In Mid September of this year, throngs gathered at the United Nations to rally for slavery reparations from the United States government. International guests harking from such law-abiding and justice-seeking nations as Zimbabwe, Libya, Angola, Cuba, Namibia, and Nigeria were in attendance at the event. Speakers included Ron Walters, Louis Farrakhan, and NYC Councilman Charles Barron. Dozens of fringe groups like the Friends of Zimbabwe and The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) sponsored the rally. Thousands also attended last year’s Millions For Reparations Mass Rally, held on August 17, 2002, in Washington, D. C.
It is, perhaps, high time to stop marginalizing this increasingly influential grassroots movement, which is gaining considerable strength and support, and rather meet it head on, resolving the issue once and for all, with zest, and not letting it linger on in our national consciousness unresolved.
President Bush has made an effort to indirectly tackle the difficult aftermath of slavery. The President’s speech on Goree Island in Senegal, a stirring example of democracy working in Africa, was one of the great and noble moments of reckoning in his career thus far. Despite being caught in the crossfire of Africa’s most popular statesman, Nelson Mandela, President Bush made his way to the continent with a relatively small retinue. As reported by the Arizona Republic’s Don Melvin, a cartoon appeared on the front page of The Star, the largest newspaper in Johannesburg, on the day that the President delivered his historic speech. The cartoon showed President Bush in tourist dress being greeted by South African President, Thabo Mbeki:
“Wow!” Bush says in the cartoon. “What a beautiful country.”
“No, you can’t have it!” Mbeki replies.
Those skeptical sentiments notwithstanding, the President’s speech exhibited characteristic courage in accepting America’s role in the immoral institution of slavery:
“At this place (Goree Island, Senegal), liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings were delivered and sorted and weighed and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return … One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the greatest crimes of history.”
Little ado was made of this principled and monumental speech delivered by the leader of the free world. There was nothing “peculiar” about his assessment: slavery was evil. The press was more concerned, alas, with calibrating the amount of time the President spent on the continent in relation to the amount of time he spent on air travel.
As a first generation Ugandan immigrant, I must say at the outset of this piece that I would not qualify for any form of legal reparations payout based upon US slavery. I mention my background here because motive is the key to understanding the growing momentum of this movement. During this year’s Millions For Reparations rally, speakers stirred the slow fires of resentment by skillfully rendering the sorrowful image of the slave martyr – raped, beaten, humiliated – in lurid detail, carefully tailored to the crowded attendees inciting … what? Well, primarily, the image was directed at resentment, and not the cause of distributive justice towards which the crowd was purportedly gathered. Therein lies the difficulty: the strength of the reparations movement is generated not by an appeal to the law, as their strategy suggests, but rather to the smoldering fires of resentment.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the king of resentment, in On the Genealogy of Morals sketches his theory of resentment, or, as he calls it, “ressentiment.” Nietzsche always went in for the French word. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche recounts how the self-esteem and pride of the conquered is subverted by the conquering physical might of the conquerors. As a result, the conquered resent their status, but are powerless to openly retaliate. Rather than resign themselves to humility, the conquered appropriate and sanction strategies of coping with perceived injustice, impotence and envy. Always with Nietzsche the relationship between the conqueror and the conquered was paramount: as if nothing else in life mattered. At this point in the reparations debate, the legal argument enters onto the world stage.
The Reparations Movement in its current incarnation seeks legal redress through International Law. The Bush Administration opted out of the chaotic 2001 U N World Conference Against Racism, in Durban, South Africa, which, ultimately decided that the Tran Atlantic Slave Trade Was A Crime Against Humanity. From that decision, the current Reparations movement draws its steam.
Comparisons are also being made to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, but those are not valid. At Nuremberg, justice was speedily brought against the direct participants responsible for crimes against humanity. Nuremberg, moreover, was an anomalous situation. The Reparations Movement also brings up Japanese Internment during WWII and American reparations paid. In the case of Japanese reparations payments, again, direct participants in that historical moment were involved. The case of slavery reaches back into the recesses of history for its claims.
And just what are the limits of Reparations claims? How long, or through how many successive generations, should such claims for reparations survive? Since there is no statute of limitations which limits claims for murder and genocide, does this mean that Mexico could ostensibly sue Spain for reparations over the excesses of Hernan Cortez in the Sixteenth Century? Here we enter into the realm of Sophistry couched in legal arguments: reason is twisted to suit historical hurts at the expense of true justice.
Surprisingly, as recently as Spring 2002, a significant number of African Americans in the region surrounding the aforementioned UN rally were against reparations. In a March 2002 Eyewitness News(ABC)/Survey USA poll of 500 (NY area) asked if respondents thought “the government should use taxpayer money to compensate the descendants of former slaves, and an overwhelming majority (74 percent) said no. Only 19 percent said the government should.” Broken down racially, less than half of the black poll respondents (49 percent) felt that the reparations should come from federal taxpayer money. That less than half of the black respondents supported reparations is significant; does this regional poll suggest a national trend?
Flyers distributed for the rally by Millions For Reparations (http://www.millionsforreparations.com) were emblazoned with the incendiary “They Owe Us!” But who are “us” and who are “they”? Correct documentation is nearly impossible in most cases of ancestral slavery. Just how does one calibrate the reparations for ancestral slavery? How would pain and suffering be converted into dollar amounts? Further, it seems reasonable to argue that any calibrated amount would meet with significant opposition as being a low figure. Would any dollar amount in the settlement be subject to further arbitration at a later date or would the case be closed forever?
Who would be the parties arbitrating the sum between the African American descendants and the United States? The International Criminal Court? The United States Congress? Can a consensus be reached about the arbitrator? Would the Southern nations be responsible for a larger allotment of the reparations because they benefited more as an agrarian geographical region? If so, how much more responsible would they be?
Would this Trust be paid out from tax revenues? Would this Trust be paid out in Scholarships? Would the reparations be paid out with tax credits? Would the reparations be paid in government bonds? Would the Reparations be paid in cash?
Would affluent African Americans also be included in the trust? Would immigrants who arrived in the United States after the repeal of slavery be exempt from contributing to these payments via their tax dollars? Would the tax revenues come primarily from white descendants of slave owners or from everyone in the United States? Would non descendants of slave owners be allowed to protest the spending of their tax dollars on a Reparations Trust? Would descendants of African slaves in America living abroad for generations be eligible for the Trust?
On the morning of January 3, 1889, while visiting Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche, the greatest exponent of resentment, suffered a mental breakdown, leaving him an invalid for the rest of his short life. Upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse’s neck, collapsing, mad: Nietzsche’s final meditation on the relationship of conqueror and conquered.
Now, even more than ever, after the solidarity after September 11th, after generations of gains in moving towards true equality of man before the eyes of the law, this is a time for unity. There are no “usses and thems,” only we, one nation, the United States of America. That is why I am against reparations.Powered by Sidelines