Proponents of slave reparations feel that slavery, and the resulting system of racism that followed it, has severely crippled the ability of blacks to compete in American society.
The argument against reparations for slavery put forth by David Horowitz has been denounced by black leaders as racist and white supremacist, and it has brought the issue of apologizing for slavery and paying monetary restitution to blacks into the public eye.
“His positions are absurd,” said Conrad Worrill, chairman of the National Black United Front. “David Horowitz is distorting history and utilizing the system of white supremacy to put forth inaccuracies, misinterpretations and conceptualizations of the history of African peoples.”
According to Worrill, the system has been set up to favor whites. Reparations are necessary, not just because they are owed to blacks, but also to “level the playing field.”
“It’s not that we’re out to penalize the present generation,” Worrill said. “Certain countries, including the United States, and certain segments of the population are in a better position economically, politically and socially as a result of unjust enrichment.”
Many opponents of slave reparations question the need for whites to pay reparations to blacks when so many whites came to the United States after slavery was finished.
“White people have benefited from unjust enrichment enjoyed by their ancestors at the expense of African people,” Worrill said. “All white people in this country benefited from slavery. Because of the system of white supremacy, being white is an advantage.”
“Black people worked long, hard, killing days, years, centuries — and they were never paid. The value of their labor went into other pockets — plantation owners, northern entrepreneurs, state treasuries, the U.S. government,” said Randall Robinson, civil rights activist, in his book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.
The Reparations Assessment Group, a team of civil rights lawyers headed by Harvard law school professor Charles Ogletree and including high-profile lawyers Johnnie Cochran and Alexander Pires Jr., is preparing to sue the U.S. government and other businesses that benefited from slavery.
“We will be seeking more than just monetary compensation,” Ogletree said. “We want a change in America. We want full recognition and a remedy of how slavery stigmatized, raped, murdered and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own.”
The U.S. government has a history of giving reparations to groups it has wronged, having paid reparations to Japanese-Americans who were interred in prison camps during World War II, leaving many of those in the pro-reparations movement wondering why blacks have been ignored.
“Why is it that all the other groups who have put forth just claims for reparations, there has been no argument?” Worrill said. “No one has raised objections to their just claims of reparations due to human rights violations. Slavery was the worst set of human rights violations, the worst holocaust in human history.”
According to Horowitz, in his ad “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea — and Racist Too,” the difference is that there is no accurate way to determine who has descended from slaves, in part to a lack of accurate records.
“The argument that ‘we cannot prove who was the descendant of a slave’ is a false, racist and a white supremacist position,” Worrill said. “White people have inherited the preferential advantage of being white, and black people have inherited the loathsome disadvantage of being black. That’s the way the system is set up.”
In “Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz,” University of Massachusetts Professor Ernest Allen Jr. and Publisher Robert Chrisman argue that injuries of slavery were inflicted upon a people designated as a race. That race, as a whole, continues to suffer the institutional legacy of slavery, making the attempt to separate race from individual injury inflicted irrelevant.
“After slavery, there was still so much hatred, discrimination and contempt that we entered into a second slavery,” said Edward Robinson, a spokesman for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. “And this has been going on for 140 years.”
Randall Robinson argues in The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks that “what slavery had firmly established in the way of debilitating psychic pain and a lopsidedly economic relationship of blacks to whites, it should surprise no one that the wealth gap separating blacks and whites over the 20th century has mushroomed beyond any ability that black earned income can ever have to close.”
College-educated whites enjoy an average annual earned income of $38,700, a net worth of $74,922 and net financial assets of $19,823. College-educated blacks average only $29,440, a net worth of $17,437 and $175 in financial assets, Robinson said in his book.
The issue of slave reparations has been largely ignored by Congress. On January 5, 1993, Congressman John Coyers introduced a bill establishing a committee to assess the damage of slavery and its aftermath, but the bill has never made it out of committee.
Several attempts were made to contact Randall Robinson, but he was unavailable for comment.
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