Prof Henry Gates: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

[bik0]

Professor Gates makes the point that to truly have a just settlement of the reparations issue, culpability should not be focused solely on whites in America but should also include black Africans who were complicit as well...


Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.
Published: April 22, 2010
Cambridge, Mass.


THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.

So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”

About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html?pagewanted=1&hp

[CTyankee]

1. How is the question of reparations really related to assessing fault?

"the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage" is an issue of and by itself. The evildoers, whether black Africans or white European colonialists, are all dead and gone. Is the idea to assess the descendants of those leaders for the money to pay the reparations? Because if it is not,then whether black Africans were involved is not the issue...or is it?

I'm scratching my head here for the logic in this piece...

[Igel]

2. The logic is fairly simple.

It goes in two directions.

First, claims for reparations usually are based on labor and rewards. Whites benefited from black slave labor; therefore their descendants should somehow contribute to reparations.

However, Africans benefited directly from enslaving blacks. Therefore their descendants should somehow contribute to reparations.

The logic is parallel. The logic is usually despised because nobody likes the conclusion. However, the caveats, the loopholes, are also the same: (1) You can't get reparations from the Africans because they were impoverished. But many of the descendants of slaveowners were impoverished after 1865; many of those who succeeded in not being impoverished in the 1800s lost their shirts in 1929 and 1930. (2) Not all the members of a tribe benefited, and usually the tribe is part of a larger country now--so having all the current members of the tribe contribute is just as wrong as having all members of the country contribute. Their ancestors didn't benefit. Then again, there were huge waves of white immigration in the 1880s-1920s whose descendants didn't benefit from slavery.

Some get around the parallelism by looking at infrastructure, but often employ a kind of one-drop rule in construction. If black slaves were used in building any part of, say, the White House, then it's entirely a black-slave contribution, with a corollary being to overlook that without black slaves it would have been done but something of lesser worth wouldn't have been built. In other words, there'd be less, but what "less" entails is too messy to actually suss out, so the need for sussing out the actual detail is deemed unworthy of our notice. It also overlooks the problem that slavery in the South actually slowed economic growth, although how to factor together "slavery as a hobble on growth" with "slavery as a engine of growth" seems to not have any good principled answer. In other words, the conclusion dictates the process, never a solution that's particularly convincing to those who aren't already true believers.

Second, there's the moral argument, that somehow American whites bear collective moral guilt generations later. It would hold for the Africans, as well, wouldn't it? (Skipping over the very idea of intergenerational moral guilt, how to distribute it among society, etc., etc.)

Actually, Gates' article serves another purpose. I've seen great pride shown by some American blacks in the African kingdoms that existed, as though those kingdoms' glory says anything about a teenage American black in 2010. At the same time, the European kingdoms are looked at as foul because they did morally suspect things, and their descendants bear some sort of moral stench for the imperialist, superstitious, slaver policies of their ancestors' kingdoms. Well, welcome to the "introspection" club. The African empires were imperialist, superstitious, and had policies fostering slavery. What you're left with is foul intent that, by virtue of lower levels of technology, was underachieving. Technological backwardness as a moral virtue. Luddites rule! Uh... Yeah, jingoism of all sorts is suspicious.

There's a third argument, but it's a nasty one to make and deal with. That's Jim Crowe, with affirmative action and the like to balance it out. As long as everything involves dead people we never actually knew we can agree on at least most of the facts. As soon as we talk Jim Crowe, we have to deal with the history of Jim Crowe, the 1960s and afterwards. Too current. While you don't have nearly as many recent white immigrants to factor out of the equation, there are some nasty sociological facts that bit reparations on the ass.

And there's a fourth that I've heard but seldom seen in print but which sometimes is merged with the third argument, sometimes it's distinct: The "legacy of slavery" argument. Nobody really wants to point to how that legacy translates into current conditions, since the conditions obviously don't just self-generate. The "legacy of slavery" is usually implicitly taken to be whites' behavior, or circumstances that are just imposed on black communities from outside--sort of a strange kind of inheritance. That argument gets really, really nasty right off the bat, so I'll put my bat away and go find something to drink.

[CTyankee]

4. Thanks for navigating this...interesting. But I still don't know how any of the

scenarios you describe can result in any fair way to determine what the reparations should be and who should pay them, even if we could determine that and force those in that group to pay reparations (the descendants of the African empires who are still in those African nations where we have no say).

So where, in your estimation, does this leave the question of reparations? I guess I get back to my original question. I'm thinking that your idea of finding something to drink a good one, except it's a little early for that right now...

[EFerrari]

10. There are contemporary families that know very well where their wealth stems from.

There is some discussion of that here:

The Slave Ship
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/200012-1

Video, transcript at link

The de Wolfe Family, btw, has learned their history and have been making self imposed "reparations" for many years now.

[Taitertots]

3. Why should I pay reparations?

My family wasn't even on the continent until well after slavery ended.

[CTyankee]

5. I think the answer might be that they still benefitted from the labor and effort of

the former slaves. I'm not arguing for reparations, just trying to discern an answer to your question.

In my case, all of my family is Southern, most predating the Civil War. Though I never heard that any ancestor of mine every owned a slave, it is immaterial to me in this argument. Clearly, whites benefitted greatly in the South and elsewhere. As a child I went to segregated schools and blacks couldn't aspire to any decent jobs held by whites in that society. My family had opportunities and supports based on the color of their skin...

[Taitertots]

6. What about black people who immigrated after slavery?

They benefited as much as my family ever has.

[CTyankee]

7. I don't think there's any research that suggests that black immigrants after the Civil

War had benefits equalling that of white immigrants overall. However, I could be wrong. I just think that the statement seems dubious to me...without some study of the question, I shouldn't make categorical statements...

[Taitertots]

8. Well they did benefit from slavery, albeit not as much

Which is why reparations are a bad idea. There is no effective way of determining who gets paid and who should be doing the paying.

[CTyankee]

11. Yep, I think that is the problem. How do you asess this?

I guess what happened to the Japanese Americans who were put in internment camps in WW2 might serve as an example, but my guess is that the American taxpayer footed the bill for that...

[Old Troop]

9. Who are the relarations paid to?

What about families that remained in Africa, but had the breadwinner kidnapped and shipped out as a slave? How about African immigrants to the US since 1865? What about descendants of slaves from the Carribean who emigrated to the US or Britain?
How would the amount of reparations be determined? A percentage of current GDP or a determination of the actual amount of labor expended? How will reparations be allotted? Perhaps descendents of house slaves will receive less than descendents of field slaves.
The mechanics are hard.