Fighting The Good Fight
By Ronald Roach
Black Issues In Higher Education talks to renown human rights activist and author Randall Robinson about the Black American reparations movement. Robinson, who was formerly president of the Washington, D.C.-based TransAfrica advocacy organization and the TransAfrica Forum, has emerged as a central figure in the campaign to win reparations. At his home on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, Robinson takes time from a busy writing schedule to speak to Black Issues about the philosophy and strategy of the movement.
BI: What do you consider to be the goals of the reparations movement?
ROBINSON: The damage done over a 346-year period is both economic and social. The psychological damage is more difficult to quantify, but one of the goals that we began to accomplish by simply raising the issue and provoking public discussion…access to a peoples’ own story of themselves. Their history is important to any peoples’ psychological health. The U.S. invests a great deal in history — both formal and ephemeral — in museums, in statuary, in symbols and that sort of thing. And the idea is to connect people to some distant past so as to make them feel significant and larger than the small space of their individual, mortal lives. To strip a people of the story of themselves is to do enormous and devastating psychological damage to the victims. African Americans have been damaged in a way they can’t quantify.
I think a part of what this movement will accomplish is something closer to the equality in American education —- access to information —- not just for African Americans, not just for African people throughout the world, but for White Americans who badly need to know the story, the history expunged during the long years of slavery.
And then there’s of course the economic consequence. It is not complicated and difficult to argue that when you expropriate the value of a people’s labor for 246 years of slavery, and follow that with a century of formal discrimination based on race with government involvement that those who were in the beneficiary group stood to gain from the expropriation of the value of that labor. And those who had the value of their hire stolen from them stood to suffer, hence this enormous economic gap yawning still and static, separating Blacks from Whites in the United States and throughout the world.
The White House, the Capitol built by slaves — Georgetown University, its early buildings — built by slaves. These people were never paid, and their relatives were doomed to an endless poverty that has reached well into the 20th century. And so the current consequence of this, as I see it, is an America with one-twentieth and one-fourth of the world’s prisoners – two million and growing, half of whom are Black. Half of those on death row — Black. Blacks comprise 14 percent of those who commit drug-related infractions in the United States, but 75 percent of the prison admissions for drug-related convictions in the United States.
So this kind of discrimination, rooted in a tradition of slavery and formal discrimination, is with us still. And when governments are involved in these great crimes against humanity, and this the longest running in the world over the last 500 years, governments are obliged to compensate not unlike what Germany was obliged to do after World War II and other countries have done since. And I think it’s now time for the United States to face its own history of human rights abuse and to compensate the victims.
BI: To what extent do you see the interest in reparations generated by the 1990s backlash against affirmative action and the impact of conservative social policies, such as welfare reform? Is there a connection?
ROBINSON: I think there probably is. When I wrote the book (The Debt), I started with a hard look at certain factual realities that scream out from the social data, contemporary social data. These gaps, I’m talking about, are anywhere from morbidity to education to home ownership to wealth to investments to representation in the prison population. All of this tells us that the gaps between Black and White in the United States are widening. And when one looks at this and wonders why there is difference of performance; why is there a difference in wealth; why is there a difference in the general success rates of Blacks and Whites in the United States, one can’t do anything but attribute this to slavery. Any people subjected to what African Americans suffered — after 246 years of that memory loss, families destroyed, labor and wealth building expropriated, stolen —- and to follow that with something very much like slavery in the early 20th century, to expect them to be equal in accomplishment is ludicrous on its face. And so it seemed to me that what America did after the civil rights movement was to say we’re going to stop doing to you what we had been formally doing to you for 346 years, and now catch up. Well, that’s literally impossible.
I thought if we could provoke Blacks to stand back and look at the fabric of this problem in its long-term development, we would demand something differently, and I think that’s begun to develop. I think that poorer Blacks always demanded reparations, but after the civil rights movement I think the Black community became somewhat bifurcated. Those of us who benefited directly from it — middle-class Blacks who made their way into college were those who didn’t think about things like reparations. We forgot that we were in the same boat with those who had been left behind and some of us were bottom stuck — the modern victims of slavery. Others of us thought that we had a way out. I think that’s changed somewhat because the difference in this call and previous calls is that this is being embraced by mainstream, successful, well-educated, well-placed African Americans who are in a position of relative authority and influence. That has given us a new visibility.
BI: How did the idea of writing The Debt
originate?
