious than ever. Grassroots organizers, lawmakers, and distinguished academics have embraced the idea that reparations should be pursued vigorously in the courts and legislature. But others ask, Who should pay? And could reparations help heal the wounds of the past?
This comprehensive collection -- the only of its kind -- gathers together the seminal essays and key participants in the debate. Pro-reparations essays, including contributions by Congressman John Conyers Jr., Christopher Hitchens, and Professor Molefi Asante, are countered with arguments by Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams, and John McWhorter, among others. Also featured are important documents, such as the First Congressional Reparations Bill of 1867 and the Dakar Declaration of 2001, as well as a new chapter on the current status and future direction of the movement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062013637 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 01/17/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 482 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Raymond A. Winbush, Ph.D. is the Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology from Oakwood College in Alabama and received a fellowship to attend the University of Chicago, where he earned both his master's degree and Ph.D. in psychology. He has taught at Oakwood College, Alabama A&M, Vanderbilt University, and Fisk University. He is the recipient of numerous grants, including one from the Kellogg Foundation to establish a "National Dialogue on Race." He is the author of The Warrior Method: A Parents' Guide to Rearing Healthy Black Boys, the former treasurer and executive board member of the National Council of Black Studies, and is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Black Studies. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Read an Excerpt
Should America Pay?
Slavery and the Raging Debate on ReparationsBy Raymond Winbush
Harper Collins Publishers
Copyright © 2003 Raymond Winbush All right reserved. ISBN: 0060083115Chapter One
Molefi Kete Asante
The African American Warrant for Reparations: The Crime of European Enslavement of Africans and Its Consequences
Until lions have historians, hunters will be heroes. - Kenyan Proverb
In his 1993 monograph Paying the Social Debt: What White America Owes Black America, Richard America makes a forceful argument that reparation for Europe's enslavement of Africans in the United States is an idea whose time has arrived. Almost a decade before the powerful book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, written by Randall Robinson in 2000, America laid out the economic bases of the debt owed to African Americans. While the argument for reparations is a Pan-African one, we are most interested in this essay with the discourse surrounding the enslavement and its consequences in the American society. There are those who will immediately say that the people of the United States will never accede to reparations. I am of the opinion that the discussion and debate surrounding reparations has only recently occurred in any serious way; therefore, this essay is offered as an attempt to raise some of the philosophical ideas that might govern such adiscourse.
Randall Robinson's The Debt has been one of the most popular and important books written on the subject so far because he has captured the warrants for reparations in very clear and accessible language. What he has demonstrated is that while a national paralysis of will may exist at the present time, there is no lack of national guilt and interest in this theme. There is every reason for the United States to shape and frame the culture of reparations that shall become an increasingly powerful moral and political issue in the twenty-first century. The highest form of law exhibits itself when a system of law is able to answer for its own crimes. Nothing should prevent men and women of moral and political insight from making an argument for an idea whose legitimacy is fundamental to our concept of justice. We must act based on our own sense of moral rightness.
When Raphael Lemkin started in 1933 to gain recognition of the term "genocide" as a crime of barbarity, few thought that it would soon become the language of international law. When genocide was adopted as a convention in 1948 with an international criminal court to serve as the home for judging genocide it was a victory for those who had fought to put genocide on the world agenda. My belief is that the current discussions about reparation undertaken by scholars, political activists, and the United Nations will advance our own plan to place reparations at the front end of the agenda for redress for African Americans.
The argument for reparations for the forced enslavement of Africans in the American colonies and the United States of America is based in moral, legal, economic, and political grounds. Taken together these ideas constitute an enormous warrant for the payment of reparations to the descendants of the Africans who worked under duress for nearly 250 years. The only remedy for such an immense deprivation of life and liberty is an enormous restitution.
When one examines the nature of the terms amassed for the argument for reparations it becomes clear that the basis for them is interwoven with the cultural fabric of the American nation. It is not un-American to seek the redress of wrongs through the use of some form of compensatory restitution. For example, the moral ideas of the argument are made from the concept of rightness as conceived in the religious literature of the American people. One assumes that morality based in the relationship between humans and the divine provides an incentive for correcting a wrong, if it is perceived to be a wrong, in most cases. Using legal ideas for the argument for reparations, one relies on the juridical heritage of the United States. Clearly, the ideas of justice and fair play, while often thwarted, distorted, and subverted, characterize the legal ideal in American jurisprudence. Therefore, the use of legal strategy in securing reparations is not only expected but required by Africans receiving compensatory redress for their enslavement. The Great Enslavement itself showed, however, how legal arguments could be twisted to defend an immoral and unjust system of oppression. Nevertheless, justice is a requirement for political solidarity within a nation and any attempt to bring it about must be looked upon as a valid effort to create national unity. Simply put, no justice, no peace.
Recognizing that justice may be both retributive and restorative, it seeks to punish those who have committed wrong and it concerns itself with restoring to the body politic a sense of reconciliation and harmony. I believe that the idea of reparations, particularly as conceived in my own work, is a restorative justice issue.
The economic case is a simple argument for the payment to the descendants of the enslaved for the work that was done and the deprivation that was experienced by our ancestors. To speak of an economic interest in the argument is typically American and an issue that should be well understood by most Americans. Simply put, Africans in America are owed back wages for nearly 250 years of uncompensated work by their ancestors and another 130 years for laws and behavior that continue to affect them economically.
Finally, the political aspect of reparations is wrapped in the clothes of the American political reality. In order to insure national unity reparations should be made to the descendants of Africans. It is my belief as well as that of others that the underlying fault in the American body politic is the unresolved issue of enslavement. Many of the contemporary problems in society can be thought of as deriving from the unsettled issues of enslavement. A concentration on the political term for reparations will lead to a useful argument for national unity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Should America Pay? by Raymond Winbush
Copyright © 2003 by Raymond Winbush
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | xv | |
| Introduction | xxi | |
| Part I | History and Reparations | |
| The African American Warrant for Reparations: The Crime of European Enslavement of Africans and Its Consequences | 3 | |
| Reparations: An Idea Whose Time Has Come | 14 | |
| Excerpt from Black Exodus: The Ex-Slave Pension Movement Reader | 22 | |
| Restitution as a Precondition of Reconciliation: Native Hawaiians and Indigenous Human Rights | 32 | |
| And the Earth Moved: Stealing Black Land in the United States | 46 | |
| Part II | Reparations and the Law | |
| Reparations for the Descendants of American Slaves Under International Law | 57 | |
| Does America Owe a Debt to the Descendants of Its Slaves? | 79 | |
| Many Billions Gone: Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations? | 109 | |
| Slave Taxes | 135 | |
| Reflections on Homer Plessy and Reparations | 150 | |
| Part III | Voices for and Against Reparations | |
| Presumed Victims | 165 | |
| Debt of Honor | 172 | |
| Against Reparations | 180 | |
| ... Or a Childish Illusion of Justice?: Reparations Enshrine Victimhood, Dishonoring Our Ancestors | 197 | |
| Part IV | Reparations and Grassroots Organizing | |
| The National Black United Front and the Reparations Movement | 203 | |
| The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA): Its Creation and Contribution to the Reparations Movement | 209 | |
| The Popularization of the International Demand for Reparations for African People | 226 | |
| Part V | Reparations and Intervention | |
| Debtor's Prison: Facing History and Its Consequences | 239 | |
| Reparations and Health Care for African Americans: Repairing the Damage from the Legacy of Slavery | 251 | |
| The United States' Debt Owed to Black People | 282 | |
| Riding the Reparations Bandwagon | 286 | |
| Reparations + Education = The Pass to Freedom | 299 | |
| Interview with Chester and Timothy Hurdle, Barbara Ratliffe, and Ina Hurdle-McGee, October 29, 2002 | 315 | |
| Part VI | Historical Documents | |
| Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution | 323 | |
| In the Field: Savannah, Georgia, Special Field Orders, No. 15, January 16, 1865 | 325 | |
| A Bill Introduced by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, H.R. 29, 40th Congress, 1st Session, March 11, 1867: A Plan for Confiscation | 328 | |
| Congressman John Conyers's (D-MI) Bill for a Study of the Impact of Slavery on African Americans, HR40IH, 105th Congress, 1st Session, H.R. 40 | 331 | |
| The Dakar Declaration: African Regional Preparatory Conference for the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Dakar, 22-24 January 2001 | 338 | |
| Farmer-Paellmann v. FleetBoston, Aetna Inc., CSX | 348 | |
| Part VII | Current Status and Future Directions of the Reparations Movement | |
| Current Legal Status of Reparations, Strategies of the National Black United Front, the Mississippi Model, What's Next in the Reparations Movement | 363 | |
| Notes | 385 | |
| Index | 403 |