Payback?

Christian Century, Oct 25, 2000 by Victoria Barnett

Racism, reparations and accountability

IN 1969, I DROPPED OUT of college, moved to Racine, Wisconsin, and worked for a community action program and then for a welfare rights organization. The focus of my work was tenants' rights--helping tenants negotiate with landlords over things like rent and housing violations. Among my many indelible memories from that year was the situation of a family with six children. A large part of their welfare check paid for the worst housing conditions I had ever seen. The stucco house looked reasonably sound on the outside; inside, however, parts of the floor were rotten, pipes and wires were exposed, and the infestation of roaches was so great that that there was literally a moving carpet of them on the floor. The landlord said that "these people" were "animals," and that fixing the house up would be a waste of time and money. The landlord was white; the family was African-American.

When I went to Racine, I idealistically thought of myself as color-blind. Most of the families with whom I worked were African-American, as were all of my colleagues, and for a time I naively believed that I had somehow become part of that community. But if I learned anything that year it was that there is no such thing as color-blindness in this society and that the dividing line I had temporarily crossed is not easily erased. The first day I worked for the welfare rights organization I was told by its director, a black ex-welfare mother, that I might as well know that I was in a foreign country. She was right. Although I didn't like to think about it, I came from the same country--the white middle class--as the slum landlord.

After leaving Racine I returned to college and to that country. It proved impossible to maintain several close friendships I had formed. Black America was once again out of my immediate view, and as a result the acute sense of anguish and outrage I had once felt diminished. In 1985 I drove back to Racine and found the neighborhoods where I had worked looked exactly as I remembered. The stucco house was still there, and there were still people living in it.

I think about that house in Racine when I listen to discussions these days about granting reparations to African Americans. The call for reparations is not new; it began as soon as slavery ended. But it has gained steam in recent years, fueled by growing historical scholarship about the details of slavery, an increased worldwide readiness to call societies to account for their pasts, and an eloquent and passionate debate within the African-American community. In 1993 the Organization of African Unity called for some form of restitution from the U.S. and from those European countries that were involved in the slave trade. That same year, Representative John Conyers (D., Mich.) introduced a bill (which never made it out of committee) to establish a commission to study the effects of slavery.

Some precedents already exist. In 1994 Florida paid $2.1 million to descendants of the African-American victims of the 1923 Rosewood massacre. Earlier this year, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission recommended that reparations be paid to the survivors of the 1921 race riot in that city, in which as many as 300 African-Americans were killed. The issue is relevant for other groups as well. The 1988 Civil Liberties Act, for example, paid $20,000 to each Japanese-American who was incarcerated during World War 11. State and federal courts and mediators are dealing with hundreds of Native American land `claims, and indigenous tribes in the U.S. and Canada have filed suits demanding reparations for various crimes, such as the abuse of students in parochial and government-run schools.

Reparations are a form of compensation for past injuries. Yet, particularly with respect to the African-American and Native American populations, we are not just looking at past injuries, because the original injustices have been compounded by decades of discrimination. For that reason, discussion of reparations for slavery touches on a number of deeper issues. Proponents contend that the destructive legacy of slavery continues to hinder many African-Americans from achieving equal status in this society. In measurable ways--infant mortality rates, unemployment, incarceration rates, etc.--African-Americans are at a disadvantage. Racism remains an ugly reality in our society. This summer, the New York Times concluded a lengthy series on the perceptions of race among Americans by saying: "The series has portrayed a stubbornly enduring racial divide, and the poll suggested that even as the rawest forms of bigotry have receded they have often been replaced by remoteness and distrust in places of work, learning and worship."

Proponents of reparations point to this reality and say that the descendants of slaves are owed some form of monetary settlement. In The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson contends that slavery's legacy of injustice and disadvantage is "structural," continuing to benefit whites "whose assets piled up like fattening snowballs over three and a half centuries." As a result, Robinson charges, even those African-Americans who have achieved some level of economic security still lack real political power. More ominously, they "are emotional defectors from a society whose white majority long ago smothered to death any notion of cultural co-ownership."