On Reparations, by Adolph Reed

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by Doug Mann, 29 Oct 2004, Submitted to the Star-Tribune for publication 28 Oct 2004

Introductory Note

On Reparations, by Adolph Reed was originally published in the Progressive magazine (December 2000) and reprinted by People's Tribune/Tribuno del Pueblo Vol. 29 No. 6/ June, 2002 (for Online Edition go to http://www.lrna.org)

Reed considers why the reparations movement has moved from the margins toward the center of political discourse in the black community, and explores differences in approach to the issue that have emerged between cultural nationalists, pan-Africanists, and others. In the concluding paragraph Reed states,

"I know that many activists who have taken up the cause of reparations otherwise hold and enact a politics quite at odds with the limitations that I've described here. To some extent, I suspect their involvement stems from an old reflex of attempting to locate a progressive kernel in the nationalist sensibility. It certainly is an expression of a generally admirable commitment to go where people seem to be moving. But we must ask: What people? And where can this motion go? And we must be prepared to recognize what can be only a political dead end -- or worse."

******************************************************************

[Editor's note: This article first appeared in the Progressive in

December 2000, and is reprinted with permission.]

The notion that the United States government, or white

institutions in general, owe reparations to black Americans for

slavery and its legacy has been around for some time. Until

recently, its most dramatic eruption into public life was in 1969,

when James Forman, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC), led a disruption of New York's

liberal Riverside Church to present a "Black Manifesto" that

demanded, among other things, $500 million in reparations to black

Americans from white churches and synagogues. The idea lingered on

the periphery of the public agenda for a few years, so that Jesse

Jackson's Operation PUSH and the National Economics Association,

the black economists' group, attempted to reintroduce it in 1972,

around the presidential election, in conjunction with a demand for

a $900 million "freedom budget."

Otherwise, the idea of organizing to demand reparations for black

people's uncompensated labor in slavery and for other injustices

associated with the long history of enforced racial inequality had

circulated mainly within politically marginal, nationalist

circles. It had not gained much traction even among black

During the last half-dozen years or so, however, the issue has

been threatening to come in from the margins. Partly stimulated by

successful pursuit of compensation for Japanese-Americans who were

interned by the U.S. government during World War II and for

victims of Nazi slave labor, talk of a movement to demand

reparations for black Americans has been spreading beyond the

nationalist enclaves where it has usually been contained. I've

watched with curiosity and bemusement as talk about reparations

for black Americans has germinated. At first I assumed that I was

noticing it more because it emanated from familiar circles with

roots in the Black Power activism of the 1960s, especially in big

cities like New York and Chicago. For instance, at its formation

the Black Radical Congress adopted the issue as one of its key

campaigns. Still, I imagined that the reparations talk would

evaporate because it seemed so clearly a political dead end. No

Publication of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, by Randall

Robinson, the respected president of TransAfrica, the organization

that played a central role in the U.S. movement against apartheid

in South Africa, seems to have propelled the reparations issue

into the public spotlight. Now it seems to be everywhere -- in

special features on network television and mainstream publications

like Harper's and the New York Times and all over the black-

How has this happened? And what is its significance? To put it

more provocatively, how does a project that seems so obviously a

nonstarter in American politics come to capture so much of the

public imagination? After all, support for affirmative action has

eroded significantly, and reparations raises the ante on

compensatory policy exponentially. And why does this idea attain

Answering these questions requires, first, understanding that the

call for reparations blends material, symbolic and psychological

objectives. The material component is the most obvious -- a demand

for remuneration for the uncompensated labor of black slaves and

the legacy of slavery. The material legacy includes direct

consequences such as the federal government's failure to fulfil

the promise of Emancipation by adopting the Radical Republican

proposals during Reconstruction after the Civil War that would

have expropriated the plantations in the South and divided them

among the freedpeople, thus establishing a black yeomanry of

independent stakeholders. These also include the federal

government's further capitulation to the former slaveholders by

accepting their disfranchisement of black voters later in the 19th

and early 20th centuries, the effect of which was to remove black

citizens from effective participation in public life and to

facilitate imposition of the white supremacist regime of official

political and economic apartheid that reigned in the South for the

first two-thirds of the 20th century. (From this perspective, it

is worthy of note that every national government -- every

presidential administration, congress and federal judiciary --

that served between 1877 and 1966 did so in clear, though

unacknowledged, violation of the U.S. Constitution. Each was

elected from, or nominated and confirmed by those elected from,

national electorates that, in the southern states at least,

violated blacks' equal citizenship rights under the 14th Amendment

and voting rights under the 15th. Small wonder that, for instance,

at least one Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court -- Edward D.

White -- was a Ku Klux Klansman, as well as a veteran of a white

supremacist military insurrection against the Reconstruction

government of Louisiana in 1874.)

The indirect material legacy of slavery includes the complex of

discriminatory practices enforced, and reproduced with

governmental acquiescence, throughout the nation in generations

subsequent to Emancipation. These include explicitly

discriminatory practices such the Federal Housing Administration's

enforcement of racially exclusionary "restrictive covenants" in

its lending policies officially until 1948 and unofficially for

some years thereafter; this practice severely disadvantaged black

people's pursuit of homeownership, the principal form of capital

accumulation for most Americans. The effects of unequal education,

labor market discrimination and publicly initiated and supported

ghettoization also can be seen as indirect material legacies of

slavery. We could also include the effects of New Deal compromises

with southern Democrats -- largely racially-inspired -- that

excluded most black workers from initial coverage under social

security and agricultural assistance. The list could expand

The reparations frame no doubt appeals partly as a unifying

metaphor that expresses the historical linkage of what

conventional racial liberalism construes as separate, isolated

moments of injustice. This is an important corrective, though it's

one that can easily occur without the call for reparations. The

frame also appeals to lawyers, economists and other people who

like to play intellectual parlor games, inasmuch as calculation of

the extent of economic and social costs of slavery and racial

injustice to their victims across generations can consume endless

energy, discussion and professional expertise.

Indeed, the question of material compensation opens a plethora of

technical issues. Should payments go to individuals or to some

presumably representative corporate entity? If the former, who

qualifies as a recipient? Would descendents of people who had been

enslaved elsewhere (for instance, Brazil or the Caribbean) be

eligible? And what of those no longer legally black people with

slave ancestors? As a friend of mine has suggested, these issues

could produce a lively trade for genealogists, DNA testers and

other such quacks, and already some seem to be rising to the

opportunity. These ambiguities, moreover, expose the faultiness of

comparisons to payments to victims of Japanese internment and Nazi

slave labor camps, who were identifiable individuals whose

experience of the ultimate injustice was direct.

If the recipient is to be some corporate entity, as Robinson and

others suggest, how can its representativeness and accountability

be determined? If the body is a development fund, who would

control it and how would the decision be made? Robinson has

suggested that philanthropic agencies be the grantees, but which

ones and to whom would they be accountable? This talk -- as is

standard in contemporary black politics -- presumes a coherent,

knowable black agenda that can be determined outside of

democratic, participatory processes among those in whose names

decisions are to be made and resources allocated. In some of the

more grandiosely Pan-Africanist versions of reparations talk the

focus of the demand for retribution is global -- including African

and, presumably, Caribbean debt relief, and other forms of

retribution involving both the United States, former colonial

powers and international lending agencies. But this approach only

expands the problems intrinsic to the domestic focus and makes

goals even more diffuse and remote, and the task more impossibly

The reparations campaign's symbolic objectives seem to center on

public acknowledgment of the injustices inflicted on black people

historically in this country. On the one hand, this opens to

public education about the real history of the United States,

although that is a project that does not require the rhetoric of

reparations. On the other hand, it fits the Clintonoid tenor of

sappy public apologies and maudlin psychobabble about collective

pain and healing. Robinson, for his part, seems fixated on

pursuing racial parity in monuments and statuary -- perhaps a

function of his long years in Washington D.C. and his growing up

in Richmond, Va., two cities in which the politics of public

monuments loom larger than elsewhere. (And how much would you bet

that that's as far as the retribution would go? Elites will always

prefer symbolic gestures to material ones: "Let's see, should we

give them college tuition and affordable housing or a heartfelt

apology and a few monuments and plaques? Hmmm, which will it be,

Its psychological objectives, though, are most revealing of the

politics that undergirds this movement. The psychological argument

for agitating for reparations first of all makes concessions to

the improbability of success. The demand is held to be important

as a means of raising consciousness among black people, whether or

not it can be won. But consciousness of what? Among more populist

or radical adherents this view rests on the premise -- a vestige

of the nationalist/anti-imperialist radicalism that evolved from

Black Power -- that mobilizing black people to fight for a better

world requires first rectifying their understanding of who they

are and where they come from in order to build on the principle of

racial solidarity. Of course, cultivation of a general

understanding of history is useful, perhaps necessary, for

developing and sustaining an insurgent politics and a good thing

in its own right. However, it's more than questionable that people

must -- or even will -- mobilize around earlier generations'

grievances to pursue current objectives.

The real point of this approach is different, as the willingness

to acknowledge the cause's doubtful practicality suggests. The

deeper appeal of reparations talk for its proponents is to create

or stress a sense of racial peoplehood as the primary basis for

political identity. As is a standard feature of the race-

nationalist politics from which it originated, this movement's

psychological project is grounded on beliefs that rank-and-file

black people suffer from improper or defective identity and that

an important task of political action is to restore correct racial

consciousness, destruction or distortion of which is held to be

the psychological legacy of slavery.

Among some strains of cultural nationalists, this view unabashedly

reproduces the old "damage thesis," recently criticized by

historian Daryl Michael Scott in his book Contempt & Pity: Social

Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996.

According to this thesis, slavery and its aftermath left black

Americans without cultural moorings and therefore especially

vulnerable to various social pathologies. It has been the

foundation of academic and journalistic slanders of black poor and

working people famously perpetrated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's

scurrilous 1965 report, The Negro Family: A Case for National

Action and contemporary notions of a self-destructive black urban


	Mann for School Board \| home 2002 Minneapolis School Board Election \| General Election, Nov 5, 2002 \| Evidence that School policies matter \| Platform \| Opening Statement, 2002 school board candidates forum \| Minneapolis Public Schools Can 'Close the Gap' \| On Reparations, by Adolph Reed On Reparations, by Adolph Reed Write-in "Doug Mann" for School Board Another Option for Minneapolis School Board Voters (2004 General Election) by Doug Mann, 29 Oct 2004, Submitted to the Star-Tribune for publication 28 Oct 2004 Introductory Note On Reparations, by Adolph Reed was originally published in the Progressive magazine (December 2000) and reprinted by People's Tribune/Tribuno del Pueblo Vol. 29 No. 6/ June, 2002 (for Online Edition go to http://www.lrna.org) Reed considers why the reparations movement has moved from the margins toward the center of political discourse in the black community, and explores differences in approach to the issue that have emerged between cultural nationalists, pan-Africanists, and others. In the concluding paragraph Reed states, "I know that many activists who have taken up the cause of reparations otherwise hold and enact a politics quite at odds with the limitations that I've described here. To some extent, I suspect their involvement stems from an old reflex of attempting to locate a progressive kernel in the nationalist sensibility. It certainly is an expression of a generally admirable commitment to go where people seem to be moving. But we must ask: What people? And where can this motion go? And we must be prepared to recognize what can be only a political dead end -- or worse." -Doug Mann **************************************************************** On Reparations** By Adolph Reed [Editor's note: This article first appeared in the Progressive in December 2000, and is reprinted with permission.] The notion that the United States government, or white institutions in general, owe reparations to black Americans for slavery and its legacy has been around for some time. Until recently, its most dramatic eruption into public life was in 1969, when James Forman, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), led a disruption of New York's liberal Riverside Church to present a "Black Manifesto" that demanded, among other things, $500 million in reparations to black Americans from white churches and synagogues. The idea lingered on the periphery of the public agenda for a few years, so that Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH and the National Economics Association, the black economists' group, attempted to reintroduce it in 1972, around the presidential election, in conjunction with a demand for a $900 million "freedom budget." Otherwise, the idea of organizing to demand reparations for black people's uncompensated labor in slavery and for other injustices associated with the long history of enforced racial inequality had circulated mainly within politically marginal, nationalist circles. It had not gained much traction even among black activists. During the last half-dozen years or so, however, the issue has been threatening to come in from the margins. Partly stimulated by successful pursuit of compensation for Japanese-Americans who were interned by the U.S. government during World War II and for victims of Nazi slave labor, talk of a movement to demand reparations for black Americans has been spreading beyond the nationalist enclaves where it has usually been contained. I've watched with curiosity and bemusement as talk about reparations for black Americans has germinated. At first I assumed that I was noticing it more because it emanated from familiar circles with roots in the Black Power activism of the 1960s, especially in big cities like New York and Chicago. For instance, at its formation the Black Radical Congress adopted the issue as one of its key campaigns. Still, I imagined that the reparations talk would evaporate because it seemed so clearly a political dead end. No such luck. Publication of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, by Randall Robinson, the respected president of TransAfrica, the organization that played a central role in the U.S. movement against apartheid in South Africa, seems to have propelled the reparations issue into the public spotlight. Now it seems to be everywhere -- in special features on network television and mainstream publications like Harper's and the New York Times and all over the black- oriented media. How has this happened? And what is its significance? To put it more provocatively, how does a project that seems so obviously a nonstarter in American politics come to capture so much of the public imagination? After all, support for affirmative action has eroded significantly, and reparations raises the ante on compensatory policy exponentially. And why does this idea attain currency now? Answering these questions requires, first, understanding that the call for reparations blends material, symbolic and psychological objectives. The material component is the most obvious -- a demand for remuneration for the uncompensated labor of black slaves and the legacy of slavery. The material legacy includes direct consequences such as the federal government's failure to fulfil the promise of Emancipation by adopting the Radical Republican proposals during Reconstruction after the Civil War that would have expropriated the plantations in the South and divided them among the freedpeople, thus establishing a black yeomanry of independent stakeholders. These also include the federal government's further capitulation to the former slaveholders by accepting their disfranchisement of black voters later in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the effect of which was to remove black citizens from effective participation in public life and to facilitate imposition of the white supremacist regime of official political and economic apartheid that reigned in the South for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. (From this perspective, it is worthy of note that every national government -- every presidential administration, congress and federal judiciary -- that served between 1877 and 1966 did so in clear, though unacknowledged, violation of the U.S. Constitution. Each was elected from, or nominated and confirmed by those elected from, national electorates that, in the southern states at least, violated blacks' equal citizenship rights under the 14th Amendment and voting rights under the 15th. Small wonder that, for instance, at least one Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court -- Edward D. White -- was a Ku Klux Klansman, as well as a veteran of a white supremacist military insurrection against the Reconstruction government of Louisiana in 1874.) The indirect material legacy of slavery includes the complex of discriminatory practices enforced, and reproduced with governmental acquiescence, throughout the nation in generations subsequent to Emancipation. These include explicitly discriminatory practices such the Federal Housing Administration's enforcement of racially exclusionary "restrictive covenants" in its lending policies officially until 1948 and unofficially for some years thereafter; this practice severely disadvantaged black people's pursuit of homeownership, the principal form of capital accumulation for most Americans. The effects of unequal education, labor market discrimination and publicly initiated and supported ghettoization also can be seen as indirect material legacies of slavery. We could also include the effects of New Deal compromises with southern Democrats -- largely racially-inspired -- that excluded most black workers from initial coverage under social security and agricultural assistance. The list could expand indefinitely. The reparations frame no doubt appeals partly as a unifying metaphor that expresses the historical linkage of what conventional racial liberalism construes as separate, isolated moments of injustice. This is an important corrective, though it's one that can easily occur without the call for reparations. The frame also appeals to lawyers, economists and other people who like to play intellectual parlor games, inasmuch as calculation of the extent of economic and social costs of slavery and racial injustice to their victims across generations can consume endless energy, discussion and professional expertise. Indeed, the question of material compensation opens a plethora of technical issues. Should payments go to individuals or to some presumably representative corporate entity? If the former, who qualifies as a recipient? Would descendents of people who had been enslaved elsewhere (for instance, Brazil or the Caribbean) be eligible? And what of those no longer legally black people with slave ancestors? As a friend of mine has suggested, these issues could produce a lively trade for genealogists, DNA testers and other such quacks, and already some seem to be rising to the opportunity. These ambiguities, moreover, expose the faultiness of comparisons to payments to victims of Japanese internment and Nazi slave labor camps, who were identifiable individuals whose experience of the ultimate injustice was direct. If the recipient is to be some corporate entity, as Robinson and others suggest, how can its representativeness and accountability be determined? If the body is a development fund, who would control it and how would the decision be made? Robinson has suggested that philanthropic agencies be the grantees, but which ones and to whom would they be accountable? This talk -- as is standard in contemporary black politics -- presumes a coherent, knowable black agenda that can be determined outside of democratic, participatory processes among those in whose names decisions are to be made and resources allocated. In some of the more grandiosely Pan-Africanist versions of reparations talk the focus of the demand for retribution is global -- including African and, presumably, Caribbean debt relief, and other forms of retribution involving both the United States, former colonial powers and international lending agencies. But this approach only expands the problems intrinsic to the domestic focus and makes goals even more diffuse and remote, and the task more impossibly daunting. The reparations campaign's symbolic objectives seem to center on public acknowledgment of the injustices inflicted on black people historically in this country. On the one hand, this opens to public education about the real history of the United States, although that is a project that does not require the rhetoric of reparations. On the other hand, it fits the Clintonoid tenor of sappy public apologies and maudlin psychobabble about collective pain and healing. Robinson, for his part, seems fixated on pursuing racial parity in monuments and statuary -- perhaps a function of his long years in Washington D.C. and his growing up in Richmond, Va., two cities in which the politics of public monuments loom larger than elsewhere. (And how much would you bet that that's as far as the retribution would go? Elites will always prefer symbolic gestures to material ones: "Let's see, should we give them college tuition and affordable housing or a heartfelt apology and a few monuments and plaques? Hmmm, which will it be, which will it be?") Its psychological objectives, though, are most revealing of the politics that undergirds this movement. The psychological argument for agitating for reparations first of all makes concessions to the improbability of success. The demand is held to be important as a means of raising consciousness among black people, whether or not it can be won. But consciousness of what? Among more populist or radical adherents this view rests on the premise -- a vestige of the nationalist/anti-imperialist radicalism that evolved from Black Power -- that mobilizing black people to fight for a better world requires first rectifying their understanding of who they are and where they come from in order to build on the principle of racial solidarity. Of course, cultivation of a general understanding of history is useful, perhaps necessary, for developing and sustaining an insurgent politics and a good thing in its own right. However, it's more than questionable that people must -- or even will -- mobilize around earlier generations' grievances to pursue current objectives. The real point of this approach is different, as the willingness to acknowledge the cause's doubtful practicality suggests. The deeper appeal of reparations talk for its proponents is to create or stress a sense of racial peoplehood as the primary basis for political identity. As is a standard feature of the race- nationalist politics from which it originated, this movement's psychological project is grounded on beliefs that rank-and-file black people suffer from improper or defective identity and that an important task of political action is to restore correct racial consciousness, destruction or distortion of which is held to be the psychological legacy of slavery. Among some strains of cultural nationalists, this view unabashedly reproduces the old "damage thesis," recently criticized by historian Daryl Michael Scott in his book Contempt & Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996. According to this thesis, slavery and its aftermath left black Americans without cultural moorings and therefore especially vulnerable to various social pathologies. It has been the foundation of academic and journalistic slanders of black poor and working people famously perpetrated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's scurrilous 1965 report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action and contemporary notions of a self-destructive black urban underclass (see my critique of the underclass idea in Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era). Less conspicuously, it has underlain much of black nationalist thought throughout the 20th century. Randall Robinson's argument for pursuit of reparations hinges explicitly on this view of the black American population -- lucky petit bourgeois people like himself excepted, of course -- as defective and in need of moral and psychological repair. And that is another source of the idea's currency: it resonates with middle class noblesse oblige and commitment to a racial politics that ensconces a particular, guiding role for upper status elites. Those are, after all, the people who can conduct the finely calibrated analyses that determine what forms and magnitude just compensation should take; they are the people who would stand to administer whatever compromise palliatives are likely to ensue from this activity. This also helps to make sense of what has struck me as most incomprehensible about the reparations movement -- its complete disregard for the simplest, most mundanely pragmatic question about any political mobilization: How can we imagine building a political force that would enable us to prevail on this issue? As with earlier Pan-Africanist ideologues, internationalist rhetoric is in part a sleight-of-hand attempt to sidestep that question by abstracting to a larger black universe. But the question ultimately does not arise because reparations talk is rooted in a different kind of politics, a politics of elite-brokerage and entreaty to the ruling class and its official conscience, the philanthropic foundations, for racial side- payments. Robinson makes this appeal unambiguously: "Until America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people." Lest there be any doubt about the limited social vision that makes such an entreaty plausible, he brushes away the deepest foundations of American inequality: "Lamentably, there will always be poverty." His beef is that black Americans are statistically overrepresented at the bottom. It is significant as well that Jim Forman's 1969 demand was crafted at a conference funded and organized by liberal religious foundations. This is a protest politics that depends on the good will of those who hold power. By definition, it is not equipped to challenge existing relations of power and distribution other than marginally, with token gestures. There's a more insidious dynamic at work in this politics as well, which helps to understand why the reparations idea suddenly has spread so widely through mainstream political discourse. We are in one of those rare moments in American history -- like the 1880s and 1890s and the Great Depression -- when common circumstances of economic and social insecurity have strengthened the potential for building broad solidarity across race, gender and other identities around shared concerns of daily life, concerns that only the minority of comfortable and well-off can dismiss in favor of monuments and apologies and a politics of psychobabble. Concerns like access to quality health care, the right to a decent and dignified livelihood, affordable housing, quality education for all. These are objectives that can be pursued effectively only by struggling to unite a wide section of the American population who experience those concerns most acutely, the substantial majority of this population who have lost those essential social benefits or live in fear of losing them. And isn't it interesting that at such a moment the corporate-dominated opinion-shaping media discover and project a demand for racially defined reparations that cuts precisely against building such solidarity? And isn't it also interesting that Randall Robinson, mainstream poster boy for reparations advocacy, is a member of the Rockefeller family's Council on Foreign Relations? I know that many activists who have taken up the cause of reparations otherwise hold and enact a politics quite at odds with the limitations that I've described here. To some extent, I suspect their involvement stems from an old reflex of attempting to locate a progressive kernel in the nationalist sensibility. It certainly is an expression of a generally admirable commitment to go where people seem to be moving. But we must ask: What people? And where can this motion go? And we must be prepared to recognize what can be only a political dead end -- or worse. Adolph L. Reed, Jr. is Professor of Political Science on the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research and is a member of the Interim National Council of the Labor Party. His most recent book is Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press).