prairie fire organizing committee

On Reparations for New Afrika:
Response to David Horowitz's speech at the University of Chicago

by benjamin evans

Horowitz's anti-reparations advertisements published in the Maroon and the Chicago Weekly News, and his appearance here on campus demand a response. Despite his intentions, David Horowitz has brought the issue of reparations for blacks to the attention of many people on campus. His appearance here prompted the Organization of Black Students to invite Alderman Dorothy Tillman to speak on campus and has initiated a debate about American history and contemporary social injustices. As the statement drafted by OBS says, "Lack of the vast funding sources available to Horowitz, the Young Republicans[his campus sponsors], and other forces against free speech and democracy, does not limit our desire or ability [to respond]. Freedom cannot be purchased, advertisements cannot replace free voices, and racist campaigns cannot go unchallenged."

As we try to find the best way to respond to conservative polemicists like Horowitz, we should keep in mind that these attacks are a reaction to the long struggle of black people in North America for reparations. Recently several city councils, including Chicago, Dallas, and Detroit have passed pro-reparation resolutions, but black people's struggle for reparations goes back to the end of the Civil War. The phrase "forty acres and a mule" originated in the Reconstruction era, and symbolized freed slaves' expectations of just recompense for generations of enslavement. Often the form of reparations demanded has been land. Bayley Wyatt, a freedman from Yorktown, Virginia was not unusual when he said in 1865;

"I may state to all our friends, and to all our enemies, that we has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. And den didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of corn, ob cotton, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything? And den didn't the large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made? . . . I say they have grown rich, and my people is poor." (quoted in Roy Finkenbine (ed.), Sources of the African-American Past (London: Longman, 1993), p. 88. and by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua in "Slavery, Racist Violence, and Apartheid: The Case for Reparations")

More recently Congressman John Conyers of Michigan has reintroduced a bill (HR 40) in Congress each year since 1989. HR 40 is a first formal step toward reparations by studying the impact of slavery and proposals for remedies. As Rep. Conyers points out, "Over 4 million Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States and its colonies from 1619 to 1865, and as a result, the United States was able to begin its grand place as the most prosperous country in the world."

After slavery, blacks were still threatened with racist attacks. Lynchings were not uncommon, not only in the South, but all over the U.S. until the middle of the 20th century. According to the figures kept by the Tuskegee Institute (acknowledged as the most conservative available) between 1882 and 1951 there were 4,730 people lynched in the United States.(The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880-1950 by Robert A. Gibson)

The U.S. criminal justice system usually took no action in these cases. Between the years 1880 and 1905, a period of twenty five years when thousands of people were lynched, no one was ever convicted of any crime associated with a lynching.

Horowitz claims that Americans should adopt a color-blind perspective, because race is a socially constructed fiction. But that doesn't mean that racism is a fiction, or that its effects are any less painful. Horowitz would abolish racial classification, but would maintain the structures of racial oppression. Horowitz claims that individual African Americans do not deserve special treatment. Yet, the reality is that they do receive special treatment, and it's usually of the negative type. Racial profiling cases and the number of blacks murdered by police forces across this country are two well documented examples.

Horowitz denies that racism is anything more than individual prejudice by denying that black people are oppressed as a people. We often speak of "Black America" or "the African American community", but these euphemisms only begin to recognize the fact that black people in the U.S. are in effect a nation within a nation (or as the Kerner Commission put it in 1968, the black America and white America are "two nations, separate and unequal"). Like the Basque people of northern Spain and southern France, like the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey, and like the Palestinians, black people in the U.S. are a "self-identifying people who share a common history, language, culture and homeland." In fact, many of the insights in Professor Rashid Khalidi's book "Palestinian Identity: The Construction of National Consciousness" could also be applied to black folks in America.

This isn't a new idea, as evidenced by the first major study of the political attitudes of people of African descent in the U.S., The 1993-94 National Black Political Study directed by Prof. Micheal Dawson, the chair of the U of C's Political Science Dept. That study showed that "half of all Blacks characterize their status as that of a nation within a nation." In fact, the same study showed that 14% of black folks (approx. 4,200,000 people) want an independent state now.

Geronimo ji Jaga, the former Black Panther Party leader who spent 27 years in prison for a crime for which he has since been exonerated, addressed this topic in a speech at Pasadena City College, October 1997;

"Africans in this country constitute the second largest African nation in the world, next to Nigeria. We have the wherewithal to field an entire nation. Over six hundred billion dollars a year go through our nation. We have the brainpower that will surpass any brainpower of the world. We have the skills; we have a common language, common culture, common everything. We have a right to elect our own leadership, to govern ourselves... It's a shame for us to be so large, so huge, so capable, so qualified, and still turn around and let Ol' Massa patrol our communities while our children are dying with dope. It's a shame that we have not called for a state of emergency at the alarming rate in which our young men and women are going to prison. It's a shame!"

All this is just to say that the movement for reparations is for black people, as a people, not just for individuals who are the descendents of African slaves or the victims of contemporary racism. Critics like Horowitz are able to take advantage of the fact that black people in the United States are defined racially, not, like other recipients of reparations (such as the Ottawas of Michigan, the Chippewas of Wisconsin, the Seminoles of Florida, the Sioux of South Dakota, or the Klamaths of Oregon), as a people who have a specific history, culture and nationality. This, after all, was one of the objectives of slavery, to destroy the slaves' history and culture and sense of themselves as a people.

But it is also the history of slavery which brought together Ashanti, Hausa, Zulu, Yoruba, etc., and the subsequent struggles (against slavery, during Reconstruction, against lynchings, for civil rights, etc.) which forged a new people here in North America (since 1968 and the founding of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, called New Afrikans). The struggle for reparations has always been a part of that history.

other websites of interest:

Reparations Bill For The African Slaves In The United States, 1867
http://www.directblackaction.com/rep_bills/hr29_1867.txt

Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, 1989
(introduced every year since 1989 by Rep. John Conyers)
http://www.house.gov/conyers/answers.htm

A response from the Organization of Black Students, University of Chicago http://home.uchicago.edu/~rblack/OBS.htm

Nation Time, the voice of the New Afrikan Liberation Front
http://www.nalfnationtime.com/nationhome.html

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