THE END OF RACE AS WE KNO\V IT:

SLAVERY, SEGREGATION, AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN QUEST FOR

REDRESS

By

Paul Anthony Dottin

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

December 2002 Copyright by Paul Anthony Dottin 2002

11 Tiffi END OF RACE AS WE KNOW IT: SLAVERY, SEGREGATION, AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN QUEST FOR REDRESS

by Paul Anthony Dottin

This dissertation was p1epared under the direction ofthe candidate's dissertation advisor, Dr. Stanford M. Lyman, Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar and Professor of Social Science, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

,,,,~,...... Date

lll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Dr. Stanford M. Lyman, chair of my doctoral committee, for his inspired stewardship of this study. His exceptional erudition, intellectual openness, exemplary mentorship, and enthusiastic :friendship helped tum my dream into a dissertation.

I thank fellow doctoral committee members Dr. Nannetta Durnell-Uwechuwe and Dr. Stephen D. Engle for their respective expertise in the areas of communications and history. Their emphasis on both disciplinary rigor and interdisciplinary innovation helped forge the unique insights of this dissertation.

I thank the Florida Atlantic University Foundation for their generous research assistantship. This funding enabled me to concentrate fully on my research.

I thank Dawn M. Smith, Associate Librarian and Head of Reference and

Government Documents, and Steven C. Matthew, Audio-Visual Specialist and Head of the Media Center at Florida Atlantic University for the professional dedication and unending patience they gave me in support of my undergraduate teaching and doctoral research. I also wish to thank Phyllis Bischof, Librarian of African and

African American Collections at U. C. Berkeley for providing my initial grasp of the field of comparative slavery.

I thank my late grandfather, Mitchell Livingstone Thorpe, for his moral rectitude and emphasis on excellence. He taught me the power of a principled mind.

IV I thank my mother, Maurelle Dottin, for her compassion and emphasis of education. She taught me the value of knowledge and showed me how to share it. I thank her for teaching me how to read before entering school and beginning my life­ long love affair with learning with a set of encyclopedia

I thank my father, Claude Dottin, for his charisma. He showed me the power of passion and taught me to express my opinions powerfully and persuasively.

I thank my wife, Cardum Stacey Dottin, for her endless endurance. She taught me that capacity equals commitment every long day I labored on this study. Truly she is the most spiritually enlightened and enabling person I know.

I thank my brother, Charles Dottin, for his entrepreneurial spirit. He taught me that initiative achieves the incredible.

I thank my brother, Michael Dottin, for his mass media insights and advice.

He taught me grace under the glare of studio lights.

I thank my uncle, Dr. Trevor Anthony Thorpe, for his intellectual example.

He is the earliest embodiment of science I knew.

I thank my brother-in-law, Ya-Sin Norrise, for always lending me logistical support when I was so far away from home.

I thank Ms. Stefanie Gapinski, Coordinator of Public Functions of the

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, for her warm-hearted friendship. Her philanthropic work and selfless support of the students of the Public Intellectuals Program is limitless and legendary. I am a better person having witnessed and benefited from her quiet quest to make the world a better place to live.

v I thank Mrs. Shelley Anisman, Executive Secretary of the Dean's Office, for being a quintessential lady. Her voice was the first great impression I had of Florida

Atlantic University.

I thank Paul Mocombe, a brilliant doctoral student in the Public Intellectuals

Program, and for his steadfast fellowship and brotherhood.

I like to thank fellow graduate students Holly Larson, Natalia Giannini, Caren

Neile and Lynn Bentley-Kemp for every kindness they showed me. They are the huge humble hearts of the Program.

Finally, I thank Tracy Hayes, Kurt Carrington, Eric Escobar, Julio Cavero and

Ronald Antonin for being such good friends to their most preoccupied buddy. I promise to be a better one in the future.

VI ABSTRACT

Author: Paul Anthony Dottin

Title: The End of Race As We Know It: Slavery, Segregation, and The African American Quest For Redress

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Stanford M. Lyman

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Year: 2002

This is a study of one of the most controversial public matters concerning race in America today: the African American reparations movement for slavery and segregation. This issue is hotly contested because racial identity and the relative status and well-being of ethnic groups in America, a configuration I refer to as "race as we know it," is inextricably linked to matters of prejudice, pride, property, and public policy both presently and historically. Any substantial shift in the relative position of blacks and whites, America's most iconically opposed groups, promises to alter fundamental dynamics between these two populations, effectively ending "race as we know it," if not racism and racial hierarchy per se.

Randall Robinson, author of The Debt, the most important work advocating reparations for African Americans, sees reparations as the means by which to break the historical "habit" of American society of locking most blacks and whites into positions of inferiority and superiority respectively. David Horowitz, author of

VII 'U_ncivil Wars, the most famous refutation of Robinson's argument, sees reparations as an all-out attack on America's "heritage" of racial progress because it threatens today's allegedly "color-blind consensus" with "reverse-racism." So put, these opposed positions express the fundamental fears of many whites and the highest hopes of many blacks. Hence, the conflict over reparations, a struggle over the economics and ethics of equality, is simultaneously and inseparably no less a struggle over the future of race in America.

With the societal stake so high, the present study constitutes a much-needed critical scholarly attempt to "save" this public matter from the ideological excesses of these powerfully opposed manifestos. This study will analyze their respective arguments by using a multidisciplinary and comparative framework employing data, concepts, and theories from the disciplines of anthropology, economics, cultural studies, history, political science, and sociology. Its comparative orientation juxtaposes different forms of human bondage, class composition, racial identity and community formation, and political movements. A critical analysis of primary and secondary sources using qualitative and quantitative methods will also be employed.

Vlll CONTENTS

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION...... 1

2. RACE AS WE KNOW IT IN BLACK AND WHITE ...... 7

The New Nadir The Limits and Limiting ofAffirmative Action The Institutional Incorporation ofBlack Politics Black Reparations as an Emergent Formation Early £mergences ofBlack Reparations .Modern £mergences ofBlack Reparations Randall Robinson and the Politics ofReparations

3. THE HYDRA OF HOROWITZI~""J HISTORY: THE MOBILIZATION OF SCHOLARSHIP AGAINST BLACK REPARATIONS...... 46

First Head: African Enslavement ofAfricans Second Head: Arab Enslavement ofBlack Africans Third Head: White Abolitionism Fourth Head: White Slavery Fifth Head: Non-Slave Owning Whites Sixth Head: Free Blacks Seventh Head: Black Slave Owners Eighth Head: Slavery's Class Legacy

4. RANDALL ROBINSON AND THE END OF RACE AS WE KNOW IT...... 135

Social Movement Frame Analysis Micromobilization and The Debt

5. CONCLUSION ...... 148

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 150

lX To my wife, Cardurn, and my mother, Maurelle INTRODUCTION

Now one of the chief errors of thought is to continue to think in one set of forms categories, ideas, etc., when the object, the content, has moved on, has created or laid premises for an extension, a development of thought.

C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics

This is a study of one of the most controversial public matters concerning race in

America today: the African American reparations movement for slavery and segregation.

This issue is hotly contested because racial identity and the relative status and well-being of ethno-racial groups in America, a configuration I refer to as "race as we know it," is inextricably linked to matters of prejudice, pride, property, and public policy both presently and historically. Any substantial shift in the relative group position of blacks and whites promises to alter the internal dynamics and external relations between these two populations, effectively ending "race as we know it," if not racism and racial hierarchy per se. In addition to the economic redress aspect of the movement, black reparationism is simultaneously what sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant would refer to as a racial reformation project that, if successful, could drastically, if not completely, change the historico-economic foundations of"race as we know it."

Omi and Winant's theory of racial formation has at least two interlocking components. First, "The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and 'de- centered' complex ofsocial meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle

1 [author's emphasis]."1 Second, Omi and Winant stress that "the crucial task ... is to

suggest how the widely disparate circumstances of individual and group racial identities, and of the racial institutions and social practices with which these identities are intertwined, are formed and transformed over time. This takes place, we argue, through political contestation over racial meanings [author's emphasis]."2 Omi and Winant

describe this aspect of their theory in greater detail:

It is useful to think of the US racial order as an 'unstable equilibrium.'28 The idea of politics as 'the continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria' has particular resonance, we think, in describing the operation of the racial state. 29 The racial order is equilibrated by the state - encoded in law, organized through policy-making, and enforced by a repressive apparatus. But the equilibrium thus achieved is unstable, for the great variety of conflicting interests encapsulated in racial meanings and identities can be no more than pacified- at best- by the state. Racial conflict persists at every level of society, varying over time and in respect to different groups, but ubiquitous. Indeed, the state is itself penetrated and structured by the very interests whose conflicts it seeks to stabilize and control.

28 The following discussion assumes the kinds of general racial conditions that have existed in postwar US: what we have tenned racial war of position (e.g. the availability of •nonnal' political channels for racial politics), and the open existence of racial civil society (e.g. the possibility of minority cultural autonomy, political institutions, observance of traditional customs, linguistic practices, etc.) Obviously these conditions have not existed at all times and all places; the civil rights phase of the black movement was concerned precisely with extending and institutionalizing them in the South. The very success of the southern struggle shows though, that at least on a national level, these conditions did already obtain. See Chapter 6 below.

-? 9 GramSCI, .. Op. Cit., p. 18?-

30 The main means available to the state for the equilibration of conflicting interests is precisely their incorporation into the state in the fonn of policies, programs, patronage, etc. Gramsci argues that various fonns of hegemony flow from this process of incorporation: • expansive' hegemony if state-society relations display sufficient dynamism and are not inordinately plagued by crisis conditions; •refonnist' hegemony (what he calls "transfonnism") if political stability requires continuing concessions to competing forces. See also our discussion of 3 'absorption' and 'insulation' below.

1 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986), 68.

2 Ibid., 69.

3 Ibid., 78-79.

2 They continue:

The concept of the trajectory of racial politics links the two central actors in the drama of contemporary racial politics- the racial state and racially based social movements - and suggests a general pattern of interaction between them. Change in the racial order, in the social meaning and political role played by race, is achieved only when the state has initiated reforms, when it has generated new programs and agencies in response to movement demands. Movements capable of achieving such reforms only arise when there is significant 'decay' in the capacities of pre-existing state programs and institutions to organize and enforce racial ideology. Contemporary patterns of change in the racial order illustrate this point clearly.4

Finally, the authors' delineate two broad strategic responses by the "racial state" to movements seeking to change a racial status quo:

In response to political pressure, state institutions adopt policies of absorption and insulation.34 Absorption [authors' emphasis] reflects the realization that many demands are greater threats to the racial order before they are accepted than after they have been adopted in suitably moderate form. Insulation [authors' emphasis] is a related processes in which the state confines demands to terrains that are, if not entirely symbolic, at least not crucial to the operation of the racial order. These policies then become ideological elements which are employed both by movements and state institutions. State agencies might argue, for example, that they have already met reasonable movement demands, while movement groups might claim that reforms don't address the problem, don't go far enough, etc.:l

34 As seen from a movement standpoint. From the standpoint of the state, these are reform policies.

Although Omi and Winant did not have the black reparations movement in mind when they developed their perspective, the potential "change in the racial order" in "the social meaning and political role played by race" this movement could stimulate via state action is best conceptualized through their racial formation theory. Furthermore, this

4 Ibid., 82.

5 Ibid., 81.

3 theory can be used to place the ideological activism of both proponents and opponents of reparations under a new revealing light.

For example, Randall Robinson, author of the most important work on reparations for African Americans, sees reparations as the means by which to break the historical

'"habit" of American society of locking most blacks and whites into positions of relative inferiority and superiority.6 It can therefore be said that he seeks a new, more balanced

"equilibrium" between blacks and whites. David Horowitz, perhaps the most articulate opponent of Robinson's argument, sees reparations as an all-out attack on America's

"heritage" of racial progress because it threatens today's allegedly "color-blind consensus" with "reverse-racism."7 It can therefore be said that he seeks to "insulate" the existing racial "equilibrium" from reparationist demands by legitimizing the current racial status quo as the product of individual faults and thereby beyond the scope of any present or possible ameliorative government policies. So put, these opposed positions express the fundamental fears of many whites and the highest hopes of many blacks.

Hence, the conflict over reparations is about the economics and ethics of equality that is simultaneously and inseparably a struggle over the future of race in America, in black and white.

With the societal stake so high, the present study constitutes a much-needed critical, constructive, and scholarly attempt to "save" this public matter from the ideological excesses of both sides. To this end, I focus on the most persuasive writings

6 Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume Book, 2000), 232-34.

7 David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations For Slavery (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 12-16, especially 14-16.

4 by the best-known proponent and opponent of reparations. As indicated above, they are, respectively, Randall Robinson, and the movement's best-known nemesis, David

Horowitz. Robinson's book, The Debt: What America Owes Blacks, and Horowitz's book, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery, are among the most cogent and celebrated manifestos of each side of this debate and have become the Alpha and Omega of almost any black reparations deliberation. For these reasons, the analytical energies of this study center on their respective works.

The basic question put to both combatants is this: "Is the logic of their respective arguments truthfol and valid?" According to two of the most widely referenced authors on the topic of rhetoric, Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, ascertaining the truth and validity of an argument are critical intellectual tasks. They write in Classic Rhetoric for the Modern Student:

Truth has to do with the matter [author's emphasis] of the syllogism; validity has to do with the form [author's emphasis] ofthe syllogism. When we inquire about the truth of a syllogism, we are asking whether a proposition is true or false ... When we inquire about the validity of a syllogism ...; we are concerned only with whether the inferences are justifiable, whether we can logically draw this conclusion from those premises.... It is extremely important that students keep this distinction in mind. If they withhold their assent to a conclusion, they must know whether they are objecting to the truth of the premise or the validity of the reasoning.... We must be satisfied about both [author's emphasis] the truth of the premises and the validity of the reasoning before we will give our assent to a conclusion. 8

An examination of the validity of the above antagonists' arguments is not the focus of this dissertation. This study is a critical evaluation of the veracity of pro-

8 Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classic Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 43. A syllogism is a type of logic, specifically "deductive reasoning" in the form of "an extremely subtle, sophisticated or deceptive argument." (Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary ofthe English Language [1989], s.v. "syllogism.")

5 reparations and anti-reparations claims. Establishing the truth of an argument is in general "a harder task... " Corbett and Connors warn, "for it ... take[s] a long time to demonstrate that [an] opponent's statement is false."9 This task is further complicated by the diversity of assertions made and seemingly substantiated by academic scholarship.

This study will analyze these various arguments by using a multidisciplinary and comparativist framework. It will employ data, concepts, and theories from the disciplines of anthropology, economics, cultural studies, history, political science, and sociology. Its comparativist orientation, a prominent feature of this work, juxtaposes different forms of human bondage, class composition, racial identity and community formation, and political movements in order to generate insights into the contextual and cultural specificity of these societal phenomena while never losing sight of their often regional and systemic interconnectedness. A critical analysis of primary and secondary sources using qualitative and quantitative methods will be employed.

9 Corbett and Connors, Classic Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 43.

6 CHAPTER TWO

RACE AS WE KNOW IT IN BLACK AND WHITE

I write these words in my 76th year. My beloved wife is dead and my career is nearing an end. Reluctantly, I am forced to face the likely possibility that the U.S. will never rid itself of racism and reach true integration. I look back and shudder at how naive we all were in our belief in the steady progress racial minorities would make through programs of litigation and education, and while I very much hope for the emergence of a revived civil rights movement with innovative programs and dedicated leaders, I am forced to recognize that my life has, in fact, been a series of glorious defeats.

Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, "Racial Progress and Retreat: A Personal Memoir"

These words are demoralizing without knowing they were written by one of the titans of the modem civil rights movement; knowing their author was the prominent psychologist and intellectual Dr. Kenneth Clark should bring us to tears. This great man sets out to meet his Maker believing that his decades of dedication to the dream of equality were for naught. The scholar, who showed segregation damaged the self-esteem of children, now walks, forever downcast and demoralized, before the spirits of Frederick

Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois.

What happened to make this great man feel so small? Two repeating patterns of race as we know it in American society wrought his desolation: first, abysmal indicators of black economic and physical well-being and, second, America's general retreat from pro-active racial policies intended to ameliorate them.

7 The New Nadir

Clark would not dispute African-American Studies Professor Sundiata Keita Cha­

Jua's designation for this state of affairs: "The New Nadir."1 The New Nadir is the contemporary parallel to the period after the end of first Reconstruction beginning in the late 1870s. The New Nadir encompasses several negative trends impacting black

America since the end of the ••second Reconstruction"2 to the post civil rights era beginning in the early 1970s. I turn first to segregation.

Hyper-segregation is sociologist Douglas Massey's concept for the condition of living in a neighborhood mostly comprised of one's own race but with few encounters with other races and being at least three neighborhoods away from a residential area populated mostly by persons of another race.3 Massey constructed a "segregation index," a scale that ranges from 0 to 100~ with a score of 60 and above indicating ••hyper- segregation.'.4 Blacks scored over 60 in both regions of the United States, 78 for the north and 67 for the south. 5 36 percent of blacks live in hyper-segregated neighborhoods. 6

1 Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "Slavery, Racist Violence, American Apartheid: The Case for Reparations," New Politics, vol. 8, no. 3 (new series). whole no. 31, Summer2001 [journal on-line]; available from http://www. weunj. edul-newpoUissue3 llchajua3/.htm; Internet; accessed 14 November 2002.

2 This term appears to have been first coined by political scientist Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984). see chapter 7.

3 Douglas S. Massey, "Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Conditions is U.S. Metropolitan Areas," in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell, vol. I (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001), 410.

4 Ibid, 392.

5 Ibid, 399,402.

6 Ibid, 411.

8 Ironically, whites are even more segregated than blacks, tending to live in neighborhoods that are at least 80% white. 7 But opinion survey data shows that they do so voluntarily for "ideal" reasons, while the residential "ideal" for blacks is a mixed neighborhood that is heavily black. 8 Racism in the realty industry is a major reason for the gap between the black ideal and their divergent reality.9 These studies and social trends mean that blacks are the most "involuntarily" segregated minority in the U.S.

They are also more likely than any other minority, with the possible exception of Native

Americans, to live in sub-standard housing. 10

Contemporary racism and the "sedimentation of racial inequality" 11 reinforce residential segregation to a large degree and negatively impact wealth accumulation by blacks, conclude sociologists Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro. Wealth is, according to these authors, assets not used to finance daily life necessities and typically used to pass class status along to one's children.12 Home equity is the largest share of wealth owned by the typical American family. 13 Yet home ownership for blacks in 1994

7 Rebecca M. Blank, "An Overview ofTrends in Social and Economic Well-Being. by Race," in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell, vol. 1 (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press. 2001), 38.

8 DouglasS. Massey, "Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Conditions is U.S. Metropolitan Areas," 411-413.

9 Ibid, 415-21.

10 Rebecca M. Blank, "An Overview of Trends in Social and Economic Well-Being, by Race," 36-37.

11 Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, "Wealth and Racial Stratification," in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell, vol. 2 (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001), 239.

12 Oliver and Shapiro, "Wealth and Racial Stratification."

13 It constitutes approximately "44 percent of total measures net worth ... :· (Ibid., 240).

9 was 20% less than whites in general due to past and present discrimination. 14 More stunning is the fact that even when equally qualified white and black candidates applied for housing loans, blacks were still rejected for home loans 60% more often than whites. 15 Past and present residential discrimination has led to the mean value of homes owned by white families increasing $28, 605 more than black homes. 16 The intergenerational point is this: whites are three times more likely than blacks to benefit from inheritances.17 Among whites who received inheritances, the mean inheritance amounted to nearly $75,000 versus $33,400 for blacks. 18 Even controlling for income disparities, in the twenty-fifth percentile of entire distribution of wealth in the U.S., whites owned $7,671 in assets versus $3,548 for blacks. In the fiftieth percentile, whites owned $52,944 versus $30,000 for blacks. In the seventy-fifth percentile, whites owned

$141,491 in assets versus only $72,761 owned by blacks. 19 Other social indicators point to a similar situation.

Sociologist Rebecca Blank produced statistical data on several of these social indicators. In the area of education, there has been racial convergence in elementary and high school completion and math scores but a growing gap in childhood computer use

14 Ibid., 241.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 242.

17 Ibid., 245

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid. 233

10 and college completion. 20 The gap in these skills and degrees are growing at a time when they are increasingly necessary to compete in America's service-based information economy.21 In the era of economics, one telling indication of the problems blacks face is that they are two times more likely than whites to be unemployed and have three times the latter's poverty rate.22 Nor has this poverty rate decreased greatly in the last three decades. Blank's study illustrates that 30 percent of blacks are in poverty today, a drop of only 10 percent since 1965.23 Moreover, the gap between median family incomes between the races remains large and has been mostly stagnant since the 1970s. The median family income in 1995, for whites, was roughly $48,000. For blacks, it was roughly $29,000.24 In the area of correctional supervision, blacks are 6 percent more likely than whites to be arrested or to be victims of a crime.25 Nine percent of all blacks are under some type of correctional supervision versus only 2 percent of whites.26

Twenty-five percent of black males between the ages of20 to 29 are under correctional supervision.27 Finally, in the area of health, black statistics are also alarming. Black infant mortality is two-and-a-half that ofwhites.28 Perhaps even more disturbing is the

20 Rebecca M. Blank, "An Overview of Trends in Social and Economic Well-Being, by Race," 25.

21 Ibid., 26

22 Ibid, 28.

23 Ibid, 32.

24 Ibid., Figure 2-7, p. 30.

25 Ibid, 35.

26 Ibid, 35.

27 Ibid, 35.

28 Ibid, 33.

11 statistic that most blacks dying between ages of :fifteen and thirty-four years old will perish because they were murdered or developed AIDS.29 Most whites who perish in this age cohort will do so mostly from car accidents or suicide.30

Overwhelming evidence exists that the New Nadir is not as unique as it appears but rather is essentially and unavoidably the most recent manifestation of a 346 year unpaid economic debt owed to the black community by America since 1619. This nation's failure to compensate blacks for three-and a-half centuries of expropriated and under-compensated labor has evolved into a gargantuan asset and capital deficit for

African Americans. This insufficiency of assets and capital, the brick-and-mortar of any community's economic infrastructure and its strength and agency as a body politic, has meant the black inability to fundamentally alter its inherited inferior financial position without receiving and relying upon outside help, namely in the forms of .AJ:firmative

Action and public assistance.

Affirmative action and welfare policies were hard-won and warranted. They have made substantial differences in the lives of blacks (and members of other racial groups) individually and collectively. Yet, these policies do not reach the roots ofblack/white inequity since they are designed to address mostly matters of access and subsistence not asset accumulation. Furthermore, these policies are vulnerable to vicissitudes of governmental politics and the discrete political fortunes of their advocates and opponents.

29 Ibid, 34.

30 Ibid., Figure 2-11, 34.

12 Consequently, and if uncorrected, this uncertain dependency will mean the black community's fate will always be decided by others.

The New Nadir, a horrible new twist on a chronic problem, is at its root rightly called an uneradicated economic badge ofslavery. 31 Utilizing the disciplines of economics, sociology, history and political science, this study will demonstrate in an extension of Harlan's concept that it can be social scientifically proven that many of the societal problems living African Americans experience are actually the contemporary legacy of slavery and segregation, i.e., they are "badges" of the unresolved matter of the

31 The tenn "badges of slavery" is clearly defined by Supreme Court Justice John Harlan in his Civil Rights Cases of1883 dissent:

"That there are burdens and disabilities which constitute badges of slavery and servitude. and that the express power delegated to congress to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the thirteenth amendment, may be exerted by legislation of direct and primary character, for the eradication, not simply of the institution, but of its badges and incidents, are propositions which ought to be deemed indisputable."

For Justice Harlan's dissent, see FindLaw, "U.S. Supreme Court Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883)," [legal resource on-line]; available from http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navbv=case&court=us&vo1=109&page=3#3; Internet; accessed 19 November 2002.

The legal scholar who has emphasized the broad racial application of this concept as it was intended by the makers of Thirteenth Amendment is Jacobus tenBroek. Stanford M. Lyman, an eminent sociologist, synthesizes tenBroek's work on this matter:

' ... tenBroek. .. not only places emphasis on Pennsylvania's senator William D. Kelley's statement that "This proposed [Thirteenth] Amendment is designed ...to accomplish the ... abolition of slavery in the United States, and the political and social elevation ofNegroes to all the rights of white men" but also, and most significantly, calls attention to the then acknowledged fact that the "free colored person" is also a victim of slavery, "only less degraded, spurned , and restricted than his enslaved fellow [ ... but bearing] all the burdens, badges and indicia of slavery save only the technical one." (See Stanford M. Lyman, "Toward A Renewed Sociologicai Jurisprudence: From Roscoe Pound to Herbert Blumer and Beyond, in Symbolic Interaction 25, no. 2 [2002]: 165, author's brackets).

For a summary oftenBroek's Thirteenth Amendment thesis and for an original up-to-date argument proving that affinnative action and reparations are both justified as the fulfillment of the mandate of the Thirteenth Amendment, see Stanford M. Lyman, "Toward A Renewed Sociological Jurisprudence" 149-74. For more of tenBroek• s jurisprudential thinking, see "Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution: Consummation to Abolition and Key to the Fourteenth Amendment," California Law Review 39 (1951 ): 171-203 and Jacobus tenBroek, Equal Under Law (New York: Collier Books, 1965).

13 expropriation of labor and the curtailment of asset formation suffered by prior black generations, slave and free, stemming from their 246 years in bondage, 100 years of legal and customary discrimination a.fter emancipation, and the perpetuation of institutional racism against living blacks. By conceptualizing and analyzing the intergenerational transmission of these racial badges properly as institutional societal-levei encumbering social facts (Durkheim) rather than merely idiosyncratic and ''unfortunate" individual­ level experiences of personal prejudice, this empirical study will prove that it is not necessary to run "the slavery argument into the ground [by] mak[ing] it apply to every act of discrimination ..." as the Supreme Court majority argued in their anti-black 1883 Civil

Rights Cases decision, in order to prove that its pernicious effects still haunt black life.

I will analyze extensively the direct relevance of the economic legacy of slavery and segregation to present-day black circumstances in chapter 2. What is investigated at this point is the second reason increasing numbers of blacks are demanding collective compensation for slavery and segregation: the "natural limits" of civil rights politics.

There are at least two dimensions to these limitations: first, the limits and limiting of

Affirmative Action and second, the limitations imposed on black decision-making ability due to the political incorporation of its leadership.

The Limits and Limiting of Affirmative Action

The decline in liberal support for Affirmative Action and other pro-active racial measures was the second reason Clark was so despondent. Sociologist Stephen Steinberg dates the roots of the current "liberal retreat from race" to 1965, i.e., after the passage of the

14 Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act a year earlier.32 At this time "equal protection of the laws" had been formally achieved by African Americans, but simultaneously, "even before Watts exploded- there was a growing awareness among black leaders that political rights did not go far enough to compensate for past wrongs."33 Talk by even mainstream black leadership, such as Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Reverend Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr., of the need and legitimacy of"massive ... special, compensatory measures

34 wt..ich could be regarded as a settlement... " , the Urban League of a domestic "Marshall

Plan"35 for blacks, and even pressure from then-President Lyndon B. Johnson for racial

"equality of result not just equal opportunity" in his 1965 Howard University speech scared white liberals ideologically and politically?6 Ideologically they believed that the elimination of legal racism was all that was needed or should be expected of the American polity. Now merit unencumbered by prejudice would separate the deserving "wheat" from the societal "chaff'. Politically these neo-liberals believed that any racial compensation they supported in the form of preferences, quotas and the like would be unpalatable to the

American electorate and would not only fail passage but would hurt the overall pro- working class liberal agenda.

32 Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

33Steinberg, Turning Back, 109.

34 Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait (New York: Penguin Group, 1964). 137.

35 Ibid, 136.

36 This is Stephen Steinberg's argument. See his book, Turning Back, 107-110 and chapter 5 in general.

15 Steinberg points to ideological ambivalences within Johnson's speech itself as a sign of "crisis" within liberal ranks. He demonstrates that liberals escaped their "in•·1er conflict" over supporting black equality legalistically but not effectively by attributing their post-civil rights movement failures to succeed to alleged deficits and pathologies existing within black culture and families?7 Liberal support for Affirmative Action has largely evaporated since.

Yet Affirmative Action survives despite its erosion since the Bakke decision and has been very successful for blacks. William G. Bowen and Derek Bok's The Shape of the River, is probably the most exhaustive longitudinal study of the alleged societal benefits and costs of Affirmative action programs in higher education.38 Their research, based mostly on "the [academic] records of more than eighty thousand undergraduate students who matriculated at twenty-eight academically selective colleges and universities in the fall of 1951, the fall of 1976, and the fall of 1989,"39 shows that

Affirmative Action in this area has greatly enhanced black enrolment and future incomes and contributions to professional and civic life.40 Whites as well as blacks strongly supported racial diversity on campuses believing that ''their undergraduate experience

37 This occurred through what Steinberg calls ·•semantic infiltration" of culturalist arguments within progressive policy rationales, See Steinberg, Turning Back., 113-119.

38 William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape ofthe River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. with the collaboration of James L. Shulman et a/., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

39 Ibid., xxvii-xxviii.

40 Ibid., 257-58.

16 made a significant contribution to their ability to work with and get along well with members of other races ... ,.4!

In the realm of business, Affirmative Action has enabled formerly segregated enterprise to "break out of their traditional concentration in personal service and retail activities, the so-called 'mom and pop' enterprises, and diversify into dynamically growing industries."42 Economist Thomas D. Boston points to the current application of the "strict scrutiny'.43 standard by the Supreme Court in their determination of the constitutionality of Affirmative Action programs as proof of a judiciary retreat from pro-

41 Ibid., 267

42 Thomas D. Boston, Affirmative Action and Black Entrepreneurship (London: Routledge, 1999), 2.

43 Economist Jon S. Wainwright provides a good overview of the concept:

"Strict scrutiny is the most stringent standard of review available to the Court Under strict scrutiny, when state or local legislation involves a racial classification, whether it is blatantly invidious (as with the notorious Jim Crow Laws) or purportedly benign (as with affirmative action initiatives) the presumption of constitutionality usually afforded legislation by a state or its subdivisions is reversed. To establish a racial classification as benign, a state or local government must conduct detailed fact-finding regarding the presence and extent of racial discrimination in a particular geographic region and industry sector in order to demonstrate its "compelling interest' in legislating a racial classification. Finally, if a compelling interest is established, any legislation implemented in response to that interest must be "narrowly tailored' so that its scope is limited to remedying such identified discrimination. It must represent 'a precise response to the problem, and must not impair basic liberties by its overbreath" (Ducat 1978, 201 ).9

The constitutionality of a government's use of racial criteria, even when its motives are allegedly benign, is a controversial issue with a long history in constitutional law. The decisions in and subsequent to Croson are only the most recent events in this evolving area of constitutional interpretation. An in-depth examination of this area is beyond the scope of the present study. Ducat and Chase (1983, 679-901) together with Ducat (1978, 193-256) provide a good overview. More detail on the strict scrutiny standard and its two prongs in the context ofMBE programs can be found in Abrams and Hayes (1990, 74-75), Bendick (1990, 94-100), Days (1990, 4-8), Goldstein (1990, 38-42), Marshall (1991b, 12-26), and Payton (1990, 21-29).

See Jon S. Wainwright, Racial Discrimination and Minority Business Enterprise: Evidence from the 1990 Census (New York & London: Garland Publishing), I 0-11.

17 active racial policies.44 Interestingly, the Court has demonstrated a willingness to see

1 gradations in the application of the 14 h Amendment, specifically its "'equal protection of the laws" clause, when it comes to "ordinary" constitutional restrictions on business but not so when it comes to "racial distinctions having a compensatory purpose. ,,4s In tf.is matter, the Court has usually applied strict scrutiny, most notably in the 1989 Croson and the 1995 Adarand decisions.46 Boston argues that these decisions have greatly

44 Ibid., 3.

45 Boris I. Bittker and Roy L. Brooks, "The Constitutionality of Black Reparations," in When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University, 1999), 357-376.

46 "Croson concerned a challenge to the City of Richmond's affirmative action program for contracting with minority-owned businesses. That program required that 30% of city construction contract dollars be sub-contracted to minority-owned businesses. Richmond claimed, among other things, that the huge disparity between the small percentage of city contracting dollars going to blacks (0.67 percent) and the large percentage of blacks in Richmond's general population (50 percent) justified setting aside a portion of city contracting business for minority­ owned firms. The city argued that this disparity, coupled with other evidence that was introduced, supported its inference of racial discrimination (Croson at 714, 725-26). . .. The Court held instead that affirmative action for minorities is constitutional only if accompanied by a strong body of quantitative and qualitative evidence documenting the existence, scope, and causes of racial disparities among relevant populations of minorities to whom a particular affirmative action program is intended to apply-something the City of Richmond did not possess. ... The Court ruled that Richmond's statistical comparison overstated the magnitude of the racial disparity involved and thus did not provide conclusive evidence as to the size or possibly even the existence [author's emphasis], of a racial disparity." (See Jon S. Wainwright, Racial Discrimination and Minority Business Enterprise, 11 ).

A page earlier the author describes the significance ofAdarand:

"In 1995, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (115 S.Ct. 2097) overturned the 1980 Fullilove v. Klutznick (I 00 S.Ct. 2758) decision upholding federal affirmative action and extended strict scrutiny to the federal government as well. The heightened evidential and procedural requirements imposed by the majority in Croson have restricted greatly the ability of states and their political subdivisions to promote the development ofMBEs [Minority Business Enterprises] 8

The Supreme Court and lower courts continue to extend the strict scrutiny standard to affirmative action for minorities in areas other than public contracting. For example, the 1993 decision in Shaw v. Reno (509 U.S. 630, 113 S.Ct. 2816) and the 1995 decision in Miller v. Johnson (115 S. Ct. 2475) invalidated U.S. congressional districts in North Carolina and Georgia, respectively, on the basis of strict scrutiny. In 1994, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated race-based educational scholarship on the basis of strict scrutiny in Podberesky v.

18 encumbered "minority business affirmative action programs and on the development of black-owned businesses". Boston continues:

The Supreme Court decisions have forced local and state agencies to spend millions upon millions of dollars in futile attempts to meet the new standard. One by one these agencies have failed, not because discrimination does not exist but because the burden of proof is prohibitively expensive and the method for establishing it is not clearly spelled out by the Supreme Court.'.47

Since these rulings, the question of whether affirmative action was a kind of economic reparation to blacks is now moot because the government, states and municipalities are for the most part prevented from addressing systemic sectorial racial inequities deeply or broadly.

The Institutional Incorporation of Black Politics

Political scientist Robert C. Smith has typified the current era of black civil rights politics as a "strategy ofincorporation.'.48 This strategy became dominant in the early

1970s when institutionalized politics, not mass protest action, was deemed by black leaders to be a better strategy to achieve the virtual elimination of poverty, poor schooling, and ghettos.49 Smith, drawing upon a study by Rufus Browning, Dale

Marshall and David Tabb, lists ''three necessary steps if excluded groups are to move

Kirwan (38 F.3d. 147). In 1995, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals appealed to strict scrutiny as it invalidated race-based university admissions policies in Hopwood v. Texas (78 F.3d 932).

(See Jon S. Wainwright, Racial Discrimination and Minority Business Enterprise, I 0).

47 Thomas D. Boston, Affirmative Action and Black Entrepreneurship, 3.

48 Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era, with a foreword by Ronald W. Waters (Albany: State University ofNew York, 1996), 24.

49 Smith, We Have No Leaders, 22.

19 toward political incorporation ... :(!) the mobilization of the black electorate, (2) the development and maintenance of a multiethnic coalition of other minorities and

62 progressive whites and (3) winning elections and becoming the governing majority. "

62 Rufus Browning, Dale Marshall and David Tabb, Protest is Not Enough: The Struggle ofBlacks and Hispanics in Urban Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 242-43. 50

Downplaying the racial character of specific goals whenever possible while forging a broad liberal agenda "including progressive tax reform, national health insurance, increased education funding and full employment,"51 black political leaders hoped to build a large pan-racial base. Smith says the black incorporation strategy was unsuccessful on all counts. Worse, Smith writes in his book, the "first... systematic and comprehensive study of the institutionalization of the civil rights movement,"52 that their nominal incorporation within formal politics has cost them "the capacity to effectively press their demands on the system and that the system has consequently responded to their demands with symbolism, neglect and an ongoing pattern of cooptation."53 Black political leadership, color-blinded strategically and institutionally caged is too weak despite its occasional victory to generating the sustained effective advocacy needed to maintain a negation of the New Nadir.

50 Ibid., 22-23.

51 Ibid., 25

52 Ibid., XV.

53 Ibid.,21.

20 For example, The Croson decision found economic set-asides for minority businesses to be largely unconstitutional and greatly curtailed the practice. But there is some question as to whether this feature of Affirmative Action was, at least in the case of the city of Richmond, programmatically capable of generating the widespread black economic development its advocates asserted before it was outlawed. According toW.

Avon Drake and Robert D. Holsworth, "the city's effort to promote minority economic development through the set-aside policy achieved. at best, limited economic success."54

The reason for this was that "only a handful of companies were able to take advantage of the city policy."55

Yet one could argue that set-asides were the closest blacks came to receiving reparations in recent times. Some of the businesses that should have benefited did benefit.

While in no way a return of labor value expropriated during slavery or discrimination during segregation, set-asides could have been interpreted as a partial remedy for past and existing industry imbalances generated through racist practices. However, one is forced by the above facts to reconsider (but not weaken) set-asides in particular as "a defining feature of a particular strategy [author's emphasis] for African American advance that has both characteristic strengths and predictable weaknesses."56 This perspective can

54 W. Avon Drake and Robert D. Holsworth. Affirmative Action and the Stalled Quest for Black Progress (Urbana: University ofiiiinois Press, 1996), 71.

55 Ibid., 95.

56 Ibid., 96. Drawing on Wainwright's very recent and original research, I conclude as he does that affinnative action programs such as minority set-asides are important and necessary for continued black economic development in the face of on-going racism. Wainwright writes:

"Using a very large sample of 1990 census microdata, this book [his Racial Discrimination and Minority Business Enterprise] has documented for the first time the large disparities in business fonnation and earnings facing minority businesses across a wide variety of

21 apply as well to affirmative action in general. Moreover, "set-asides and similar forms of affirmative action are vulnerable to challenge on legal, political, and economic grounds ... " as we witnessed in Croson andAdarand.57

Despite the fact that affirmative action and civil rights politics have substantially bettered many black lives, the haunting problem of transforming more rights and better access into sufficient assets and autonomy to negate the New Nadir remains. In this regard, civil rights, affirmative action and other government transfers such as welfare are a poor substitute for true reparations. Hence, Black reparationism today is seen by increasing numbers of blacks as a way to circumvent white conservatism, ineffective liberalism and the noticeable moribundity of mainstream black leadership.

Black Reparations as an Emergent Formation

The quest for redress for 246 years of their ancestor's enslavement and, for some, the losses suffered during Jim Crow segregation, is not new. Reparations claims by and for blacks preceded the Civil War, though these demands found their clearest and most forceful declarations after the war. 58 A utopian goal, (historically overshadowed by what

geographical locations, industry divisions, and occupational groups. Moreover, this book has demonstrated that these disparities tend to persist even when education, age, marital status, assets [emphasis mine], industry, occupation and numerous other influential factors are held constant ... the statistical findings are strongest for blacks, followed closely by Native Americans and Hispanics" (Wainwright, Racial Discrimination and Minority Business Enterprise, 135-136).

57 Ibid., 9.

58 One of the earliest examples comes from an English barrister in the 1840s. See James Grahame, Esq., Who is to Blame? Or Cursory Review of"American Apologyfor American Accession to Negro Slavery" (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1842), 51-57; excerpted in When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University, 1999). However, I find it hard to believe that in 223 years that African Americans and Africans in American were enslaved that similar or more demanding claims for redress were not made.

22 must have seemed to many blacks as the equally far-fetched goal of obtaining equal rights), reparations remains what founding cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams calls a residual formation in black political thought and activism. '"Residual" in this case does not refer to a useless vestigial trace of past activity but rather an element within a culture (in this case, black political culture) that "is still active ... as an effective element of the present." 59 Political scientists Hanes Walton, Jr. and Robert C. Smith describe this re-emergence "as the verge of a new cycle of nationalism" inaugurated by the 1995

Million Man March. 60 The New Nadir and the fall of pro-active civil rights politics are at the root of the resurgence, as the authors explain in their own words:

The conditions are certainly ripe for such a new cycle. After a period of optimism about the possibility of universal freedom and equality following the success of the civil rights movement, many blacks now sense a turning back of the clock, a sense that history may be repeating itself in terms of a second Reconstruction. This sense of pessimism is fueled by the ongoing Reagan revolution as reflected in the election of a Republican congressional majority, the conservative tilt of the Clinton administration, and a series of adverse Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. It is also fueled by a growing sense that the mainstream, establishment black leadership of elected officials and civil rights leaders has no plan, program, or strategy to deal with the deteriorating conditions of poor black communities.25

25 Smith, We Have No Leaders, especially chap. 11.61

59 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122.

60 Hanes Walton, Jr. and Robert C. Smith, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom (New York: Addison-Wesley Longman, 2000). Out ofthe 1, 070 polled:

'"When asked why they attended the march, 88 percent cited improving moral values in the black community, 77 percent mentioned moral atonement and reconciliation, but others expressed nationalist reasons. Eighty-five percent said the march encouraged black self­ detennination and unity, and 75 percent said they attended as a way to promote independent economic development" (Walton and Smith, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, 131).

61 Ibid., 131. Early Emergences of Black Reparations

Contrary to popular opinion proposals for reparations for African Americans have been put forward several times over the past two hundred years. Equally consistent is the strong opposition to this idea by a great many Americans. According to legal scholar Roy

L. Brooks, even today many people reject any form of apology or economic compensation to Blacks of any sort, be it governmental, corporate, or racial in origin. 62

The quest for reparations is often dismissed as a ''radical or fringe concern."

Nevertheless, the quest for white contrition and black compensation has a longer history. In 1842 James Grahame Esq., an English lawyer living in the United States, condemned southern slavery and northern racism in his book, Who is to Blame?63 Failing to apply the principles of the American Revolution to blacks was morally bankrupt, he argued. Within the stronghold of"Liberty" blacks were being treated like the Jews of ancient Egypt, he wrote. Any attempt to excuse this elision as an economic necessity (the southern argument) or to deflect attention away from its terrible treatment of free blacks

(the Northern argument) was hypocritical and intolerable. Grahame clearly states that the desire for the abolition of slavery among some whites in both regions would not suffice.

Talk is cheap; compensation is better, necessary and, as we will see, the political trapdoor that even an apology could open. Of these "lamenters," Grahame wrote:

62 Roy L. Brooks, ''Not Even an Apology," in When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University, I 999), 309-316.

63 James Grahame, Esq., Who is to Blame?" 51-57; excerpted in When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University, 1999), 336-337.

24 I have heard many of these persons profess, with every appearance of vehement sincerity, their desire to discover some practicable [author's emphasis] plan of abolishing negro slavery; but have almost invariably found that they required the impracticability [author's emphasis] of redressing long and enormous injustice without any atoning sacrifice or reparatory expence, -ofrestoring and elevating, as if by magic, and without any surrender of interest or convenience, the rights and the dignity of a numerous race of men whom they and their fathers have ruined and degraded". 64

In 1865 Special Field Order No. 15, better known as the official grant of"Forty

Acres and a Mule" to African-Americans freed during the Civil War, was issued by

Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman. In it he orders, "The Islands from

Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States."65 This was to be divided up into family plots of"not more than forty acres of tillable ground ... " 66 with each head-of-family holding title to the land. Moreover, Sherman promised to assist their founding of "a peaceable agricultural settlement," secure resources needed for their production of goods, access to markets to sell these goods, and finally, to protect blacks and their landholdings "until such time as

64 James Grahame, Esq., "Why the North and South Should Have Apologized," in Who is to Blame? Or Cursory Review of ..American Apology for American Accession to Negro Slavery" (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1842), I, 6-1 0; excerpted in When Sorry lsn 't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University. 1999), 348-349.

65 Major-General W.T. Sherman, "Special Field Order No. 15: 'Forty acres and a Mule': Headquarters, Military Division ofthe Mississippi, in the Field. Savannah, Georgia, January 16, 1865,"' in When Sorry lsn 't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University, 1999), 365-366.

66 Ibid., 366

25 they can protect themselves ... " 67 Unfortunately, Reconstruction President Andrew

Johnson rescinded Sherman's Order.

Thomas Geoghegan argues that President Abraham Lincoln apologized for slavery in his Second Inaugural Address.68 The author allalyzes the section of the speech he feels best encapsulates the apology. I narrow his focus even more on the key verse of the alleged apology:

Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk ... and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another dravvn with the sword ...69

Geoghegan believes there are several reasons why the American people generally do not remember this statement as an apology. The language of the apology is "too

Shakespearean," "too biblical," and especially "too violent."70 Geoghegan writes, ""This apology for us is too strong in its emotion ... he talks of... blood sacrifice." 71 It is easier to digest the "let-bygones-be-bygones" conclusion of Lincoln's Address: "'with malice toward none, with charity for all."72 Geoghegan argues this rhetorical flourish was an act

67 Ibid.

68 Thomas Geoghegan, ''Lincoln Apologizes," in When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University, 1999), 360-36 I.

69 Ibid., 361

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

26 of contrition, which "swept away that terrifying apology, for that terrifying sin, completely from modem memory." 73

Sojourner Truth, one of the most important abolitionists and feminists of the nineteenth century, also made one of the earliest calls for black reparations. According to

Sarah K. Horsley/4 Truth's job-placement activities under the auspices of the

Freedman's Relief Association made her sharply aware of the contradiction between the massive practical "investment" of former slaves' labor into the country's wealth while they remained mostly poor and maligned. Soon after the Civil War Truth argued, "Our nerves and sinews, our tears and blood, have been sacrificed on the altar of this nation's avarice. Our unpaid labor has been a stepping stone to its financial success. Some of its dividends must surely be ours."75 Acting on her words, Truth presented an unsuccessful petition to Congress demanding a land grant on which to resettle Black freedmen in the

West.76

As part of his Emigrationist effort, the sometimes radical nineteenth century black leader, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner both rejected and endorsed different forms of reparations throughout his career. On the one hand, "he opposed the distribution of land

73 Ibid. I disagree. This so-called "apology" is vague even for the mid-nineteenth century. Certainly persons of this era would have interpreted its purple prose the way this author believes, if contrition was its underlying message. Second, how can an apology without clear reference to those offended, namely, formerly enslaved blacks? Third, even if this is a legitimate apology to black Americans, how is war, even a just one like the Civil War, compensation for two-and-a-half centuries of racial exploitation by both antagonists? There is no mention of atonement in Lincoln's "apologetic" address.

74 Sarah K. Horsley, "Fern-Biography: Sojourner Truth," [article on-line]; available from http://www.fembio.org/women/sojourner-truth.shtml; Internet; accessed 16 November 2002.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

27 to former slaves and instead encouraged freed blacks to welcome their newly won

'freedom to labor."' 77 On the other hand, in 1874, "he proposed that the federal government reserve New Mexico Territory for African-American settlement."78 Even his most famous radical political stance, the repatriation of blacks to Africa, was ideologically complicated. Strangely, Turner could both be a vocal advocate of colonial independence movements and armed black self-defense at home, yet also serve as a high- ranking official in the patronizingly racist American Colonization Society. Moreover,

Turner "argued that the federal government should underwrite [exportation] enterprise i.."l partial reparations for slavery." 79

Modern Emergences of Black Reparations

The active modem presence of"residual" reparationist politics, e.g., the nineteenth century legacy and its 1960s counterpart, is today rapidly becoming more mainstream. Elements of the reparations idea are now found in the agendas of such traditional black civil rights organizations as the Urban League and the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People. However, according to political scientist Robert Smith, the true "father" of the post-civil rights African American reparations movement is a black nationalist named Omari Obadele. 80 While he worked

77 James Clyde Sellman, "Turner, Henry McNeal," in Africana: The Encyclopedia ofthe African and African American Experience, 1900-1901.

78 Ibid., 190 1

79 Ibid.

80 Robert C. Smith, "lmari Obadele: The Father of the Modem Reparations Movement," [article on-line]; available from http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/312.html; Internet; accessed 16 November 2002.

28 with the Republic ofNew Africa, in the late 1960s, this organization demanded $400 billion dollars as compensation for slavery. Yet the true start of the current reparations movement began in 1988 when the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in

America (N'COBRA), a major organization of the contemporary redress movement, was founded by him and others.

One year later, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan introduced House

Resolution 40, a bill that calls for "a commission [to] be created to study the institution of slavery in this country from 1619 to 1865, and subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, as well as the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, and to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies."81 Thus far, Conyer's resolution has not received approval in the

House of Representatives.

Another recent congressional attempt at addressing the legacy of slavery is to be found in Congressman Tony Hall of Ohio's House Resolution 96.82 It reads: "Resolved by the House of Representatives that the Congress apologizes to African-Americans whose ancestors suffered as slaves under the Constitution and the laws of the United

States until1865."83 For ethical reasons, Hall argues that an apology is owed, even if

81 Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, "The Commission to Study Reparations Proposals," in When Sorry lsn 't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University, I 999 [I 997]: 367).

82 Congressional Record H3890-H3891, House Concurrent Resolution 96, reported by . Congressman Tony P. Hall, 105m Cong., 151 sess., 1997. See Congressman Tony P. Hall, "'Defense of Congressional Resolution Apologizing for Slavery," in: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University, 1999), 350-351.

83 Ibid.

29 compensation is unlikely. An apology for slavery is the smallest "price for restoring lost trust ... and it is the right thing to do."84 He writes that while slavery ended over a century ago, "The hatred and racial divisions springing from slavery are very much alive."

(Interestingly, he makes a connection between slavery and its "lingering economic effects" but does not press for redress). Congress should apologize because while "no

Member of congress today voted on measures to perpetuate slavery ... Congress as an institution does bear responsibility." 85

Hall reminds his audience that "the laws we passed ignored, even encouraged slavery. Our Constitution, the foundation for the Congress, and our Government even declared at one time that a black man was only three-fifths of a person."86 Furthermore, there exist precedents for such an apology by this institution. Congress apologized to

Japanese-Americans for their internment during WWII, and to native Hawaiians for the destruction of their indigenous government by the U.S. He ends his defense by stating that while other American groups may be entitled to an apology for injustices committed against them, African-Americans are the obvious candidate-group.

There have been some concrete steps taken on the state level that facilitate the reparations quest. In 2000, moderate Democrat Gray Davis of California ·"signed into law

84 Ibid., 350.

85 For quotes sited see, When Sorry Isn't Enough, 351

86 Ibid.

30 two bills that could eventually lead the way to the payment of reparations to the descendants of slaves."87

The bill states:

Under the Slaveholder Insurance Policies Bill (SB 2199) California's Insurance Commissioner has the power to request slave insurance policies from insurers doing business in California. The second law, the UC Slavery Colloquium Bill (SB 1737) allows the University of California the option to hold a conference on the economics of slavery." 88

The Rosewood Compensation Act of 1994 addresses some of the above issues.

According to Kenneth B. Nunn, the Act passed by the Florida legislature, "marked the first time that any American governmental body had acknowledged its responsibility for an act of racial violence committed against African Americans, in the long history of such acts."89 Rosewood victims, families, and descendents became legally entitled to a combination of individual and familial redress. The Act contains six elements:

First, the State of Florida officially acknowledged that the community of Rosewood was destroyed by white violence, and accepted state responsibility for failing to prevent the destruction. Second, a criminal investigation of these events was required. Third, families were compensated for their real and personal property loss. Each family was eligible for a payment of $20,000, which could be increased up to $100,000 for actual losses shown. Fourth, any African American residents of Rosewood who were "present and affected by the violence that took place" were eligible for an additional payment of up to $150,000. Fifth, a Rosewood Family scholarship Fund was established that provided individual grants of up to $4,000 to cover tuition and fees for postsecondary education. The twenty-five yearly scholarships were to be made available to "minority persons with preference given te> the direct descendents of the Rosewood families."

87 "Slave Insurance Policies Uncovered: The Call for Reparations," [article on-line]; available from http:/ /afroamhistory .aboutcomllibrary/weekly/aal20400a.htm?terms=obadele; Internet; accessed 16 November 2002.

88 Ibid.

89 Kenneth B. Nunn, "Rosewood," in When Sorry lsn 't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks. (New York: New York University, 1999), 435.

31 Finally, the state university system was directed to continue research and instruction on the Rosewood incident.90

Note, however, that the scope of this compensation is at most familial in its direct benefit to these African American victims. It does not grant the indigenous social institutions or commercial infrastructure of this once relatively prosperous black town the proper means for its re-development. In this sense, the Act did not provide for the kind of redress most likely to lead to collective self-sufficiency. Second~ no apology for the massacre was given, only the "acknowledgement" it had occurred and that some compensation should be forthcoming. Third, what claimants received was an economically and legally modest compensation for the atrocity ("payments for damages or losses ... "), not reparations, granting "atonement... payments to redress general wrongdoing, such as ... human rights violations."91 Moreover, the sums provided are not sufficient for most "of the Rosewood families ... [to] ... repurchase their homesteads or significantly improve their lot in life ...." 92

However~ what acknowledgement and compensation they did receive is far more than any other black towns destroyed by racist white mobs during segregation, such as

Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921.

Given this historical perspective how is the current black reparations movement best conceptualized? The decline of the civil rights paradigm coupled with the current

90 Ibid., 436.

91 Ibid.

92 Ibid. social conditions of black America, has ~'thinned" (or "decayed," to use Omi and

Winant's term) this important, potentially productive, certainly necessary, but increasingly ineffective paradigm, permitting the residual "reparation frameworks" to

"emerge" with less resistance from black civil rights leadership and ordinary black citizens.93 To say the reparations movement today is "emerging," I do not mean in the sense of a simple "return" to what has been "repressed," as if all that is happening is simply the exhumation and resurrection of Bishop H. M. Turner or Rev. Dr. King.

Rather, I theorize its current onset the way Raymond Williams may have, that is, as something both residual and original. Black reparationists today are developing "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship [that] are continually being created."94 Many, if not most, of the pro-black reparations intellectual and activist politics today "depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form."95 Reparations, an alternative black politics of economic, cultural and social development, " .. .is in effect a pre-emergence [author's emphasis], active and pressing but not yet fully articulated ... "96

93 On March 26, 2002 the latest legal attempt to recover racial losses from black enslavement came in the form of a lawsuit against three major corporations. The lawsuit, filed by African American lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, has several stated goals. Outstanding among them are ''the appointment of an independent historic commission," restitution ofthe value oftheir [the corporations] unjust enrichment based upon slave labor," and a "disgorgement of illicit profits" made from slavery. See Deadria Farmer-Pael/mann vs. Fleetwood Boston Financial Corporation, Aetna Inc., CSX; available from http://news.findlaw.corn!cnn/docs/slaverv/fpllmnflt032602cmp.pdf; Internet; accessed 15 November 2002.

94 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 123

95 Ibid., 126

96 Ibid.

33 Randall Robinson and the Politics of Reparations

One of the most important articulators on this inchoate movement is Randall

Robinson, "the founder and president of TransAfrica, the organization that spearheaded the movement to influence U.S. policies toward Africa and the Caribbean."97 A

"Restatement of the Black Manifesto" was created by Robinson, president of the D.C.- based black advocacy think tank, TransAfrica, and several members of the political group known as the Reparations Coordinating Committee, and was made public in 2001.98 The document is divided into three sections. Section one, titled "Statement of Facts," reviews succinctly the impact of slavery and segregation on African Americans up to the present and the U.S. government's direct and indirect complicity with these practices. Section two, titled "Statement of Positions," asserts that "'through intergenerational transfers

(inheritance) the ill-gotten gains continue to accumulate to the greater impoverishment of

African Americans and their descendents and the greater support of white supremacy."99

Hence, regardless of the time-span between today and past injustices, Robinson, et al., argue, ""It is never too late to seek justice. Reparations for African Americans are justified under the legal doctrine of unjust enrichment: unjust enrichment of a person occurs when he has and retains money or benefits which in justice and equity belong to another... Slavery the expropriation of the labor of another without compensation, is a

97Amazon.com, "Editorial Reviews," available from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detaill-lbooks/04522821 01 /reviews/gid= 1037386031 /sr=12- 5/002-4465558-0430465; Internet; accessed 15 November 2002.

98 TransAfrica Forum, "Restatement of the Black Manifesto," available from http://www.transafricaforum.org/reports/roundtable011100 manifesto.shtml; Internet; accessed 16 November 2002.

99 Ibid

. 34 paradigm instance of unjust enrichment." 100 The third section, the conclusion of the document, calls for Congress to hold hearings on the matter to decide the sum and form of reparations.

Better known by far is Robinson's popular manifesto of the movement, an incendiary book called The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks. 101 The style of this missive is very different from the matter-of-fact TransA:frica statement. The Debt is designed to stimulate the reparations movement The Debt inspires (and angers) readers through a certain stylistic rendering of the reparationist argument which functions as taproot and fount of a large black cultural politics.

What is pertinent at this point is the theory of black political culture Robinson details in the book. Robinson's configuration of fact, anecdote, and fiction in this text is diagnostic and directive: it tells how social change can take place for blacks and what needs to be done for this change to take place. Even with clarification and re- conceptualization, his cogent argument nonetheless continues to lead us into debatable connections between collective consciousness and political culture.

Robinson argues that a collective psychic trauma of slavery and ignorance of

African, African American and African Diasporic history are the main barriers to achieving a proper and productive historically-rooted pro-black political consciousness today. Robinson offers both assertions and arguments to support his position:

There is no linear solution to any of our problems, for our problems are not merely technical in nature. By now, after 380 years of unrelenting psychological abuse, the biggest part of our problem is inside us: and how we have come to see

100 Ibid.

101 Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2000).

35 ourselves, in our damaged capacity to validate a course for ourselves without outside approval.102

In another section, he writes:

Saddest of all, they [black males in this passage but blacks in general] have no clear understanding of why such debilitating [economic, political, social] fates have befallen them. There are no clues in their public school education. No guide posts in the popular culture. Theirs was the "now" culture. They felt no impulse to look behind for causes.103

The raison d'etre of Robinson's entire discussion of slavery, culture, class and consciousness is to establish the necessity of African American reparations. With it,

Robinson seeks to repair through redress the alleged economic, cultural, and psychological damage suffered by blacks historically and presently. He delineates several components of the reparations quest and process necessary to bring about change in the three areas.

First, Robinson takes an unusual if not entirely unexpected turn regarding the economic dimension of reparations. He writes that restitution however necessary is not the most important precipitate of the movement. Rather, he claims that a quest for redress will bring about a the rediscovery and reinvigoration of an affirmative, agential,

Africa-centered, African-American collective consciousness. Yet, Robinson argues, this collective consciousness will not be the end product of reparations but rather a psychic process paralleling the political struggle. 104 Robinson bluntly states, "The issue here is

102 Ibid., 205-6.

103 Ibid., 214.

104 Robinson, The Debt, 235-247.

36 not whether or not we can, or will, win reparations. The issue rather is whether we will fight for reparations, because we have decided for ourselves that they are our due." 105

How could even a failed quest for redress enhance black cultural consciousness en masse? He hypothesizes:

Even the making [author's emphasis] of a well-reasoned case for restitution will do wonders for the spirit of African Americans. It will cause them at long last to understand the genesis of their dilemma by gathering, as have all other groups, all of their history -- before, during, and after slavery- into one story of themselves. To hold the story fast to their breast. To make of it, over time, a sacred text. And from it, to explain to themselves and to their heirs. Tall again, as they had been long, long ago. 106

Rejecting what his associate, political scientist Ronald Walters, describes as the

"sophisticated form ofbegging"107 practice that black society has traditionally employed in dealings with its "favorite" political party for the last seventy years, the Democratic

Party, Robinson stresses that neither economic compensation nor the political sympathy of whites is enough to alter the so-called political "dependency mindset" of too many blacks:

Before the country in general can be made to understand, African Americans themselves must come to understand that this demand is not for charity. It is simply for what they are owed [author's emphasis] on a debt that is old but compellingly obvious and valid still.108

Leadership will be an important catalyst of the kind of collective consciousness most conducive to self-esteem enhancement posits Robinson and to any possible

lOS Ibid., 206.

106 Ibid., 232.

107 Robinson quotes Walters, (Robinson, The Debt, 238).

108 Robinson, The Debt, 231.

37 achievement by the reparations movement success. In contradistinction to alleged

"egocentric or intimidated" political elites, Robinson sees the necessity for a new bold leadership forged by what he describes as "Renaissance blacks":

Unless some critical number of renaissance [author's emphasis] blacks can wrench us away from the minced-step rusted strategic template to which our noses have been welded, can eschew politicians, black and white, as the self­ limiting, self-protecting pragmatists they invariably if involuntarily are, and can dramatically comprehend and address the broad whole of the enormous psychic wrong done to us through the long ages, with American complicity.... no Marshall Plan for our material renovation can work.109

Robinson's preferred leadership would seek different "uplift" tactics evincing a paradigm shift away from traditional civil rights activism. He writes, "'While I support affirmative action, I believe that those who would camp blacks in an exitless corner expending all energy defending its thin dime do the black community no service."110

Driving the point home, he continues:

... African Americans are overrepresented in [poverty] for one reason and one reason only: American slavery and the vicious climate that followed it. Affirmative action, should it survive, will never come anywhere near to balancing the books here. While I can speak only for myself, I choose not to spend my limited gifts and energy and time fighting only [author's emphasis] for the penny due when a fortune is owed.111

109 Ibid., 108.

110 Ibid., 8.

Ill Ibid., 8-9.

38 However, Robinson does not resuscitate the hackneyed dichotomy between

"integrationists" and "nationalists" to support his new model. Having experienced close- up the limitations of both approaches, "Renaissance leadership," he argues, must embody the best attributes of each political philosophy:

Looking back on it, the elites [integrationists] were right, but only partially so. The voices of dissent [nationalists] were every bit as right, but woefully bereft oftools ... The black community badly needs their fire-combined with an element of erudition without which broad credibility is simply not achievable. Suffice it to say that black elected officials, alone, will lead the black community nowhere near where it needs to go. 112

This pro-reparations leadership must be made of sterner stuff than most existing black politicians and "financers":

For blacks who would accept mantles of public leadership throughout the world, there are hard lessons to be learned if their leadership is to be, first, authentic and, second, effective. The global black community badly needs implacable black voices for its interests and causes whether they are validated by American Establishment institutions or not. We as a community must be centered enough, self-confident enough to prepare our own agendas of policy concerns and then be prepared to advocate tirelessly for those above all others, no matter where the American Establishment sun is shining. For there is nothing in the entire history of American public and private sector behavior toward Africa, the Caribbean, or black America to encourage a conviction that the United States has ever had the black world's interests at heart. Our community never gets more from the U.S. than it is willing to fight for. Often less. Never more. What [author's emphasis] we fight for must be decided by us and only us. 113

Robinson characterizes black political culture, as it is instantiated within elected black officials, as "mince-stepping" and visionless. His condemnation is harsh and

112 Ibid., I 09-110.

113 Ibid., 190-191.

39 hyperbolic. Their lack of political power as self-agency is not mostly of their own doing, as even he must concede. 114 The eclipse (but not disappearance) of indigenous and/or charismatic institutions by institutionalized governmental politics and the severe cost of this development to black political agency is undeniable. Political scientist Robert Smith et al. precisely dissects the institutional predicament of this political caste in numerous works. 115 The finding of these works is supported by social movement theorists Frances

Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward's earlier comparative research examination of how incorporation absorbs insurgent social movements within state structures.116 Another social movement theorist, Aldon D. Morris, provides the lesson in his major writing, The

Origin ofthe Civil Rights Movement, of the necessity of situating black leadership within responsive "indigenous organizations" in liberation struggles. 117

Hence, Robinson is more right than he is wrong on this point. The high horizon black politicians may or may not have for their community is undeniably circumscribed by their current institutional location. Its membership is mostly committed to black progress, but is too few in number and too dependent on outside help to be "race- specific" reform, much less a revolution in race relations as anticipated by some reparationists.

114 A prime example can be found in his failed attempt to organize Caribbean countries to protest U.S. policies detrimental to the tropical region. See Robinson, The Debt, 191-197

115 See Ronald W. Walters and Robert Smith, African American Leadership (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1999), 132.

116 See Frances Fox Piven and Richard A, Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1977), especially pages 181-263.

117 Aldon D. Morris, The Origin ofthe Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing/or Change (New York: Macmillan, Free Press, 1984).

40 But "institutionalization" is only one part of his discussion of the alleged moribundity of black political culture. Robinson also sees a lack collective vision among blacks, but this time most damningly among its well-heeled stratum. Robinson laments:

In off-year national elections, it costs as little as five million dollars to run national voter education and voter mobilization efforts in the black community. Such efforts are carried out by the black church, civic, and social organizations. Little of the money to fund the political work of these organizations comes from the black community, although it would seem that there is ample wherewithal to do so. Thus we don't own the politics between our votes and their policy, and have, alas, little leverage over the latter [author's emphasis]. The reason? Our heads. The heads of those who could easily fund and own, in our name, our own community's politics. The heads of our children and all the rest of us. It is another price of slavery and its aftermath. We have no connecting mantra, no secular religion, no common tenets. No complete and satisfying knowledge of ourselves. With exceptions, most of us who have a little money to give have done better renovation work to our outsides than to our insides, or to our heads."118

Robinson's disgust is reminiscent of Harold Cruse's condemnation of the black middle and upper ciasses.119 The question of why black economic elites do not do more to "own" black politics evokes tentative answers of a structural and ethical nature.

First, one should clearly identify the class-grouping Robinson has in mind. The large amounts of money needed to own black politics for black people can only be provided by the members of one class: black capitalists. Yet one should have a proper sense of the relative size of the group Robinson casts his condemnation, compared to the rest of the black population. According to economist Thomas D. Boston, the black upper- class constitutes less than one percent of the entire black population while its working

118 Robinson, The Debt, 239 (author's emphasis in bold).

119 Harold Cruse, The Crisis ofthe Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1967).

41 class makes up eighty-four percent of the community. 120 The Black middle class is sandwiched in between at fifteen percent. 121

Second, this group has experienced substantial change in its composition since the late 1960s, according to Boston. This group should therefore be distinguished temporally

122 123 and structurally into its two segments : "Old" and "New." The old black capitalist class, a pre-1970s formation, had its economic base overwhelmingly in the black community and was tied directly to its interests by Jim Crow segregation policies, markets as well as civil society activities. Consequently, its economic existence and social standing were firmly integrated with the general well-being (or lack thereof) of blacks lower on the community's class hierarchy.124 The new black middle class is a post-segregation formation :free(r) to expand its economic activities away from the black community with help of liberal government assistance. 125 Moving substantially beyond its traditional ethnic clientele, many black capitalist enterprises now "depend to a greater

120 Thomas D. Boston, Race, Class and Conservatism (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 8 (fig-11re 1.1.). Boston combines the class theories ofKarl Marx, Max Weber, Nicos Poulantzas and Anthony Giddens into a "synthetic approach" to black class structure analysis. (Boston, Race, Class and Conservatism, I 5-20).

121 Ibid., 8 (Figure 1.1).

122 Boston defines "class segment" as "a sub-grouping within a class or a status grouping of individuals having similar "life-chances' derived from common locations within the division of labor and common patterns of income distribution." (Boston, Race, Class and Conservatism, 17 (figure I .3).

123 Ibid.,. 30 (Figure 2.2).

124 Ibid., 33. I do not wish to overstate the socio-political "integration" of these two groups. Substantial status, and of course, economic differences existed between the black upper-class and the black middle- and lower-classes. See Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats ofColor: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, I 990) for a scholarly historical examination of the "old segment" of the well-to-do. For an excellent ethnography of the '"new segment" by a non­ academic, see Lawrence Otis Graham's Our Kind ofPeople: Inside America's Black Upper Class (New York: Harper Perennial, I 999).

125 Boston, Race, Class and Conservatism, 36-37.

42 extent on white clientele, the general corporate sector and subcontracts form the government."126 This structural shift has greatly (but not totally) separated the "economic fortunes" of the classes and, consequently, the "ideological and political affiliation" between them. 127

Third, this structural-ideological unraveling of interests has had direct negative effect on the financial support of contemporary black political leadership, as political scientists Ronald W. Walters and Robert C. Smith observed:

In addition, the evidence from the Black Enterprise annual surveys of the top 100 Black businesses suggests that the economically able Blacks are in the nonpolitical fields ofentertainment and construction, followed by automobile dealerships, publishingfirms, and cosmetic firms [emphasis mine]. 3 By and large, the profile of economically able Blacks in business does not appear to suggest that they would have the same investment in political leadership questions to the same degree as corporate heads in the White community. The impact of this factor on Black leadership is to leave it without a major economic resource ... 128

3 See any of the recent annual surveys of the top 100 Black businesses published by Black Enterprise magazine.

While the ethic of racial uplift has been and continues to be strong among African

Americans as a cultural standard, this imperative is under great structural strain. 129

Robinson, a man who has spent decades working with black politicians and crafting policy for the betterment of Africa, must be familiar with these constraints; he even

126 Ibid., 36.

127 Ibid., 36.

128 Ronald W. Walters and Robert C. Smith, African American Leadership (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1999), 132.

129 Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1996).

43 presents at least one major instance in his book.130 Yet, he takes repeated swipes at the black elite by arguing in several places that the biggest barrier to black political autonomy is the mindset of this group. This "mindset" is the result of socio-economic restructuring within the black community, and, perhaps, the rise and spread of a post-

Civil Rights/Black Power "post-soul" mass culture.131 It is not due primarily to cultural confusion or weak will power. Robinson makes a case that is rhetorically compelling but not empirically substantiated. It is an "appealing" story because when a people are as desperate for to escape the New Nadir as black people are, they will invariable be critical of their leadership when so much so often falls so short of their hopes. 132

These problems are chronic in substance despite periodic changes in form. Black leadership, as we currently know it, also suffers from what should be called a political

130 Robinson, The Debt, 99-120.

131 Cultural studies professor Mark Anthony Neal theorizes that African Americans have entered a period they characterize respectively as "post-soul." Neal, in particular, is helpful at conceptualizing this moment in light of culture, communalism, commercialism and creativity:

"I used the term post-soul to describe the political, social and cultural experiences of the African American community since the end of the civil rights and Black Power movements. To my knowledge, Nelson George first used the term in a general description of black popular culture after the blaxploitation era. More specifically I locate the beginnings of the post-soul era Regents ofthe University ofCalifornia v. Bakke challenge to affirmative action in 1978. I am most concerned about those folks, artists and critical thinkers who Jive in the fissures of two radically different social paradigms; folks born between the I 963 March on Washington and the Bakke case, children of soul, if you will, who came to maturity in the age of Reaganomics and experience the change from urban industrialism to deindustrialism, from segregation to desegregation, from essential notions of blackness to metanarratives on blackness, without any nostalgic allegiance to the past (back in the days of Harlem, or the thirteenth-century motherland, for that matter, but firmly in grasp of the existential concerns of this brave new world. At the core of this indulgence is radical reimagining of the contemporary African-American experience, attempting to liberate contemporary interpretations of that experience from sensibilities that were formalized and institutionalized during earlier social paradigms" (Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Sou/ Aesthetic [New York: Routledge, 2002], 3).

132 Walters and Smith, African American Leadership, chapters 7,10 and 11 discuss the overly high expectations blacks have on their leaders considering the depth and scope of their problems.

44 badges ofslavery. This uncompensated legacy of loss has meant that unlike most other major ethno-racial groups in the United States black "Leadership has [had to rely] on social rather than economic resources because of the transfer of Black capital to Whites in the process of slavery."133 A more effective and responsive black leadership is only likely to come about when this group acquires the economic wherewithal to be an agential political class instead on an incorporated/subordinated one. And this will only occur when the black community can concentrate and coordinate sufficient internal and external material resources-and yes, renaissance-minded leaders-for the mass­ mobilization of its constituents for a what promises to be a long and difficult struggle for reparations, the Third American Reconstruction.

However, Robinson's argument has been met with a powerful counter-statement.

The maker of this statement is a conservative ideologue named David Horowitz.

Horowitz's counter to Robinson and other reparationist proposals is presented in the torrn of a series of assertions substantiated by a number of academically-grounded comparisons. This research and Horowitz's passionate mass media denunciations form the most important counter-attack to the reparationist movement. This counter-attack will be the subject of my next chapter.

133 Walters and Smith, African American Leadership, 122.

45 CHAPTER THREE

THE HYDRA OF HOROWITZIAN HISTORY: THE MOBILIZATION OF SCHOLARSHIP AGAINST BLACK REPARATIONS

No scientific attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended nearly 150 years ago.

David Horowitz, Uncivii Wars

Anyone who actually reads David Horowitz's carefuily reasoned andfactually-based ad [emphasis mine] will understand why his critics did not sL-rnply reply to him and try to prove him wrong .... The painful irony is that those who are crying out against slavery of the past include many who are trying to impose an enslavement of the mind through storm-trooper tactics.

Thomas Sowell, "Storm-troopers vs. Free Speech"

We have shown how the [social scientist] has to disregard the preconceptions which he had of facts, in order to face the facts themselves; how he has to discriminate among them according to their most objective characteristics; how, he must seek in the facts themselves the means of classifying them as normal and pathological; how, finally, he must be inspired by the same principle in the explanations he attempts as in the way in which he tests these explanations. For, as soon as he has the feeling that he is in the presence of things ["social facts"], he will no longer think of explaining them by utilitarian calculations or by syllogistic reasoning [emphasis mine] of any sort. He will understand too well the gap that exists between such causes and such effects.

Emile Durkheim, The Rules ofSociological Method

46 In 2002 former leftist radical-turned-arch-conservative, David Horowitz, vvrote a counter-attack to Randall Robinson's The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks1 and the black reparations movement in general titled, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over

Reparations for Slavery? This book is the most elaborate and extensive refutation of current black reparations politics to date. It is an interdisciplinary ideological work marshalling historical, economic, and sociological data and comparisons intended to defeat the intellectual justifications of the black redress movement.

Horowitz's mobilization of scholarship is like a hydra for black reparationists. His serpentine set of assertions seeks to constrict all thought of compensation and envenom public opinion against proponents. Also, like the myth, Horowitz's hydra has many fierce heads. Each one attacks reparationism in a different way and therefore deserves to be called by its own proper name. 3 Horowitz's hydra heads are:

• First Head: African Enslavement of Africans • Second Head: Arab Enslavement of Black Africans • Third Head: White Abolitionism • Fourth Head: White Slavery • Fifth Head: Non-Slave Owning Whites • Sixth Head: Free Blacks • Seventh Head: Black Slave Owners • Eighth Head: Slavery's Class Legacy

1 Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Penguin Group, Plume Books, 2000).

2 David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002).

3 Each ofthe following "heads" represents a synthesis and distillation of assertions and arguments Horowitz's makes about a particular aspect ofreparationism. While these arguments are often covered separately in his book, they are in fact, like the hydra of myth, all partial expressions of a central raison d'etre, namely, the protection of the unequal "race as we know it" status quo. For more on the hydra myth, see Gustav Schwab, Gods & Heroes: Myths and Epics ofAncient Greece (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946), 167-68.

47 The Herculean task of this chapter is the destruction of this beast, one angry head at a time, until enemies and allies alike of reparations see it for what it truly is-a monstrous distortion of academic research born of blunt methods and rough-hev.rn theories.

First Head: African Enslavement of Africans

Horowitz's main assertion is that "Black A:fricans ...were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. "4 He presents three supporting arguments for this thesis. Distilled to their essences, these arguments are: (1) "African slavery"5 was a form

4 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 12.

5 I place the concept "African slavery" within quotes since Horowitz mobilizes this concept monolithically in his juxtaposition with American slavery. This tendency is not limited to his comparison of different forms of slavery but is also applied to elements within particular form of slavery (e.g., so-called "white slavery" versus black slavery). In problematizing and analyzing his various comparisons I am doing more than explicitly countering his ''facts" and his interpretation of those facts; ! am also exposing his hidden, flawed methodology. Repeatedly throughout his book Horowitz constructs what the classic sociologist Max Weber would call "ideal types" in his attempts at "scientific" compa...;son. Weber's rationale for developing ideals types was reasonable and practical:

" ... When dealing with a political or military enterprise, it is first convenient to decide how the action would have proceeded if all the circumstances and all the intentions of those involved had been known, and if the means adopted had been chosen in a fully rational purposive way, on the basis of empirical evidence which seems to us valid .... The constructed model of a fully rationally purposive action in such cases can be understood by the sociologist with complete certainty and total clarity which results from its rationality: as a type (an 'ideal type') it thus enables him to understand the real action, influenced as it is by all sorts of irrational facts (emotional impulses, errors), as a 'deviation' from what might be expected if those performing it had behaved in a fully rational way" (author's emphasis). See Max Weber: Selections in translation, trans. E. Matthews, ed. W. G. Runciman, F.B.A. (Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press,1978), 9.

In and of itself this is a time-honored way to begin comparative research. However, the formation of ideal types is only a preliminary heuristic step that should be followed up with empirical research and warranted interpretation. Certainly, as sociologists H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills pointed out, Weber believed: "'Social scientists had the choice of using logically controlled and una1nbiguous conceptions, which are thus more removed from historical reality, or of using less precise concepts, which are more closely geared to the empirical world" (See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mi1ls, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology [New York: Oxford Press, I 946], 59).

48 of involuntary servitude despite claims to the contrary; (2) "African slavery" was at least as bad as "Trans-Atlantic slavery" in its scope, motivation, and treatment of slaves; (3)

European colonial powers fought valiantly to abolish "African slavery" while African slave owners fought vigorously to maintain the institution.

Horowitz's elevation of African slavery to the level of a "crime against humanity" of equal or more egregious proportion than American slavery is central to his entire attack against black reparations. He must therefore prove that (1) Africans were equally complicit in black slavery within their continent and in relation to the Atlantic

Slave Trade. The subtext of such a victory is that Africans would be rendered as morally bankrupt as Westerners (even more so because they would have enslaved and sold '"their own people")6 in the context of African slavery. The political implication of :finding

But, continue Gerth and Mills:

"The real meat of history would usually fall in between such e>..treme types; ..." (Ibid., 60).

Horowitz's evidentiary procedures are so consistently deficient in this regard that he usually cannot advance beyond the first step to get a proper understanding of either the significance of historical events or the social actions of individuals or groups. Weber defines social action as:

" ... The meaning intended by the agent or agents involv[ing] a relation to another [author's emphasis] person's behaviour and in which that relation determines the way in which the action proceeds" (Max Weber, 7).

Consequently, Horowitz's ideal beginnings become confounding stereotypes. See Max Weber, "The Nature of Social Action," in Max Weber: Selections in Translation, 7-32 and H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, "Intellectual Orientations,"' 45-74.

6 This conclusion is incorrect. According to historian Colin A. Palmer:

"The vast majority of the slaves were prisoners of war. The seller and the victim usually belonged to different states and were enemies. Accordingly, Africans did not •sell their own people,' as some historians have maintained. Such a claim ignores the culturally and politically diverse nature of the regions from which the slaves came as well as the diversity of the African continent as a whole. The overwhelming majority-perhaps eighty percent-of the victims of the human traffic were likely to be persons who had no ties to the state of their sellers, had no rights,

49 Africans equally or more responsible for African slavery would be that living black

Americans would have no ethical justification for singling out the American nation as the main target of its redress claims. To do so would amount to "reverse-racism." The legal implication of finding Africans equally or more responsible for African slavery would be that there would be no legitimate reason for the government to waive its sovereign immunity protection and thereby exposing itself to any liability for its part in the slave trade when African governments of the past committed the identical crime against the identical people without reparation. 7

Horowitz's characterization of African slavery and its demise is for the most part factually and conceptually incorrect. This can be proved conclusively through the use of appropriate concepts backed by relevant historical data

First, it is necessary to delimit the spatial boundaries of his comparison. Since

Horowitz wishes to focus on the physical ancestors of living African Americans, this would include persons mostly from nations today known "as Ghana, Mali, Chad, Niger,

Nigeria, The Gambia and Upper Volta," in other words, West Africa8 However,

and were vulnerable to the traditional fate of wartime prisoners-imprisonment, enslavement, or death [as was the case in Europe]."

(See Colin A. Palmer, ·• The First Passage: 1502-1619" in To Make Our World Anew: A History ofAfrican Americans, ed. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis [Oxford: Oxford University Press], 14).

7 To my knowledge no reparation is forthcoming from African nations or has been sought by African Americans from them, but an apology was issued by a former African slave trading state, Benin (known as Dahomey during the slavery era). This is more than the United States has done. See Lawanda Johnson, "Benin Seeks Forgiveness for its Role in African Slave Trade," [article on-line]; available from http://www.kbabooks.com/benin seeks forgiveness for its.htm; Internet; accessed 18 November 2002.

8 John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History ofAfrican 1 Americans, 7 h ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 1.

50 Horowitz draws upon examples of slavery that occurred as far away as East Africa.9 He contrasts these examples with events in colonial America/United States.

Second, patterns in human bondage in this region prior to substantial European contact should be identified and evaluated. This is a necessary step since Horowitz argues that "African Slavery ... pre-existed the Atlantic slave trade by a thousand years.... " 10

But note that he is making a continental assertion, one inclusive of West Africa but going far beyond this region. Hence, we are impelled to examine pre-European West "African slavery" but also the existence of slavery throughout the entire landmass to test his assertion. One must therefore go back to 500 B.C., nearly one thousand years before

Columbus's 1492landing in the Americas, to prove or disprove Horowitz's temporal and spatial claims.

Sound conceptual tools are necessary before undertaking this journey in comparative history. Most forms of human bondage are identical to Horowitz and he heatedly rejects any attempt to establish a hierarchy of wrong-doing.1 1 Horowitz accuses reparationists of "'argu[ing] incoherently that African slavery was not really slavery; or, if it was slavery, it was not really bad." 12 (He continues this thesis when he refuses to make sufficient distinction between so-called "'white slavery" and black slavery in

9 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 133.

10 Ibid., 48.

11 This is not hairsplitting. There are several qualitatively different major categories of "unfree" human servitude with several variations within each category. See M. L. Bush, Servitude in Modern Times (Polity: Cambridge, 2000).

12 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 132.

51 America and between black slaveholders and white slaveholders in the same region). But is he correct?

Joseph E. Inikori, a scholar who has investigated different forms of human bondage throughout world history, provides these theoretical tools. After analyzing the literature on serfdom and slavery in Europe, Russia and Africa, Inikori concludes that what is often called slavery in Africa is much more akin to serfdom. He came to this conclusion by first developing a clear historically-informed conceptual distinction between these different types of servitude:

The foregoing evidence on England and Russia (and generally on Europe) makes it clear that the formula employed by students of European history to distinguish serfs and other dependent social categories from slaves incorporates unambiguous elements: First and foremost, the serfs or non-slave dependent people must possess the means of production of their own (mainly land) large enough to provide a potential income that could support a household with unproductive children and old members; second, they must have enough free time to produce for themselves in order to realize the potential income from the employment of their means of production; third, they must be allowed to retain for their own use as they please the income realized; and fourth, their residences must be physically separated from those of their lords. On the other hand, for a dependent people to be slaves, they must spend virtually their entire working day on their lords' estates-- they may be allotted some plots, but both the size and the time available to work them would be so limited that they would have to be fed, clothed, and housed by their lords; and their owners must be free, under the law and by tradition, to sell them to any buyer. 13

Inikori next mobilizes this clarified notion of slavery in an intra-regional analysis of African servitude. After surveying several polities existing in West, Central and East

Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he finds that serfdom and slavery both existed in Africa, often simultaneously. However, historical evidence conclusively

13 Joseph Inikori, "Slaves or Serfs? A Comparative Study of Slavery and Serfdom in Europe and Africa," in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, ed. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies and Ali A. Mazrui (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 55-56.

52 demonstrates that serfdom was by far the predominant form of servitude in Africa. The reason for this is straightforward:

The phenomenon of what scholars referred to as intergenerational mobility among the slave populations in Africa61 --the tendency for the children of slaves to become free persons or nearly so -- meant that the slave class in Africa could not reproduce itself, not only because its rate of reproduction was low... but largely because the children of slaves normally did not remain L."l slaverj. They either became free or became serfs. Apart from the clove plantations of East Africa, most of what scholars have called slave plantations in Africa were, in fact, serf villages.

61 Klein, "The Study of Slavery," p. 605. 14

It is therefore incorrect to say, "'There were certainly more slaves in Africa in the nineteenth century than there were in the Americas at anytime,'" as one of the scholars

Horowitz frequently uses states. 15 But it is interesting that Inikori makes a."l exception of the East African plantation system because this is exactly a case Horowitz highlights to prove that "African slavery" was "exploitative."16 As he will do with American slavery and black slave ownership, Horowitz chooses an extreme instance to support an exaggerated claim. Therefore, Inikori's finding is not simply a political gloss coincidentally favoring reparationists. 17 Suspicion should fall on Horowitz. 18

14 Ibid., 67-68.

15 Ibid., 49. lnikori quotes Paul E. Lovejoy. Horowitz does not cite this work by Lovejoy even though that would apparently boost Horowitz's claim ... nor does he refer to sources written by Lovejoy, which would complicate his claim. See for example, Paul E. Lovejoy, introduction to Slaves and Slavers on the Gold Coast: Towards an Understanding ofSocial Bondage in West Africa, by Peter Haenger, ed. J. J. Shaffer and Paul E. Lovejoy (Switzerland: P. Schlettwein, 2000), x, xii.

16 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 133.

17 Horowitz makes this charge against reparationists who, as he says, "... argue incoherently that African slavery was not really slavery ... " {Ibid., 132).

53 The question of whether what has been misidentified as slavery for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was also misidentified for the 1000-year period before significant

European contact with West Africa and the rest of the continent remains. Therefore, ! extend Inikori's analysis to at least the millennium before 1500 A.D. to further test

Horowitz's claims and those ofreparationists.19

Covering the four centuries prior 1500 A.D.- the twelfth century to the sixteenth century- and examining several African regions, D. T. Niane finds that in general the continent's "kings and emperors had 'human estates', that is, lands [were] worked by subjugated communities; but closer examination shows that this was a system of serfdom rather than slavery. "20 Numerically, '' Slaves never exceeded peasants as a proportion of the population. Free men worked the soil on their own account, but free men and tributaries both owed service to the ruler or to the locallord."21 There were, of course, regional differences but throughout the sub-Saharan region (and other regions but to a different degree), serf labor was larger in number, productivity, and economic importance

18 Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr., "Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz," [Article on-line]; available from http://www .umass.edu/afroamlhor.html ; Internet; accessed I 0 November 2002.

19 An exhaustive application oflnikori's analysis to African servitude would require me to write another dissertation on this point alone. What follows instead is continental comparison of forms based on the scholarship ofleading academics contained within the eight-volume United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) General History of Africa series.

20 See D.T. Niane, conclusion to Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, vol. 4 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. D.T. Niane (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 682. Also see, M. Adamu, "The Hausa and their neighbors in the Sudan", in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, vol. 4 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. D.T. Niane (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 294-295.

21 Niane, Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, 683.

54 than the labor of slaves.22 Inikori's distinction seems to hold somewhat even when extended 3500 years before 500 B.C. to the era ancient Egypt, 23 Nubia, 24 sub-Saharan

Africa, 25 and the East African Coast.26

22 Niane writes:

" ... Agriculture provided one ofthe principal economic bases ofthe kingdoms south of the Sahara; production rested on the family fann. Here and there, however, there were enslaved population groups who worked on behalf of the rulers. In black Africa there was a system of serfdom, tributes and dues being fixed by custom; in the southern Maghrib slaves and peasants worked the land for the benefit of the lords or rulers. Plantations were developed in the islands off the east coast of Africa. But nowhere throughout this period were there hordes of slaves being systematically exploited" (Ibid., 680).

This point is substantiated by more focused studies. See M. Adamu, "The Hausa and their neighbors in the Sudan", 296; Y. Person, "The costal peoples: from Casamance to the Ivory Coast lagoons", in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, vol. 4 of UNESCO: General History of Africa, ed. D.T. Niane (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 30I-323; see V.V. Matveiev, "The development ofSwahili civilization", in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, vol. 4 of UNESCO: General History of Africa, ed. D.T. Niane (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, I 984; Berkeley: University of California Press, I 984), 455-56; see D. Lange, "the Kingdoms and Peoples of Chad", in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, vol. 4 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. D.T. Niane (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1984; Berkeley: University of California Press, I 984), 250; see T. Tamrat, "The Hom of Africa: the Solomonids in Ethiopia and the states of the Hom of Africa", in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, vol. 4 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. D.T. Niane (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, I 984; Berkeley: University of California Press, I 984), 438.

23 J. Yoyotte, "Pharaonic Egypt: society, economy and culture," in Ancient Civilizations ofAfrica, vol. 2 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. G. Mokhtar (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1981; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 ), 117.

24 See A.A. Hakem, "The civilization ofNapata and Meroe," in Ancient Civilizations ofAfrica, vol. 2 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. G. Mokhtar (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1981; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 ), 298-325:

25 Examining the trade relationships between different regions of the continent anywhere between 400 and 11 00 BC, M. Posnansky writes:

"Much more evidence of contact in pre-Islamic times comes from the rock art and archeological evidence.... We have to assume from the rock art that the routes across the Sahara were negotiable by horse, bullock and almost certainly by the versatile donkey.... slaves, though not very important at this period [emphasis mine], may have been another element in the trade~ Negro skeletons have come from Punic cemeteries and there were certainly Negro soldiers in the Carthaginian armies" (M. Posnansky, "The Introduction to the later prehistory of sub-Saharan Africa", in Ancient Civilizations ofAfrica, vol. 2 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. G. Mokhtar [Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1981; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981], 549-550).

55 While some merchants and states engaged in slave trading to amass wealth and were very adept in doing so,27 this trade was never a dominant mode of wealth accumulation or means of production for the preponderance of tributary states and kinship societies in Africa prior to European control. For African slavery to take on the chattel characteristics it did in the Transatlantic trade, it would have required the substantial substitution of serfdom with capitalist relations-entailing at bare minimum, private property ownership and its attendant cultural logic of"possessive individualism."28

Neither occurred greatly in the pre-European era. 29

As above this excerpt does not give indication oftreatment or the relation of the slaves to land, but provides some notice of the scale of slave trade.

26 See A. M. H. Sheriff, "'The East African coast and its role in maritime trade," in Ancient Civilizations ofAfrica, vol. 2 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. G. Mokhtar (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1981; Berkeley: University ofCalifomia Press, 1981), 551-567.

27 See Juliet E. K. Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan; London: Prentis Hall, 1998), 14-17.

28 Possessive individualism is not identical to "basic" greed. Rather, as political scientist C. B. MacPherson writes:

"The basic assumptions of possessive individualism-that man is free and human by virtue ofhis sole proprietorship of his own person, and that human society is essentially a series of market relations-were deeply embedded in the seventeenth-century foundations. It was the assumptions that gave the original theory its strength, for they did correspond to the reality of seventeenth-century market society" (C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory ofPossessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964]).

What was one personal (may we say "'psychological"?) ramification of these societal developments? MacPherson writes:

"The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature ofthe individuals. The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is the proprietor of his person and capacities. The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills ofothers, andfreedom is a function ofpossession [emphasis mine]" (Macpherson, The Political Theory ofPossessive Individualism, 3).

29 For an example ofhow the cultural standards of some kin-oriented production societies "drove" social actors to both amass wealth and share it, see the work of early 20th century anthropologists: Franz

56 Economically speaking, after reviewing "the present state of research" (up to

1984) on events and patterns occurring within Africa or involving Africans from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, D. T. Niane concludes that '" ... nowhere did private ownership of property become general; the principle right of ownership belonged to the community" 30 and although "[a] certain accumulation of capital began with the merchant class ... this did not result in a true bourgeoisie."31

Traveling further back in time is revealing. A. Bathily and C. Meillassoux appraisal intra-African trade from the seventh to the eleventh century also describes the nature of African commerce as overwhelmingly non-capitalist. The authors state:

...The African economy as a whole remained a self-sufficient one within which productivity standards followed consumption standards. Goods were traded on the basis not of their exchange value as such but of their use value. Economic links between the various regions were based on complementarity between the goods they respectively produced; and these were more subject then than now to natural conditions because of the low level ofproductivity.32

Boas classic ethnography the potlatch wealth display-circulation-destruction ceremony of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Coast ofNorth America, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies ofthe Kwakiutllndians, and Bronslaw Malinowski's equally classic but more famous ethnography of the kula ring gift exchange system of the Trobriand Islanders living near eastern New Guinea, Argonauts ofthe Western Pacific. For an interesting discussion of how the Kwakiutl's politically useful kinship-economies were dangerously warped and eventually destroyed by European capitalism, see Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 182-194.

30 Niane, Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, 683.

31 Ibid, 683. This is the proper modal contextualization ofthe entrepreneuralism of African merchants and other businesspersons. Proper contextualization does not cast Africans willy-nilly irrational economic actors or one's immobilized by "tradition." Nor does it mean African merchants and states did not participate in slave trading. On the variety and vitality African business enterprises prior to European control, see Juliet E. K. Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America, 1-31.

32 A. Bathily, with the collaboration of C. Meillasoux, "Relations between the different regions of Africa," in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, vol. 3 of UNESCO: General History ofAfrica, ed. M. Elfasi, asst. ed. I. Hrbek (Paris: UNESCO and Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1988; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 749.

57 Culturally and politically speaking, possessive individualism was nowhere dominant on the continent. Prior to the Europeans, there were three ways an African could be unfortunate enough to become a slave: pawnship, by court order, or capture in war. Historical anthropologist Eric R. Wolf described each:

The first of these mechanisms, pawnship, was widespread. It was used to settle debts, placing a person in the possession of another in payment of a debt. This transferred to the receiver all rights over the person's labor, reproductive activities, and progeny for the period of the pawn. People might also pawn themselves or their relatives in case of famine, exchanging rights in persons for access to food. The second mechanism for creating potential slaves operated through the judicial process. In brief, infractions against the kinship order and the lineage structure were seen as directed not merely against living people but also against the ancestors, and hence the supernatural .... Such people could be sold as slaves.

A third mechanism was capture in war. In effect, like the other mechanisms, this meant the victim was severed from his native lineage and deprived of supporting kin. Thus, potential slaves in general- whether pawns, criminals, or captives - were all obtained by cutting their ties from kin and transferring the victim to the owner's kinship group.33

This emphasis on lineage connections was not limited to the kin-oriented mode of production,34 but it was the one most vested in these kinds of connections. Note that while enslavement could occur for economic reasons (debt), this financial reason was not

33 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 207.

34 According to Wolf, to understand the "political economy" of a kinship mode of production, we should go beyond our usual socio-emotional conceptualization of the phenomenon:

"Kinship [should] be understood as a way of committing social labor to the transformation of nature through appeals to filiation and marriage, and to consanguinity and affinity. Put simply, through kinship social labor is 'locked up,' or 'embedded,' in particular relations between people. This labor can be mobilized only through access to people, such access being defined symbolically. What [author's emphasis] is done unlocks social labor; how [author's emphasis] it is done involves symbolic definition of kinsmen and affines" (Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 91).

58 the profit-motive, a far harder, and some say, impossible imperative to satisfy.35

Moreover, those rendered slaves through these mechanisms were not simultaneously given an inhuman status (unlike American slavery), as Wolf notes:

It is important to recognize that once in the possession of his owner's lineage, a pawn or slave could become a functioning member of the domestic group, even if denied linkage with the owner's lineage. Pawnship and slavery could thus have relatively benign consequences, without any of the attributes of chattel slavery, which became characteristic of the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, both pawns and slaves lacked the rights of lineage members and were thus open to manipulation by their owners. 36

There are also noteworthy examples of slaves secured for a tributary mode of production by elites but again the motivation for this activity was not profit usually but rather a practice designed to concentrate social labor through political might and custom.37

35 Neo-Marxist historical sociologists Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein explain the economic insatiability of capitalism, a system of uniquely distinguished by a generalized profit-logic:

The first and foremost sense in which the [world-economy] has been capitalist (as opposed to being say redistributive or socialist) has been precisely the predominance of the law of value. The law of value prevails in a situation where there exists a 'market' in which there is some price-competition between entrepreneurs who make their production decisions in their own interests (that is, in order to optimize their own accumulation of capital over some short or medium run). It follows in such a situation that each is compelled to make these decisions in terms of exchange-value instead of use-value, failing which the entrepreneur suffers acute losses and eventually goes bankrupt. (See Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, "Capitalism and the Incorporation ofNew Zones into the World-Economy," Review 10, no. 5/6 [Supplement], [Summer/Fall 1987], 763-779).

For a non-Marxist "culturalist" distinction between generic greed and the profit-motive, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958). For an overview of various interpretations of greed ranging from a sin to a systemic imperative, see Stanford M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil, rev. and expanded ed. (Dix Hills: General Hall, 1989), 232-268.

36 Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 207-208.

59 The significance of this clarification is not that "use-value"38 slave-trading was intrinsically a benign transaction. A slave in almost all instances was a human being of sorely degraded status. 39

When the predominant African modes of production did initially interface with

European/American labor demands, trade between economic systems was based initially on a voluntary exchange mutually benefiting each "world's" merchants.40 Some African

37 Wolf defines "tributary mode of production":

" ... A mode of production in which the primary producer, whether cultivator or herdsman, is allowed access to the means of production, while tribute is exacted from him by political or military means." (Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 79-80).

38 Duncan Foley provides a neat description of both use value and its related concept, exchange value:

"Since the COMMODITY [author's emphasis] is a product which is exchanged, it appears as the union of two different aspects: its usefulness to some agent, which is what permits the commodity to enter into EXCHANGE [author's emphasis] at all; and its power to command certain quantities of other commodities in exchange. The first aspect the classical political economists called use value, the second, exchange value [author's emphasis]." (Duncan Foley, "use value," in A Dictionary ofMarxist Thought, 504).

Earlier I described in great detail the social conditions slaves-for-tribute experienced and why they were appropriated in my discussion of African serfdom and slavery. Based on that comparison it appears that slavery under the tributary system, a predominantly use value system, was generally less destructive of these persons than slaves under the profit system, the raison d 'etre of European and American capital ism.

39For an exhaustive comparative study of the degraded status of slaves, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Piess, 1982).

40 Wolfs generic definition of a merchant:

"a specialist in exchange, buying and selling goods to obtain a profit ... The position of merchants is ... always defined politically as well as economically, and is always dependent on the power and interests of other social classes" (Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 84- 85).

Wolf describes their explicit motivation:

"To increase profits merchants strive to enlarge the sphere of exchange, drawing subsistence or prestige goods produced within the kin-ordered or tnbutary mode into the channels of commodity exchange, the market. This transformation of use values into commodities, goods produced for exchange, is not neutral in its consequences. It can seriously weakened tributary

60 merchants sold slaves for exchange value.41 As uncomfortable as this fact may be for some reparationists, it should be acknowledged. Yet, this fact should be contextualized and given proper perspective. Were African slave merchants who traded for exchange values the norm in Africa or a lucrative aberration? Was this kind of African slave trader similar to his European counterpart?

Often at the nexus between economic systems, merchants may seem mostly identical in their function. However, Wolf cautions, while some merchants functioned as points of articulation between systems, this does not mean they embodied the predominant economic characteristics of their respective societies.

Early modem merchants, for the most part, were only powerful or privileged enough to "skim" a fraction of the surpluses generated by non-capitalist modes of production, and subsequently commodify 42 these surpluses and reap profits.43 Most

power if it commercializes the goods and services upon which that power rests" (Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 84).

41 Exchange value defined:

"It is clear that exchange involves a relation between producers (and non-producers). It there by creates an equivalence between different types oflabor, forming ABSTRACT LABOUR [author's emphasis] as the substance of value. This formation of value is and is expressed as a relationship between the USE VALUES [author's emphasis] of commodities and is consequently characterized as COMMODITY FETISHISM [author's emphasis]. It is taken to an extreme by the role of money in exchange which dictates that everything should have its price. Social relations between producers are, and are expressed as material relations between things" (Ben Fine, "Exchange," in A Dictionary ofMarxist Thought, 156).

42 Duncan Foley provides a clear definition of commodity:

"All human societies must produce their own material conditions of existence. The commodity is the form products take when this production is organized through exchange. In such a system products once produced are the properties of particular agents who have the power to dispose of them to other agents. Agents who own different products confront each other in a process of bargaining through which they exchange the products. In exchange a definite quantity of one product changes places with a definite quantity of another. The commodity, then, has two powers: first, it can satisfy some human want, that is, it has what Adam Smith calls USE VALUE [author's emphasis]; second, it has the power to command other commodities in exchange, a

61 could not take this wealth and turn it into capitaz44 ownership of the means of production.

Slave labor, the little there was in pre-European African times, was mostly locked into other modes.45 Private property on a systemic level was uncommon. Without wide- spread private property, the kind of "profit for profit's sake" economic logic of capitalism could not take hold or be fully taken advantage of by merchant-slavers at this stage. And without this occurring, most of these African merchants could not rightly call themselves true capitalists. Wolf makes an emphatic distinction between mercantile enterprise and capitalist enterprise:

As long as wealth remains external to the process of production, merely skimming off the products of the primary producers and making profits by selling them, that wealth is not [author's emphasis] capital. It may be wealth obtained and engrossed by overlords or merchants, but it has not yet entered what Marx called "the really revolutionary road" of appropriating and transforming the means of production themselves (Cap. III, 1967:334). Only where wealth has laid hold of the conditions of production in the ways specified can we speak of the existence or dominance of a capitalist mode. There is no such thing as mercantile

power of exchangeability that Marx calls VALUE [author's emphasis]. Because commodities exchange with each other in definite quantitative proportions each commodity can be thought of as containing a certain amount ofvalue .... Value becomes visible as exchange value when commodities confront each other in exchange, and exchange value comes to have an existence independent of any particular commodity as MONEY [author's emphasis]. (Duncan Foley, "commodity," in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 86).

43 But European merchants had more latitude than those from other regions. See Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 85.

44 Capital is "in general ... an asset which can generate an income stream for its owner''. But according to the Marxist point-of-view:

"[C]apital is not a thing at all, but a social relation which appears in the form of a thing. To be sure, capital is about money-making, but the assets which 'make' money embody a particular relation between these [sic] who have money and those who do not, such that not only is money 'made', but also the private property relations which engender such a process are themselves continually reproduced" (Simon Mohun, "Capital," in A Dictionary ofMarxist Thought, 60).

45 Patrick Manning, "Slavery in Africa," in Africana: The Encyclopedia ofthe African and African American Experience, I 720.

62 or merchant capitalism, therefore. There is only mercantile wealth. Cafitalism, to be capitalism, must be capitalism-in-production (author's emphasis). 4 Hence, the presence of specialized "interstitial" figures such as slave traders would not indicate that the tributary and kin-oriented modes of securing and allocating slave labor47 in Africa were not still the dominant economic institutions for doing so. For example, the Rausa ofNigeria did "commodify" some of their slaves but seemingly a larger portion were procured not through purchase or sale but as " ... tribute from neighboring countries. "48 In general, there is little evidence that the minority of slaves, purchased or sold for exchange value within Africa for African usage, were forced to labor in "non-traditional'' ways or generally experienced less-than-customary treatment.

Emphasizing modes of production contextualizes commercial acts and also highlights differences between nominally identical economic activities. Slave trading, if not slavery per se, has been a commercial enterprise for millennia within and between

46 Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 79. This is why I have some trouble with Walker's coverage of so-called black capitalist culture in Africa before European influence (Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship). It is truly revolutionary to show in such great detail the economic sophistication of black Africans for this is a group (along with African Americans) whom for racist reasons is never thought of as having any business acumen. To produce copious evidence to the contrary is illuminating. Certainly merchants, "specialist[s] in exchange. buying, and selling goods to obtain a profit" (Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 84) were important facilitators of trade between economic systems including slaves. Proving so would still not detract from the business acumen that West Africans developed or the survival of these traits in Africans in American slaves. What it would mean is that these merchants may have been great businessmen but most were not capitalists, technically speaking.

47 It is important to note that slavery in and of itself is technically not a mode of production but a feature of all modes. (John Weeks, "Non-Capitalist Modes of Production," in A Dictionary ofMarxist Thought, 353). A slave system's characteristics vary generally with the modes of production and cultural conditions they are embedded within.

48 Hausa slaves at this time "... fulfilled various roles, being used as currency and goods, has domestic servants, soldiers and gardens, and agricultural and patchwork "' (Adamu, "The Hausa and their neighbors in the Sudan," 299). While I do not believe it is historian Walker's contention that all or most economic activity in Africa prior to European invasion was capitalist, it is important for my argument that her groundbreaking evidence is not used incorrectly to obscure the relative weight of these simultaneous modes of labor control as they relate to the slavery question Horowitz and reparationists are most concerned.

63 societies. However, more specific points should be raised: What was t.lte general nature of this commerce in Africa before European encroachment? What was the commercial nature of the Atlantic slave trade? How did the articulation of Atlantic "commercial" slavery affect African "commercial" slavery?

Only theoretical precision can aid reparationists at this point. What they should emphasize, in apparent contradiction to their earlier negative evaluation of all commercial slavery, that the existence of a market where/when values are traded, per se, does not prove that these transactions were predicated on exchange value. They should seek to establish, if correct, that the intra-Africa slave trade was mainly a trade of use values49 before European control transformed many, though not all, of its slave transactions to ones based on exchange value. Only when African ''pre-existing institutions were placed in the service of European mercantile expansion,"50 did the

African slave trade take on genocidal chattel form. The domination of the kin-oriented and tribute-oriented African slave trade by the capitalists transatlantic slave trade, a process economic incorporation51 within the Western world-economy through military

49 Ibid, 156.

50 Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 208.

51 Incorporation is defined by world systems theorists, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, as the "expansion of the geographical loci included in the division of labor of the capitalist world-economy." See Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, "Capitalism and the Incorporation of New Zones into the World-Economy," 768. This notion needs a larger theor.:tical concept in order to make sense. This ''bigger idea" for Wallerstein, et al. is the world-economy:

"We mean by a world-economy a set of integrated production processes linked in a continuing (though evolving) social division oflabor which fundamentally determine social behavior (or social action) within its arena (boundaries) over time. These boundaries themselves are variable. The forces at work (at conflict) within this social arena express themselves or give rise to various institutional expressions not only as structures of the workplace but as political and cultural "structures." A world-economy is defined as that kind of world-system in which the political and cultural "structures" are multiple and the system-wide political and cultural structures

64 -., coercion=>- and exchange value commerce, would eventually reduce those who were once considered lowly but wholly human, into chattel. Contra Horowitz, and to the vindication of reparationists, the historical evidence supports the latter's contention that

African slavery was far less commercial (capitalist) than the transatlantic Slave Trade dominated by Europeans and Americans.

Second Head: Arab Enslavement of Black Africans

Horowitz's assertion on this topic, "Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans,"53 is supported by the argument "in the period between

650 and 1600, before [author's emphasis] any Western involvement, somewhere between

3 million and 10 million Africans were bought by Muslim slavers for use in Saharan societies, and in the trade in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea"54

are far less tangible and immediately constraining than more "local" ones" (Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, "Capitalism and the Incorporation," 764).

52 For example, as anthropologists James Peoples and Garrick Bailey write:

"The Portuguese became the first major traders of African slaves in the Americas. In the earliest period of the trade, slaves brought to America had already been slaves in Africa. However, the number of such people was limited, and as the demand for slaves increased the Portuguese turned to other methods-in particular, raiding-to acquire them. The expanding demand for slaves changed the relationship of the Portuguese with African societies. The kings of Kongo allowed their subjects to trade slaves to the Portuguese, but they refused to permit them to raid for additional slaves. As a result, in I575, Portuguese mercenaries and African 'allies' began systematically to stage slave raids throughout much of central Africa. Finally, in I 660, the Portuguese virtually destroyed the Kongo kingdom in a short war" (James Peoples and Garrick Bailey, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology [Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, I 997], 33 I -332).

53 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 12

54 Ibid., lll.

65 Horowitz is right when he says the enslavement of black Africans by Arabs is usually unknown or ignored. However, he is wrong on almost every other account.

Horowitz argues that the Muslim slave trade was larger than the North American slave trade by the order of approximately 10 to one at most. 55 The actual number of slaves transported in this trade is closer to 6 million. 56 Regardless of the actual number,

Horowitz is being conceptually slippery here. He does not compare equivalent trades.

When he argues against Islamic slavery, he includes the entire expanse of that trade

(Saharan societies, Indian Ocean and Red Sea trade). He then compares this trade in toto to only a portion of the entire Transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, that is, the

Atlantic Slave Trade to North America (more specifically, the area that would come to be known in the late eighteenth century as the United States). When compared to the estimated total number of African slaves reaching all American shores, Islamic continental and water trades are far less than the Transatlantic Slave Trade-only half the amount. According to the latest comprehensive scholarly study of the latter phenomenon conducted by Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Afro-American

Research, almost 12 million enslaved Africans were forced onto European ships heading for the Americas with "many more Africans were captured or purchased in the interior of the continent, [and] ... a large number died before reaching the [African] coast."57 This

55 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 111.

56 "Some scholars suggest that since about 1500 C.E., approximately 4 million slaves traveled along trans-Saharan routes while another 2 million people were sold into slavery by way of the Red Sea." See Ari Nave, "Trans-Saharan and Red Sea Trade, traffic in African slaves across the Sahara and the Red Sea for export, mainly to Arabia and South Asia," in Africana, 1879.

57 Stephen Behrend, "Transatlantic Slave Trade," in Africana, 1865.

66 means that at least twice as many Africans in about one-third the time span were brought as slaves to the Americas versus the number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic Trade.

In addition to the smaller amount enslaved over a one-and-a-half millennia, it should be pointed out that in Islamic slavery the treatment of captive black Africans was nowhere as severe as slavery in the Americas. Ronald Segal, a historian who has conducted comparative research on both Islamic and Atlantic slave trades, offers this balanced juxtaposition of slavery in the two different civilizations:

Christian societies were responsible for an engagement to slavery in its most hideous, dehumanizing form. Yet it was Christians who lead the campaign to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself. Islam has been, by specific spiritual precept and in common practice [that is, as a "social fact"], relatively humane in its treatment of slaves and its readiness to free them, even though individual Muslims have been among the most ferocious slavers in history."58

Earlier in this chapter I complicated the popular image of white Christian English and

American abolitionists as one mainly driven by benign humanitarian impulses, but it is more important at this point to properly characterize the experience of persons enslaved under Islam/Islamic societies.

Islamic slavery varied significantly depending upon the circumstances. 59 The

Rausa "farm-slavery system" of the Kano Emirate, a polity that predated European control, is a good example of what "typical" Muslim slavery was like. 60 There were

58 Segal recognizes the role of(white?) Christians in the abolition ofthe slave trade and slavery, though he does not complicate their motivations and politics as I will do later in this dissertation. See Ronald Segal, Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giraux, 2001), x-xi.

59 Polly Hill, "Comparative West African Farm-Slavery Systems (south of the Sahel) with special reference to Muslim Kano Emirate (N. Nigeria)," in Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa: The Servile Estate, vol. 2, ed. John Ralph Willis (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 34, 36.

60 Ibid., 35

67 similarities between American slavery and Islamic types of slavery. Kano slavery was geared toward household consumption of crops and the generation of surpluses.61 A slave was "considered chattel because he had a market value, which no one save his owner could realize by selling him; ..." 62 Moreover, owners owned the offspring of their female slaves. 63 Yet, there were many important differences between the two systems. First, "a master was obliged ... to provide his slave with a plot of land on which he could work on his own account, and to allow him one or two free days in the week when he could work on his own farm or in some other remunerative occupation, rather than on his owner's ... farm."64 Applying Inikori conceptual and practical distinction between slaves and serfs would mean that many so-called slaves under Islam were actually closer to serfs. Second, while a slave owner had the absolute right to sell all and any of his slaves,

"a slave-owner's freedom to sell any slave living enfamille was severely limited by local public opinion, which held that children should not be separated from their parents or spouses wrenched apart, unless the owner had become impoverished or the slave were unmanageable, troublesome or criminal."65 The separation of family members was far more common under American slavery, even if based on conservative calculations.66

Third, slaves under Islam were allowed to purchase their freedom or could have their

61 Ibid., 36.

62 Ibid., 37.

63 Ibid, 38.

64 Ibid., 37.

65 Ibid., 38

66 Fogel and Engennan, Time on the Cross, 44-52.

68 freedom purchased for them. This also occurred under American slavery but where as there was little opportunity for slaves to earn enough money to do so, Kano Emirate slave

"masters were obliged to allow their slaves time off in which to accumulate sufficient funds by pursuing some remunerative occupation ... "67 Against the Islamic example, stands the practice of charging "self-ransoming" slaves twice their market value for their freedom where as self-manumitting slaves in the U.S. were usually charged their market value. 68 However, American slaveholders often attached pecuniary and humiliating requirements on to-be-freed slaves while this was not as frequent a practice under

Islam. 69 Moreover, "A freed slave was free without qualification ... " under Islamic slavery since "there was, in fact, no legal status intermediate between slavery and freedom."70 This was certainly not the case in American slavery, as I will demonstrate later in my analysis of free blacks in this chapter.

Another major difference between the Islamic and Transatlantic trades is that the former was overwhelming female while the latter mostly male. African women were used as concubines and domestic servants in the Muslim slavery. Turning to another major

Islamic slave trade destination, southwest Asia, Ari Nave concludes:

... The majority of slaves, particularly women who served as concubines, became integrated into host societies, most often under Muslim law. Male slaves were also circumcised and given Muslim names. Upon bearing a son to their owner, concubines could not be sold or given away. Furthermore, concubines were

67 Hill, "Comparative West African Farm-Slavery Systems," 38.

68 Ibid.

69 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.

70 Hill, "Comparative West African Farm-Slavery Systems," 38.

69 liberated upon their owner's death, and the child was considered a free individuaL Many other slaves were probably manumitted after working a nine-year period, after which many pious Muslims felt that the slaves had worked sufficiently to have earned their freedom.71

By stating that Islamic slavery was less severe than American slavery, I do not mean to diminish in any way the crime of sexual exploitation experienced of women or men the former system. But in comparison, this most despicable offence suffered by slaves in both systems, compounds the larger list of abuses black slaves faced in the

Americas. The private and public rape of black women and the more familiar image of castrated black men noosed and hanging from trees also served a "social function" but there is little proof that this level of human degradation and torture was practiced as widely as it was during American slavery and after the country's emancipation of black slaves.

Third Head: White Abolitionism

Horowitz begins his attack asserting:

For thousands of years, until the end of the eighteenth century, slavery had been considered a normal institution of human societies. In all that time, no group had arisen to challenge its legitimacy. Of course, there were many slave revolts from the times of Moses and Sparatacus, in which those who had been enslaved sought to gain their freedom. But that was not the point. The freedom they had sought was their own. They did not revolt against the institution of slavery as such. What had happened in the English-speaking countries at the dawn of the American Republic was entirely unique. Before then, no one had thought to form a movement dedicated to the belief that the institution of slavery was itself immoral. What was important in this historical fact was that it showed that white Europeans who were the target of the r~arations indictment had played a pivotal role in the emancipation from slavery. -

71 Ari Nave, "Trans-Saharan and Red Sea Slave Trade," in Africana, I 880.

72 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 58.

70 Horowitz's assertion can be dismantled on the level of theory and on the level of historical evidence. Horowitz's historical knowledge is flawed. Historian Theodore L.

Sylvester traces the first signs of abolitionism to two ancient sects of Jews called the

Essenes and the Therapeutae. 73 These groups lived in first century Palestine and Egypt, respectively. They were pacifists and abhorred slavery. The Essenes, for example,

"actively worked to end slavery by purchasing slaves from their masters and setting them free." 74 Second, his minirnalization ofSpartacus' revolt is not justified. Spartacus did not simply free himself and a band of seventy gladiators alone from their particular owners when they escaped their slave pens in 73 B.C. In addition to freeing themselves,

Spartacus' soldiers "set up base near Mount Vesuvius ... and attacked nearby towns, freeing slaves and killing slaveowners, sometimes forcing them to fight each other to the death. And Sylvester continues:

As word spread, the gladiator-led revolt attracted thousands of runaway slaves to the rebel camp. By the time Rome sent a small military force to Vesuvius to end the rebellion, they faced thousands of liberated and runaway slaves. The Romans were soundly defeated. 75

The activities of all these groups indicate that anti-slave institution efforts were under way thousands of years before British or American initiatives beginning in the late eighteenth century.

73 Theodore L. Sylvester, Slavery Throughout History Almanac, ed. Sonia Benson (Detroit: U.X.L., 2000).

74 Ibid., 33.

75 Ibid., 54.

71 Horowitz's conceptual understanding of political movements is generally problematic. It is too narrow a formulation. Blacks slave revolts are perhaps legitimate but ultimately only self-serving forms of liberation, according to r..im. Horowitz does not believe these events and less dramatic forms of resistance constitute an anti-institutional politics. There is no mention in his work of the evolution of a collective anti-slavery consciousness or politics among blacks independent of or prior to white abolitionism.

Robert Christian and Ernest Allen, Jr. take Horowitz's to task for his omission of black agency. 76 Horowitz has responded to this criticism by saying that he "was defending those whites who had honorable anti-slavery sentiments and deeds to their credit against the claims of the reparationists partisans. There was obviously no reason, in making such an argument, to comment on the efforts of blacks themselves." 77 More to the point he argues that all examples the authors give of black militancy ''postdated the creation of the anti-slavery movement by Christians in 1787." 78 The date 1787 is important because it marks the founding of the London Abolition Committee by four white English Quaker merchants named George Harrison, Samuel Hoare, James Phillips and Joseph Woods.79 In short, according to Horowitz, black revolts and regular resistance do not a "revolution" make. Interpreted theoretically, these unpredictable activities are

76 Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr., "Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz."

77 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 58, (author's footnote 81).

78 Ibid.

79 For a proper social movement analysis of the British abolitionism, see Leo d' Anjou, Social Movements and Cultural Change: The First Abolition Campaign Revisited (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1996).

72 what some social movement theorists would describe as part of a larger "cycle of protest"80 against the institution of slavery.

Horowitz's general understanding of political movements is one of formal resource mobilization practiced by social movement organizations, to use the parlance of movement theoreticians. 81 While these creations are undoubtedly crucial to most movements, it is not correct to conflate them with all movement activity as Horowitz does. Doing so prevents Horowitz from accurately interpreting, for example, the attacks and "predations" by blacks whom escaped their personal bondage and formed "bands of runaways sometimes ... so emboldened that they sent entire [white] communities into panic."82 Nor can he explain why slave owners in general feared the instability rebellious slaves brought to the whole system of slavery through nearly "250 serious revolts

80 David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, ·'Master Frames and Cycles of Protest," in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

81 According to sociologist Aldon D. Morris, resource mobilization theory:

"Emphasizes the resources necessary for the initiation and development of movements. They include formal and informal organizations [my emphasis], leaders, money, people, and communication networks ... It is the ability of groups to organize, mobilize, and manage valuable resources that determines whether they will be able to engage in social protest" ( Aldon D. Morris, The Origins ofthe Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing/or Change [New York: Macmillan, Free Press, 1984], 279).

Movement researcher John Lofland defines social movement organizations:

'"Associations of people making idealistic and moralistic claims about how human personal or group life ought be organized that, at the time oftheir claims-making [author's emphasis], are marginal to or excluded from mainstream society-the then dominant constructions of what is realistic, reasonable, and moral" (John Lofland, Social Movement Organizations: Guide to Research on Insurgent Realities [New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1996] 2-3).

From Horowitz's perspective, it seems the ability of groups to organize formally and publicly determines whether, it the case of abolitionism, slavery resistance culture of African Americans can qualify as actual abolitionist activity.

82 See John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 86-89 on collective resistance to slavery by runaways.

73 (conspiracies and uprisings)" 83 from early colonial times up to the Civil War.84 Slave rebellions did indeed occur in specific places at particular times-in precise "localities."

Perhaps no slaver feared a rebellion more than the one at his doorstep. However as

Sylvester notes, the political ramifications of these collective actions were felt

... [Throughout] the entire nation, especially in the slaveholding South. For slaveholders, the rebellions and conspiracies were reasons to fear their slaves all the more and to pass even more restrictive laws to control them ....As examples of the price slaves were willing to pay for freedom, the slave revolts and conspiracies inspired and helped to unify the abolitionists. 85

Obviously, Horowitz's implicit "organizational standard" for abolitionism is an inappropriate measurement of"informal"86 black abolitionist activities during a time when most blacks were enslaved or at best "quasi-free."87 Securing enough freedom and resources to organize and sustain lasting organizations was very difficult during slavery.

White violence and other forms of repression hampered black abolitionist agendas. Black organizations, far more that white organizations, had to perform several social, economic and political functions for their communities. This meant black organizations under racism and heavy demands required more time to extend themselves markedly in some

s~" Sylvester. Slavery Throughout History Almanac, 184.

84 Sylvester is precise; he does not '"pad" his numbers with all acts of resistance. be they costly to the system or recuperative to slaves. such as sabotage. foot-dragging. and other "weapons of the weak." He writes, "For a slave rebellion to be included in this count. it had to involve a minimum often slaves. and freedom had to be their goal" (Ibid.).

85 Ibid .• 189-90

86For the best conceptualized and ethnographically supported understanding of this notion, see its originator•s written works: James C. Scott. Weapons ofthe Weak: Everyday Forms ofPeasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1985) and Domination and the Arts ofResistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1990).

87Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Random House, Pantheon Books. 1974).

74 endeavors. Perforce many of their black anti-slavery activities came to acquire a more piece-meal appearance, especially in the early days of the Colonies. If white abolitionists were able to forge standing organizations before blacks, this is understandable since they were not encumbered by the severe restrictions imposed on their personal freedom and political rights as were placed on blacks. 88 To put a fine point on it, it was far easier and less dangerous for a handful of white Quakers in England to take a strong public stand against slavery than two equally religious abolitionist black men, Richard Allen and

Absalom Jones, who did so in America. Yet Allen and Jones were still able to found their

Free African Society the same year as the London Abolition Committee! Beginning as probably "the first black benevolent society in the United States ... within several years members had turned their attention to antislavery work, including the prevention of kidnapping [free blacks into slavery]''.89

Blacks often had to adopt more covert means to undermine the institution of slavery. Some would be cultural, as in the case of"slave religion" and its re- interpretation of Christian doctrine as narratives of divine deliverance from and retribution for the temporal horrors of slavery. Slave culture(s) also gave birth to folkt.ales that condoned patience, guile and even humor as coded counter-narratives to the logic of

88 For example, free blacks were seen as a political threat to white slave society because they were suspected of attempting to liberate slaves individually and on groups. Black slaves and free blacks were not allowed to vote in most instances. They were not considered citizen even though they were free and had tenuous political rights. Free blacks were watched closely and bars we instituted against them gathering in groups or bearing arms. For more on this point, see section of this chapter dealing with so-called "free blacks."

89 For more on the activities of this organization, see Carol Wilson, "Active Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty: Black Self-Defense against Fugitive Slave Recapture and Kidnapping of Free Blacks," in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, ed. John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 11 1.

75 slavery.90 Their ubiquity and usage by slaves can be posited, in part, as proof of a wide- spread counter-consciousness against the slave system which, if not revolutionary, was certainly collective and critical. When they presented their case before colonial authorities, blacks often had to condemn their enslavement through comparisons that played on the sympathy -and hypocrisy- of white colonial public's anger at British tyranny.91 For example, in line with this necessarily muted rhetoric, but completely ignored by Horowitz, were "petitions of independence" authored by blacks during the

Revolution Era, predating the Declaration of Independence by at least three years.92

Horowitz's excuse for omitting pre-1787 black efforts to systematically undermine slavery is unacceptable in light of the vacillations and contradictions displayed by most white abolitionists and American Enlightenment figures. In the first case history shows that blacks sought various means to achieve their own freedom once the Revolutionary War began. 5000 blacks joined the colonial army hoping that the ideals of the revolution would be applied to them if the insurgents won.93 Black loyalty to the

90 For an example of slave usage of anti-slavery myth, "High John de Conquer," see Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, Xodus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, I 996), 60-63. Paraphrasing James Scott, Robin D.G. Kelley, a historian who utilized this concept in his examination of "informal" black militancy, writes:

"Despite appearances of consent, oppressed groups challenge those in power by constructing a "hidden transcript", a dissident political culture that manifests itself in daily conversations, folklore, jokes, songs and other cultural practices" (Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class [New York: The Free Press, ! 994], 8).

91 See, for example, Phyllis Wheatly's poem quoted in Daniel C. Littlefield, "'Revolutionary Citizens," To Make Our World Anew: A History ofAfrican Americans, ed. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 103.

92 Peter Wood, "Strange New Land: 1619-1776," in To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, ed. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (Oxford: Oxford Universit-y Press, 2000), 99- 100.

93Daniel C. Littlefield, "Revolutionary Citizens: 1776-1804," I 16.

76 principle of freedom transcended any loyalty to colonial nationalism. Blacks slaves fled even "kind masters" like Thomas Jefferson; they did not seek only to escape their particular circumstances, but also to rid themselves of the "peculiar institution's"94 logic and dictates. Since they could not destroy the institution but had few qualms about damaging its economic base in unpaid labor, some took flight, others joined the British army in the wake of Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation "offering freedom to slaves ... of rebellious [colonial] subjects ... able to join and fight."95 Still others fled to "parts unknown," with "Jefferson estimat[ing] that about 25, 000 Virginia slaves left their owners during the war ... many had to endure considerable danger and hardship to do so."96 Attempts to extricate themselves from their particular conditions of enslavement were also simultaneously attacks on the institution itself. Runaway slaves alone cost the institution a great deal in terms oflost capital, reduced production, and the "enforcement cost" in expanded slave patrols when this kind of'"property stole itself."97

All these attempts at self-liberation occurred years before Horowitz's start-date for white abolitionism.98

94 Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956).

95 Daniel C. Littlefield, "Revolutionary Citizens: 1776-1804," 115.

96 Ibid, 117.

97 Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History ofthe American Civil War (Illinois: Open Court, 1996). For in-depth coverage of this point, see Saily E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For earlier coverage of this activity, see Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and the Allies, 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 4-27.

77 White American Abolitionism

Horowitz asserts that "if not for the anti-slavery beliefs and military power of white Englishmen and Americans, the slave trade would not have been brought to an end."99 Moreover, he writes, "If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white

American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in

America would still be slaves."100 The problem with these statements lies not in that they are entirely incorrect but rather in what they exaggerate and what they occlude. For example, one is led to believe from Horowitz's assertions that then President Lincoln was a selfless and strident opponent of slavery. This portrayal is contradicted by political scientists, Haines Walton, Jr. and Robert C. Smith. According to these scholars, during the eve of the Civil War:

As the prospects of succession and civil war increased, the House and Senate appointed special committees to investigate the situation and make recommendations that might avoid war. Among the recommendations proposed by the House committee was an amendment to the Constitution that would have prohibited any amendment to the Constitution granting the Congress the power to interfere in any way with slavery in any state.... This extraordinary amendment, intended to freeze slavery into the Constitution forever, was adopted on March 2,1861 by a Congress that was overwhelmingly northern, since by that time the senators and representatives from seven southern states that had already succeeded were not present. President Lincoln took the extraordinary and completely unnecessary step ofpersonally signing the amendment, the first and only time a president has signed a constitutional amendment [emphasis mine]. 101

Lincoln's position on blacks in America was highly troublesome and contradictory, not unlike the opinion and politics of more genuine white abolitionists. In

99 Horowitz, 2002, 15.

100 Ibid.

101 Walton, Jr. and Smith, American Politics, 198.

78 his book, Reluctant Reformers, sociologist Robert Allen investigates whether liberal white abolitionism was truly as anti-racist as is commonly believed. His answer is a resounding "no."102

Slavery had become a fixed institution at least a century before the America..'l

Revolution. 103 Early proposals to end the "peculiar institution" failed before the combined might of northern merchants and southern planters. Anti-slavery forces failed again at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Northern interests argued that enslaved

Africans and African Americans should not be counted fully for the purpose of apportioning representatives. Southern slave holding interests wanted slaves to count fully in order to increase the region's political clout. A bargain was struck and it was

"written into the United States Constitution ... that each slave would be counted as 3/5 of a person." 104

As the plantation economy expanded at the end of the eighteenth century, so did the power of pro-slavery forces. Black abolitionist activities "converge[d] and unite[ d] in an organized [emphasis mine] movement ... [in the] 1817 conventions in Richmond,

Virginia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania". 105 Thus began the Negro Convention

Movement, its genesis a response to the founding of the American Colonization Society

102 Robert Allen, with the collaboration of Pamela P. Allen, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).

103 Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life. (New York: Double Day and Company, 1957), 3-22; Winthrop D. Jordan, "Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery," in American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader, ed. Allen Weinstein and Frank Otto Gatell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 13-24.

104 Allen, Reluctant Reformers, 12.

105 Ibid., 13.

79 (1816), an association that sought to deport free blacks. The Negro Convention

Movement opposed the colonization efforts by white abolitionists. A few whites were in line with the black position, most notably William L. Garrison, a pacifist and former pro­ colonizationist-turned-staunch-anti-colonialist, as he detailed in his 1832 Thoughts on

African Colonization. 106 But it was a black radical political philosophy, proclaimed both in David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens ofthe World, which militantly railed against slavery itself and in Henry Highland Garnet's call for slave revolts in r..is

1843 Address that really fired up support for abolitionism. John Brown, a militant white abolitionist, was the first to print Walker's Appeal and Garnet's Address together in

1849.

There were vigorous debates on the goals and strategies of the overall movement .

Initially, Frederick Douglass would not back Garnet because he was a believer in

Garrison's pacifist moral suasion approach to the slavery issue. (The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a component of the 1850 Compromise, would cause Douglass to change his mind). Earlier, Nat Turner's Virginia revolt in1831 had spurred militant abolitionism.

Inspired by Turner, Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, which was a forerunner of the larger, inter-racial American Anti-slavery Society founded in 1833.

Horowitz ignores the radicalizing effect black abolitionist had on their white counterparts. In his desire to prove white abolitionists to be the most organized of the lot he fails to closely examine the ideological make-up of his anti-slavery heroes. For

106 Ibid., 14.

80 example, the outlook of the early phase of the white abolitionist movement was largely conciliatory, gradualist, and pro-colonization. This changed only after the influx of black militants and the hardening of the slave system after 1830. Horowitz also ignores the ambiguities about race the relations of blacks to whites that split the movement into separate sections. Whites accepted blacks as members in their militant organizations but some felt an inter-racial group would scare off potential white recruits. Some whites patronized blacks and thought them naturally inferior. These issues effectively stalled the movement.

White American abolitionists should be known and given their due. However, the historical record plainly contradicts this image of black freedom as a gift given by beneficent whites to a mostly stupefied slave and free black population.

British Abolitionism

Horowitz's romanticization of British abolitionism also falls before when the axe of historical evidence. This is true whether we focus on Britain's relationship to in the

United States before and during the Civil War or if we turn our attention toward the various initiatives to "liberate" Africans.

Union forces imposed a blockade on the Confederacy early in the Civil War, which prevented the region from carrying on trade and commerce with the nations of

Europe. However, British merchants proceeded to rake in "handsome profits [from] supplying both the Union and [the] Confederacy with arms, ammunition, and sundry

81 military equipment."107 For the Confederacy, the British built "ironclad warships ... [e ]quipped with seven-foot, wrought-iron, underwater rams and nine-inch rifled guns ... sea-going fortresses [that] might have smashed through the Union blockade."108 This set off a diplomatic incident with the Union, one that forced the

English to back down and to stop their supplies to the South. After the war, the re-United

States would not let the transgression of international norms pass quietly and sought monetary damages for what was technically foreign interference in a domestic civil matter. According to Hummell, "Britain was found not to have exercised 'due diligence' and paid the United States $15.5 million."109

Horowitz's position suffers also from a lack of awareness (or concern) regarding the vested interests colonial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had in perpetuating slavery in the Africa. 110 Did European conquerors truly wish to end slavery in Africa? Certainly there were colonial administrators and local white foes of the institution whom genuinely wanted to see it end, as historians Suzanne Miers and Martin

A. Klein indicate. 111 But more common was the bureaucratic imperative to find the most efficient manner to rule. Horowitz rightly indicates that this emancipation was a gradual

107 Hummell, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, 171.

108 Ibid., 214 -15.

109 Ibid. Furthermore, in 1869, the British blockaded the ports of China against American shipping in order to prevent what was believed to be a revival of slavery in the South with the importation of Chinese workers to replace the now emancipated blacks. Britain opposed a revival of cotton production in the South because it now controlled a new source of cotton production-Egypt. See Stanford M. Lyman, Chinatown and Little Tokyo, 240-42.

110 Joseph E. Inikori, "Slaves or Serfs?" 67.

111 See Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein, eds., Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 4-5.

82 process.112 Some groups of African slave owners such as the Igbo people of Nigeria

(one of the slave strongholds Horowitz identifies) fought tooth-and-nail to maintain their human holdings. 113 The Gold Coast situation was similar. 114 Hence, coloniai efforts to end slave raiding and slave trading are verifiable and commendable. 115

However, efforts by of the same powers to keep the institution of slavery intact are not. In a recent compilation of essays by several authors designed specifically to

"cast more light on the flaws and hypocrisies of colonial policies as well as on the subtle infinite variations in the legacy of slavery" in Africa, Miers and Klein find that the authors are unanimous in their belief "of the reluctance of colonial regimes to deal with slavery." 116 Their piecemeal approach was due largely to financial considerations and administrative convenience. 117 What colonials did to appear beneficent also deserves scrutiny. Suffering seemingly under "the white man's burden," colonial administrations propagandized for full freedom. In reality, however, they chose to altered but not eliminate African slavery. Their reasons for doing so were strategic:

112 Horowitz, p. 131.

113 Miers and Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa, 5.

114 Ibid., 6.

liS Ibid., 1.

116 Ibid., 4.

117 Miers and Klein explain:

'"[The authors] show how, short of European manpower and reluctant to spend more than minimal sums on their colonies, they depended largely on slave-holding elites to administer their empires. They were convinced that without slave labour, economic activity would declined dramatically and the colonies would be a drain on metropolitan taxpayers. However, to appease humanitarian groups at home, they often clothed their actions in anti-slavery rhetoric and issued pronouncements or proclaimed laws which were all too often merely cosmetic or simply unenforceable" (Ibid., 4).

83 As their [European] empires expanded ... they sought an approach to slavery that would neither antagonize African elites nor draw fire from humanitarian groups at home. Under British law slavery had to be outlawed in colonies. To avoid this, as new areas were conquered, they were designated "protectorates". In these they could use the model of abolition work out by the British in India Under tr.is 21 model slavery lost its legal status but did not become illegal • This meant, in theory, that the colonial regime did not recognize rights over slaves in colonial courts, nor- again in theory - did it return runaways or permit slave-ov.-11ers to use force to retrieve or retain their slaves. This was acceptable to many colonial policy-makers, and even to some humanitarian's because they believed that slaves in Africa were in general well treated. The hope was that this model would enable the seriously oppressed to leave, but would keep most slaves in place and at work, until eventually they were replaced by a free wage labour force- the ultimate aim. This solution was cheap.118

21 See Miers 1975, and Miers and Roberts, pp. 12-13.

Reparationists cannot even find full comfort in the "purer" humanitarian impulse of British abolitionists. A closer look must be taken at the motivations and goals of the men to whom Horowitz is implicitly referring when he celebrates the British abolitionist movement. Their noble motives for erasing the scourge of slavery is ultimately a fulfillment of "the white man's burden." Historian Jack Gratus had this to say about t..1.e handful of Quakers who founded the famous London Abolition Committee in 1787, one of the earliest organizations dedicated to the end of slavery:

The abolitionists in Britain like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Thomas Buxton saw their campaign as both "positive" and "negative"; the latter policy was the destruction of the slave trade by persuading or coercing participating nations to cease the traffic. The "positive" policy can be summarized as Christianity, commerce, and colonialism. 10 To destroy slavery once and for all, they argued, it was essential to maintain a legitimate trade with Africa, to make the heathen blacks Christian, and to bestow on them the benefits of white Christian morality. Since the basis of their "positive" policy was a belief in the inherent superiority of white Christian civilisation, this beliefbecame entrenched and respectable, and in a less obvious but more insidious way than

118 Ibid.

84 outright racism became the moral and religious raison d'etre for colonial expansion and imperial arrogance.

10 coup Ian d, op. ctt., . 160-76. 119

Reparationists are therefore far more right than wrong when they center their redress claims on western powers (in this case, the American colonies of England and post-Revolution United States) than African polities past or present. African slavery on the whole was far less brutal and expansive than the European/American dominated slave trade and the treatment of slaves that followed.

Fourth Head: White Slavery

Horowitz asserts, "There were white slaves in colonial America" 120 His pretext for raising the question is explicit: "Are their descendents going to receive payments?"121

While this may seem to be a question concerned with policy, the underlying purpose for both the assertion and the question is to undercut the moral authority of the black reparations claim. By presenting this little-known practice as an offense equally immoral if not numerically equal to black slavery, Horowitz hopes to prove not only that "there is no single group responsible for the crime of slavery"122 but also that no one racial group was its victim. Since whites are not seeking restitution for this "identical" offence, blacks should not either. Horowitz scores rhetorically because he has successfully paralleled

119 Jack Gratus, The Great White Lie: Slavery, Emancipation, and Changing Racial Attitudes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 16.

120 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 12.

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid.

85 white slavery/ "reparations" with black slavery/ "reparations" in the public mind. To support one logically presupposes support for the other. Conversely, if one is found to be ridiculous, so is the other to some extent.

Conceptual clarity and appropriateness will go a long way to refute Horowitz's

"white slavery" assertion.123 Is he correct? Were there white slaves in colonial America?

In the most minuscule way, the answer is "yes." According to labor historian Jacqueline

Jones there was only one category of white persons who were enslaved in colonial

America: white women who gave birth to babies sired by enslaved black men. 124 A 1664

Virginia decree was designed by colonial officials to punish white women for transgressing racial-sexual boundaries. White men, the vast majority of males fathering mulatto children during slavery, never faced such severe punishment. Yet this statute, lasting seventeen years, was ''"a development that made colonial officials decidedly uncomfortable" and was rescinded in 1681.125

One cannot help notice that in the only properly documented case of white slavery in colonial America, the group's enslavement was a horrendous by-product of black slavery! These women were enslaved for no other reason than ethno-cultural racism, not for economic reasons, as was the case with most Africans and colonial blacks. Are the ancestors of this tiny and fleeting number of legally enslaved whites the population

Horowitz thinks could lay claim to reparations on the same grounds as blacks? Perhaps,

123 So will historical evidence. Horowitz does not produce one piece of evidence backing this claim in Uncivil Wars.

124Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries ofBlack and White Labor (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), 49, 53.

125 Jones, American Work, 49.

86 but he gives no indication of being aware of this minor historical event. In fact, he presents no evidence whatsoever in his book in support of his white slavery assertion.

This explosive declaration, one sentence in a 147-page polemic dedicated to "the controversy over reparations for slavery," is pure rhetoric, unsubstantiated by evidence.

But Horowitz probably does not have these unfortunate women (or their unfortunate black mates and children) in mind when he draws his comparison.

Conservative critics of slavery often point to the large number of white indentured servants working in the colonies as proof of the debilitating "multi-racial" nature of slavery. It is true that most labor in the colonial era was "unfree" and subject to "hard usage." 126 But did this mean that whites under this category were slaves? To answer in the affirmative demonstrates a con:flation of fundamentally divergent modes of racial existence, an error untangled when confronted by historically-informed concepts and relevant data

Historian M. L Bush provides such concepts in an analysis of "'bonded white servitude" in the Americas. 127 He identifies six types of servitude "unfree" whites experienced. The best known is indentured servitude. Under this type of bondage, many

126 Yet hard usage was not slavery in fact. Jones writes:

"When seventeenth-century English colonists described themselves or unfortunates compatriots as 'slaves,' they were in fact using the term metaphorically. It is true that some white adults toiled under conditions of extreme duress or dependency ... Still, these workers could claim membership in a historic English community, a community that failed to protect the well-being of its members in all cases, but nonetheless a community of people bound together by certain expectations of what was due them under law and custom. After years of hard work, white ethnics and their offspring might also lay claim to 'Englishness," a status increasingly associated with a white skin and a European lineage. In contrast, persons of African descent retained their 'strangeness' long after ethnic servants outgrew it" (Ibid., 53).

127 Bush, Servitude in Modern Times.

87 Europeans who came to the American colonies "before leaving the home country, had signed a legal document specifying the conditions and duration of service. Following their arrival and sale, a note was made to that effect on the back of the indenture."128 A second form of bondage Bush refers to as servants by statute. Under this type of bondage whites "were simply bound by 'custom of the country' and the colonial laws appertaining. No legal document was signed."129 Both forms took root in the seventeenth century. Redemptioning, another form of bondage originating in the eighteenth century, was also an option for whites. According to Bush:

After making the transatlantic passage without prior payment, they [the redemptioners] eventually signed an indenture of service in the New World and submitted themselves for sale. But this only happened after a fourteen-day period of grace in which they were given the chance to redeem themselves by somehow finding the fare. Succeeding, they settled as free persons; failing, they became bonded servants. 130

In the above cases whites voluntarily agreed to become servants or to expose themselves to this liability. Bush states there were also three forms of involuntary bondage whites did experience: those kidnapped from Europe into American servitude, convicts sent to America to serve their sentences, and those who broke colonial law by not paying debts or committing "larceny, arson and forgery and then, if unable to pay the fine, [were] subjected to bonded labour." 131 Both exported and local convicts "were

128 Ibid., 57.

129 Ibid., 57-58.

130 Ibid., 58.

131 Ibid.

88 assigned for a given term to whomsoever was prepared to buy them." 132 In both involuntary and voluntary bondage whites could be sold, would receive no wages for labor, and could not choose their master. 133 Some engaged in fieldwork. 134

There were some commonalities in the legal treatment of white servants and black slaves. 135 However, the overall societal treatment of black slaves and white servants diverged far more than it dovetailed. Most "unfree" white colonials consented to their own bondage or were convicted of a crime-many often of a capital crime such as rebellion.136 Their bondage was temporary while black bondage quickly became life-long by custom137 and by law138 during the middle years of the seventeenth century. White bondspersons could legally own property, 139 testify and sue in court, received customary and legal protections against abuse by their masters, and could possess weapons including firearms. Blacks were generally denied these rights and privileges. While they

132 Ibid.

133 Ibid.

134 Ibid., 61.

135 Ibid., 63

136 Ibid., 66-67.

137 The classic example of this is the John Punch case of 1640. See Ronald Takaki's, A Different Mirror: A History ofMulticultural America: A History ofMulticultural America (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993), 56.

138 See Takaki's coverage of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 for the crystallization racial inequality in the wake of the disturbance. Takaki, A Different Mirror, 63-68.

139 A tiny minority of enslaved black came to "own" low-value personal property and on rare exception more substantial forms of wealth with the surreptitious consent of their masters. See Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 29-60 and Juliet E. Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan; London Prentice Hall, 1998), 52-82.

89 received no wages during their term of bondage, white servants were given several incentives140 for their continued "good" work. 141

Of particular relevance to the reparations debate is the fact that bonded whites, including indentured servants, were given a "freedom due" at the end of their servitude.

This due usually came in the form of a land grant of thirty to fifty acres. 142 This due cannot be considered "reparations" for an economic wrong because it was the servant who owed money to the master, not the other way around. Nor can it be considered compensation for the "surplus value" generated above and beyond expenses the master incurred covering the servant's oceanic voyage or his upkeep while bonded. The servant voluntarily forfeited any right to this future wealth once he signed the contract. The glaring contrast is that while for nearly two centuries, white servants were given the material wherewithal to become economically self-sufficient after seven years of voluntary service; blacks would not receive even 40 acres per family for 246 years of coerced labor. Blacks received no "freedom dues" after emancipation, much less true compensation, for their unpaid "super-exploited" labor, personal "pain and suffering" and cultural assault.

140 Bush, Servitude In Modern Times, 61.

141 Jones calls into to question the quality and quantity of white production as compared to black. Masters often complained how difficult it was to get whites to put in a solid days work. This should not to be taken to mean that white servants were naturally lazy, as black slaves would be later accused, but rather that between the date of their first day of labor up to the end of their contracts white servants had little reason to work at full capacity since to do so had no bearing on the length of their servitude. (Jones, American Work, 55-80).

142 Bush, Servitude In Modern Times, 64.

90 Fifth Head: Non-Slave Owning Whites

This brings us to the related question of whether non-slave owning whites benefited from black slavery. This is a major sticking-point for Horowitz for he argues that since only 20 percent of southern whites owned slaves, then descendents of those who did not, most of white America, are in no way obligated to pay reparations.

While it must be stressed that the major reparationist organizations in existence today do not direct their claims against the descendents of white slave owners or whites in general, 143 I concur with the reparationist political/legal strategy of holding institutions like the U.S. government144 and private corporations accountable. However, it should be made clear that this decision is strategic and visionary; its goal is to obtain compensation for blacks in a way that balances this primary concern with an equally genuine concern to improve race relations in the country.145 It is therefore best for America that reparationists do not seek to recover damages from individual members of the dominant racial group.

143 See TransAfiica Forum, "Restatement of the Black Manifesto," available from http://www.transafiicaforum.org/reports/roundtable011100 manifesto.shtml: Internet; accessed 16 November 2002 and N'COBRA, "About Us: Information about N'COBRA," available from http://www.ncobra.com/nbusiness/ncobrainformationlaboutncobra.html: Internet; accessed 18 November 2002.

144Don E. Fehrenbacher and Ward McAfee's The Slaveholding Republic: An Account ofthe U.S. Government's Relations to Slavery, is a book that raises many difficult issues for both reparationists and anti-reparationists. However, the basic thesis of the book would still support reparationist claims against the government for slavery (though I doubt this is the intention of its authors). Fehrenbacher and McAffee write: "'The framers of the Constitution had not intended to make slavery a national institution supported by the union's fundamental law. Yet, overtime, the antebellum federal government adopted the position that slavery was a national institution fully protected by the Constitution" (Don E. Fehrenbacher and Ward McAfee, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account ofthe U.S. Government's Relations to Slavery, completed and ed. Ward M. McAfee. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001] ix).

145 See TransAfiica's statement, http://www.transafiicaforum.org/reports/roundtableO 11100 manifesto.shtml

91 Yet, one should not infer from this decision that a valid case against non-slave owning whites could not be made. Several scholars have provided ample historical evidence ofthe racial benefits of slavery (and segregation) to working-class whites. 146

These benefits were economic, cultural and political. Surprisingly, even bonded servants gained, as Bush reveals:

The presence of black slaves in substantial numbers not only promoted a more elevated view of white bonded servants but also lightened their burden of work. Originally, bonded servants were required to do whatever the master ordered. When this led to making artisans labour in the fields, the work must have seemed extremely arduous. However, the arrival of slaves narrowed down, and alleviated, the work expected of them. By the 1680's the field work on the plantations of Barbados and Jamaica was confined to blacks, with the possible exception of a few white convicts. Within the next hundred years, Maryland and Virginia went the same way. In fact, the employment of bonded servants as farm laborers only endured in the regions with a low concentration of slaves, notably the American middle colonies and New England. Where slave labor was extensively used in the fields, bonded servants came to be mainly employed as skilled artisans.... eventually the black slaves took over the skilled positions on the plantations.... Displaced by slaves as skilled and unskilled laborers, white servants continue to be employed in domestic service, as labour supervisors and as plantation managers. In this way, the range of work required of them became confined to relatively light and amenable tasks.147

Even the fieldwork they in which they did share, further racial distinctions evolved. Labor tasks were bifurcated whenever practical. For example, "hemp became known as a 'nigger crop' ... " because poor whites refused "growing ... [it] (and also

146 A host of scholars have been grouped under the rubric of "white studies". See Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997) for representative works by authors in this sub-field. Horowitz despises this intellectual corpus and makes special mention of it in Uncivil Wars in several places. Yet for all his disparagement of the theories and politics of this school of thought, he does not take the time to empirically refute its claims. Dismissal is not the same as discrediting a perspective. For a more thorough unfriendly critique, see Robert Weissberg, "Play That Funky Logical Positivism, White Boy; Or If you Are Going to Be White, Do it White," in Race in 2 ]"' Century America, ed. Curtis Stokes, Theresa Melendez and Genice Rhodes-Reed, foreword by Darlene Clark Hine (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001), 397-423.

147 Bush, Servitude in Modern Times, 63-64.

92 breaking the tough stalks in particular) was 'very dirty, and so laborious that scarcely any white man work at it.' " 148 The evolution of white prerogatives to better jobs, rights, and customary privileges of the society did not end where the fields ended. Distinctions in this area and other areas of work became more apparent by the late eighteenth century. 149

The most difficult or unpleasant tasks were reserved for blacks.

Non-slaveholding whites reaped from black enslavement in other ways.

Economically, whites, including white women, were generally given preference for the better jobs or in getting hired for any job over blacks. They, and white males to a greater degree, were able to take this "extra racial income" home to benefit not only themselves but also their entire families. 150 Economic advantages in terms of income and assets

(recall the 50 acre freedom dues many white ex-servants received) often translated into the possibility of purchasing slaves to augment other wealth-holdings. Here Horowitz is again open to attack. The important point is that "non-slave owners wanted to become

148 Jones, American Work, 208.

149 Ibid., 84:

"Toward the end of the eighteenth century, black and white men might still find themselves at work together (when they dug the Potomac Canal in 1786, for example), but they were likely to be set apart from one another by their status-the white men either as hirelings or 7 indentured servants, the black men as slaves "

See Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging ofNorth American Canals, 1780-1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p.2.

150 Many will assume white males held the favored position in the labor market vis-a-vis blacks in antebellum times but far less know that white women also enjoyed employment advantages over blacks. For example, white women in the 1700s up to at least 1840 had become the nation's first industrial proletariat. While the reason for this was because white men preferred and reserved better paid and more prestigious craft work for themselves, blacks were barred the most part due to racial discrimination. Paid domestic work, the traditional occupational niche of women of both races, also favored whites over blacks. See Jones, American Work, 284. Blacks were left to do mostly menial labor outside of this growing economic sector. Moreover, white women did not face the lynching or hate strikes black workers did. See Philip F. Rubio, A History ofAffirmative Action, 1619-2000 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 21.

93 slave owners- and supported that mentality throughout the early nation's culture." 151

Many poor whites psychologically benefited from the economic opportunities and cultural conventions that permitted even the most bedraggled bonded "buckra" to think he was better than the "niggra" next to him in the field. They both knew the white would eventually be free, own the sweat of his labor, and likely end up tilling his own field. All this was not for the black slave. Knowledge of this upward white class trajectory could not help but to add to the slaves' misery while making the servants' load lighter. As Jones pointed out, the social meaning oflabor, a changing phenomenon shaped by several societal forces, is not the product of individual imagination. Unlike the white servant, the black slaves' dreams of freedom and farmland could only turn him every which way but loose. 152 It is likely to assume that the superior class advantages white non-slave owners enjoyed explains why by 1860 88% of all persons owning slaves in the U.S. were small property owners.153 One hundred thirty five years earlier Virginia instituted a blatant policy of wealth transference from slaves to poor whites.154 Approximately 70 years later the same colony enticed soldiers to fight the war for American Independence with the promise of receiving a "prime" slave and 300 acres ofland per soldier.155

1s1.See Jones, American Work, 205.

1s2 For an urban counterpart of this eco-cultural ''psychology," see Jones, American work, 248-49.

1s3 Rubio, A History, 20.

154 Takaki quotes the colonial statue:

'"[A ]II horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave, or of any slave mark ... shall be seized and sold by the churchwardens of the parish ... and the profit thereof applied to the use of the poor.'" (Takaki, A Different Mirror, 67-68)

ISS Ibid., 68.

94 Cultural privileges were also accorded non-slave owning whites. A prime example of this is how non-propertied whites were given leave to lord over slaves they did not own as well as free blacks. In the wake of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, a failed revolt of white indentured servants denied freedom dues and freedom-seeking blacks, colonial powers punished both (but blacks worse).156 However, in the wake of this rebellion, slave-less whites were given the right to whip any black resisting the will of any "Christian."157 Mandatory deference to whites from slaves and free blacks predates the Rebellion and would continue for centuries, even after emancipation.

Politically, early nineteenth-century America witnessed the further consolidation of white advantage for non-slaveholding, non-propertied whites. The 1829 to 183 7 presidency of Andrew Jackson politically benefited non-slave owning working-class whites at the expense of blacks. Jacksonian "democracy" expanded the right to vote to non-propertied white men while blacks were disenfranchised all over the South and North regardless of their possession of property. 158

Black reparationists are making a claim for compensation based on the social fact that black slavery was a massive, long-lasting, multi-institutional, brutal, exploitative, racially specific set of practices and ideologies whose economic and cultural legacy adversely impacts black progress today. White slavery was short-lived, minuscule, and not racially motivated. There is no way white slavery was substantial enough to impede the progress of the white race either in the colonial era or up to present-day.

156 Ibid., 67.

157 Ibid.

158Rubio, A History ofAffirmative Action, 21-26.

95 White slavery did not exploit enough individual whites to economically debilitate their overall population. White slavery did not lead to the establishment of a large white underclass during its seventeen-year "practice," nor did it contribute to white poverty centuries later.

On the other hand, there is overwhelming evidence of how whites benefited from the enslavement of blacks even when they did not directly own slaves. The racial strictures of slavery augmented the economic, cultural, political and psychological standing of most whites to some degree, usually to a great degree.

Sixth Head: Free Blacks

Horowitz asserts, "During the slavery era, many blacks were free men ... yet the reparations claimants make no attempt to take this fact into account."159 In another section, he propounds, ''Hundreds of thousand of free blacks in America had citizen rights, including the right to own slaves ... Though free blacks could not vote in many states, some, like Frederick Douglass were respected statesmen in their own right." 160

Horowitz makes it seem that free blacks during slavery were nearly equal in rights, treatment and social standing to whites. As "proof' he points to the ownership of slaves by some free blacks. The latter association was thoroughly dismantled and debunked above.

This particular hydra head can be destroyed with a few sharp blows. Theodore L.

Sylvester provides some of the weapons. Life in the main was deplorable for free blacks.

159 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 13.

160 Ibid., 81

96 Reminiscent of Ronald Takaki's point above that since 1676 (at least) whites were free to physically punish any blacks they felt were "belligerent," Sylvester adds that "if found guilty of certain crimes, free blacks were subject to public whippings and the possibility of enslavement, fates that no whites were forced to endure."161 In the matter of political rights, "In the North, only five states, four of them in New England, permitted free blacks to vote. Free blacks could not vote anywhere in the South." 162 Some free blacks were forced to leave the states where they were emancipated as was the case in Virginia. 163

Most were not free to travel where they wished, even in the North. 164 "By 1835, most free blacks in the South had lost the right of free assembly," writes Sylvester.165

Economically, they were legally and violently relegated to t.a'le worst jobs, pushed out of skilled trades by white workers, barred from labor unions and suffered poverty so severe that a tiny minority even chose to re-enslave themselves in order to acquire the basic prerequisites oflife.166 More generally, free blacks were re-enslaved by kidnappers preying mainly on those living in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, states close to the Mason-Dixon line with "a greater free black population than the rest of the country combined from 1790 to 1860.''167

161 Sylvester, Slavery Throughout History Almanac, 157.

162 Ibid.

163 An 1806 Virginia law expelling free blacks from state, neighboring states pass law forbidding them permanent residence. See Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk Virginia, 1790-1860,29.

164 Sylvester, Slavery Throughout History Almanac, 160.

165 Ibid., 170-71.

167 See Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping ofFree Blacks in America, 1780-1865 (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 10-11.

97 Horowitz's rhetorical differentiation of antebellum free blacks from enslaved black is more a conceptual feat than an actual fact. One must ask how free could any black person have been truly when the majority of their friends, family and race were enslaved in America before 1865?168 Slaveholders knew social bonds between differently positioned blacks did not end at the outer edge of their plantations and they used these connections to their advantage whenever they could. 169 The connection between free blacks and those still enslaved was not incidental; it was sociological, economic, political, personal and ethical, as historian James Oliver Horton elaborates in his book,

Free People ofColor: Inside the African American Community. 170 Horowitz ignores these dimensions, preferring to focus his attention of the fractional number of free blacks who were slaveholders171 as if this minute statistic was a fair indication of relationship between free blacks and enslaved blacks in general. Under these adverse circumstances, free blacks were not truly free for centuries, but rather were what historian Ira Berlin more aptly described as "slaves without masters."172

Besides having grounds for compensation for racial discrimination and racist terrorism, descendents of antebellum free blacks could also demand compensation for the

168 Economic class did not inhibit this to the extent Horowitz would cynically summarize. For example two of the most prosperous blacks in antebellum America, Chicagoans John and Mary Jones, were "nationally known abolitionists." See Deborah Gray White, Let My People Go: African Americans, 1804- 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 119.

169 For example, Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 233.

170 James Oliver Horton, Free People ofColor: Inside the African American Community (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, I 993).

171 Sundiata essay says only I% at most (Cha-Jua, "'Slavery, Racist Violence, American Apartheid.').

172 Berlin, Slaves Without Masters.

98 loss of income they endured every time they purchased the freedom of enslaved blacks for familial or humamtarian reasons. These expenditures were substantial and further depleted resource-bare free communities of savings and wealth. 173 Moreover, any black slave who had to purchase his or her own freedom would also be eligible for compensation. 174

Seventh Head: Black Slave Owners

Horowitz's surprising revelation of black slave ownership in America is two- pronged. First is the revelation that it existed at all, a fact known by few. Second is a statistical point, namely, that "there were 3000 blacks slave-owners in the antebellum

United States." 175 Horowitz accuses reparationists of"reverse racism" because they

"make no attempt to take this fact into account" 176 when making their claims against whites. His reason for raising these points is explicit and subtextual. His explicit reason is one of policy: "Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?" 177 Yet it is the subtext of his argument which is most damaging. The subtext of the argument is that if blacks had been given equal opportunity to enslave they would have done so and treated

173 According to Sylvester:

"'The price depended on the circumstances, but it was usually set at what the slave would cost on the open market," (Slavery Throughout History Almanac, 158). Also see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 235.

174 For more on self-purchase by slaves, see Sumner Eliot Matison, "'Manumission by Purchase," Journal ofNegro History 33 (April1948): 146-167

175 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 12.

176 Ibid., 13

177 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 12.

99 slaves as deplorably as whites. Driven by an avarice equal to whites, blacks so endowed would have enslaved their own people (as they allegedly did in Africa, according to

Horowitz) and treated black slaves as poorly as the white masters did. The philosophical implication of this subtext is that universal human nature- "greed" and a "thirst for power" - were more the root causes of slavery and its egregious assaults on black humanity, rather than a deep-seated Eurocentric racism combined with a system of capitalist production.178

Horowitz ignores the basic fact that one cannot have widespread enslavement conducted by either whites or blacks unless a slave system exists. The slave system in

America was an interlocking and evolving set of economic, cultural, political and legal initiatives operating to set the general societal conditions which permitted and supported the involuntary possession of one human being by another. The establishment of a slave system in America meant that the ownership of slaves was no longer left entirely up to the individual philosophy, morality, or class position but far beyond these micrological factors, the very possibility of owning others and their offspri..11g in perpetuity was now legitimated, facilitated and indeed coerced by societal institutions. In other words, black slavery in America had become a fully crystallized social fact by at least the mid-

1660s,179 not merely the result of individual lapses before "the seven deadly sins." 180

178 Horowitz can do no more than rest on "luck and pluck" in the eternal drive to "truck and barter" no matter the societal constraints or ethical compromises. Society and its social facts are little more tha., the aggregation ofthe will and wants of individuals. Society and its conventions are fundamentally and ubiquitously molecular in this sense.

179 See Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life, 3-22 and Winthrop D. Jordan, "Modem Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery," 13-24.

18°For a socio-theological analysis of the "seven deadly sins," see Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins.

100 Slavery, best understood as a social fact, is therefore analyzed most appropriately with sociological) economic and/or historical concepts and methods, not with psychological profiles or "character studies" in morality. In order to have produced a sound social scientific study of slavery and its significance to the socio-economic situation of twenty-first century blacks, Horowitz would have had to have followed the basic methodological directives of one of sociology's founding fathers, Emile Durkhiem.

Doing so, Horowitz would have avoided his reduction of society-level matters to instinctual or learned behavior, and instead would have render an account of the social fact of slavery by first examining the "energies capable of producing it," in other words, other social facts. 181 Following this Durkheimian approach, the basic question relevant for this section becomes, how was it that black slave ownership in the thousands was even possible during a time of widespread black enslavement and anti-black racism?

Obviously, the institution of American racial slavery existed as an overarching social fact that in one of its many paradoxes facilitated the existence of another much smaller but apparently complementary social fact: black slave ownership.

But beyond this proper recontextualization, Horowitz would still need to communicate to readers the relative scale and power of black slave ownership as a social fact before making more general claims and inferences about its practice. To employ a social fact as part of a sociological explanation without clearly establishing whether the fact either occurs frequently enough to constitute reasonable proofof a general societal pattern, or, if not frequent, is yet so powerful and critical to the general operation of the

181 Emile Durkheim, The Rules ofSociological Method, 8th ed., trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller, ed. George E. G. Catlin (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1938).

101 societal institution (in this case, slavery) as to dominate existing patterns, is an unforgivable lapse in research methodology that makes accurate findings and sound political statements impossible.

A proper sociological-historical investigation of social facts can be pursued correctly through quantitative analysis, to name only one approach. 182 It is for this reason that Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua's critique of Horowitz's black slave owner assertion is as methodologically correct as it is empirically. Using statistics, Sundiata first appears to strengthen Horowitz's case. He reveals that "Actually, the 1830 census lists 3,777 Black slave owners, not 3,000 as Horowitz carelessly states."183 But the 21 percent underestimation that would have favored Horowitz, if this difference had been included, would not help his case fundamentally, as Cha-Jua reveals:

The existence of3777 black slaveholders is meaningless without knowing the total number of slaveholders. In 1850 there were 348,000 slave holding families (the Census Bureau collected data on families, not individuals). Thus, the three thousand, seven hundred and seventy-seven Black slaveholders comprise only about one P' rcent of slaveholding families! 184

Yet, it is fair to ask whether one can rightly infer from quantitative data the qualitative character of sociological relations between groups?185 Horowitz chooses to

182 For a comprehensive historical review and analysis of the use of qualitative research methods in the study of social phenomena, see Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, ''Qualitative Methods: Their History in Sociology and Anthropology," in Handbook ofQualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1994), 23-59.

183 Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "Slavery, Racist Violence, American Apartheid: The Case for Reparations," New Politics, vol. 8, no. 3 [new series], whole no. 31, Summer 2001 [journal on-line]; available from http://www.wpunj.edu/-newpol/issue31/chajua31.htm; Internet; accessed 14 November 2002

184 Ibid.

185 Weber would have supported my position:

102 deduce the social characteristics of black slave ownership using statistical data and only one concrete case study.186 Doing so is methodologically unsound, as Cha-Jua criticizes. 187

Horowitz interprets statistics of black slave ownership as indications of slaveholding for commercial purposes by this group. He strongly contests the claim made by two of his critics, Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr., that black slave ownership was humanitarian and based on the purchases of family and friends. 188 He grounds his position in a statement on the matter by slavery historian Larry Koger:

The census of 1850 demonstrated that 83.1 percent of the Negro masters were mulattoes, while nearly 90 percent of their slaves were of dark skin. Where was the kinship? Since mulattoes primarily married mulattoes, the black folk owned by the light-skinned Afro-Americans were seldom kin and were overwhelmingly held as laborers. By and large, Negro slaveowners were darker copies of their white counterparts. 189

"To give a correct causal interpretation of a typical [author's emphasis] action ... is to show that the occurrence which is said to be typical not only seems to be adequate to some degree or other on the level of meaning but is also to some degree or other causally adequate. Without adequacy on the level of meaning, our generalizations remain mere statements of statistical [author's emphasis] probability, either not intelligible at all or only imperfectly intelligible ..." (Weber, Max Weber, 15).

186 For more on this case study, see Lany Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Master in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (Jefferson, North Carolina: Mcfarland & Co. Publishers, 1985.

187 Cha-Jua rightly criticizes this strategy:

"... African-Americans slave owners were a statistical reality that tells us nothing about actual social relationships. Although some black slave owners held others in bondage, that is asserted rights of ownership and exploited slave labor, most did not. They were people of some means who purchased family and friends from [author's emphasis] bondage, but never imposed master-slave relationships" (Cha-Jua, "Slavery, Racist Violence, American Apartheid: The Case for Reparations").

My critique ofHorowitz's use of Koger reinforces Cha-Jua's point.

188 Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr., "Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz."

189 Koger, Black Slaveowners, xiii.

103 A critique of Horowitz's methods and levels of social analysis should not be limited to a war ofnumbers.190 Social facts, as the work of founding sociologist Max

Weber exemplifies, cannot be fully understood without paying attention to patterns of social action groups manifest when forming and engaging institutional formations. 191

The scientific study of society, a standard Horowitz wishes applied to the public debate over reparations, engenders not only a search for "diachronic" (historical) and

"synchronic" (contemporary) social facts but is also inseparably an interpretive enterprise. It is this attention to the interpretation of social facts that must be applied here to Horowitz's generalizations.

Koger's findings are correct and generally supported, though one should question his logic for making "mulatto masters" unrelated to black slaves. A better way to comprehend this socio-anthropological phenomenon is found in the works of historian

Loren Schweninger who combines class, ancestry, social milieu and regional factors to

190 Statistical analysis can indicate the existence, scale, and frequency of a social phenomena but this method is less indicative of the daily lived "anthropological" reality, ethical principles, or political mentality of subjects. Revealing the "external processes of action which seem to us to be the 'same' or 'similar' may result from very different complexes of meaning, as seen by the agent or agents; and we can also 'understand' actions which are intended to deal with situations which seem to us to be 'similar', but which differ markedly from each other and may even be totally opposed to each other in meaning" (Weber, Max Weber, 13) is best handled with qualitative methods and research.

191 I am not attempting to conflate Durkheim's "social fact" with Weber's "social action" but rather wish to emphasize their complementarity when applied to this point in my argument because I stress not only the coercive aspect of society but also the agency of social actors-in this case, slave-owners. This requires that human action not be reduced to "human behavior," which botl-t Durkheim and Weber would deem to be the purview of those who study instinctual and conditioned responses to stimuli. Rather we should keep conceptually distinct different types of human agency and the means by which the act upon their physical or social environments. Hence, I am more comfortable thinking of the varieties of social action-traditional, affective, absolute, and "means-end"-as the kinds of individual or collective forces that sustain or affect change upon a social fact. See Weber, Max Weber, 25-32.

104 explain the split between mulatto slave owners, black slaves, and for that matter, blacks in general. 192

Yet, the real issue here is not whether black slave ownership in South Carolina occurred, but rather Horowitz's extrapolation of its pattern ofnon-hu.rnanitarian black slave ownership as the general characteristic of this phenomenon throughout the rest of the South and America overall. Horowitz's claim is grounded in the peculiar case of

South Carolina's unusually high percentage of black commercial ownership of slaves.

Koger even admits that South Carolina "may not have been the typical Southern state where free blacks owned slaves."193

Why then does Horowitz choose an obviously exceptional circumstance of non- benign slave ownership among blacks to back his claim? By using Koger as his only illustrative source to make his black slave owners point about first, their unexpected existence, and second, their alleged exploitation of slaves, Horowitz violates a central tenet of social scientific investigation: the degree to which a finding can be said to be representative of a general pattern.194 By explicitly presenting the South Carolina case as

192 Schweninger, Black property Owners ofthe South and Loren Schweninger, "'Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790-1880," The American Historical Review 95, no. I (I 990): The socio-political split between mixed-raced owners who predominated the total number of"black" slaveholders and black slaves was real and substantial, though stating that the reason for this was the lack of familial relations is a weak explanation. Schweninger is more nuanced on this point. It could also be argued that the biggest between black slave owners and black slaves was not slave ownership, per se, since this was a common freedom strategy throughout the country. Rather, being a slave owned by a black owner more likely to exploit and mistreat him/her for commercial reasons. See John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, 199-203.

193 Koger, Black Slaveowners, 2.

194 Of course generalization is not the only raison d'etre of social science. For example, focus group research is specifically designed to gain deeper insights into the attitudes of segments of population while eschewing general claims. See David L. Morgan, Focus Group Kit (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1998).

105 indicative of a general pattern, he has misled his readership and listening audience.

Without taking the time to prove his point "scientifically" (let us say, "statistically") or beyond a reasonable common sense doubt (not in the legal sense but with a preponderance of evidence), Horowitz's ideal type here (and in the several "hydra head" comparisons he makes) remains a stereotype.

A proper survey of black slaveholding in America, about which there is no lack of scholarship, serves as a corrective. Horowitz's subtext ofblack slave ownership for profit was not true for Louisiana, 195 North Carolina, 196 Virginia, 197 Maryland, 198 or New

York.199 His claim does not hold even for the South in general.200 Moreover, black slave ownership, which in reality was rare for ethical and financial reasons, was theoretically possible only because a racist slave system already existed, a system designed primarily by whites for the benefit of whites. Since the overwhelming number of those who enslaved blacks were white, and did so for commercial reasons, while most blacks who did enslave blacks did so to get them away from whiter and worse situations, it is

195 H. E. Sterkx, The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972), 236-237.

196 John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 159-161.

197 Tommy L. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk Virginia, 1790-1860:The Darker Side ofFreedom (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1997), 33. Also see Ira Berlin, Marry Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries ofSlavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1998), 323.

198 Christopher Phillips, Freedom's Port: The African American Community ofBaltimore: 1790- 1860, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 95.

199 Sherrill D. Wilson, New York City's African Slaveowners: A Social and Material Culture History (New York: Garland Pub, 1994), 75.

200 Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, 273.

106 inaccurate and misleading to present black slave ownership as anything but humanitarian.

Overall, Horowitz selected a non-representative case to make a general point, a point designed to undermine the moral power of the reparations claim. Here reactionary rhetoric outraced reality.201

Returning to the question of reparations for black slave owners, historical research supports this claim. However, descendants of black slave owners have not to this date pursued redress individually or in a class action suit. Like most reparationists, most descendants of black slave owners seeking redress desire "rehabilitative reparations" for the entire blacks community.202 Thus, to answer Horowitz's query, the living descenda..'lts of black slave owners are not direct "plaintiffs", nor would they be direct beneficiaries of reparations- although they would have good cause to make such a claim.

201 Durkheim warns against the rhetorical leveling of qualitatively different but categorically similar social facts, especially for ideological purposes:

" ... A [social] thing is a force which can be engendered only by another force. In rendering an account of social facts, we seek, then, energies capable of producing them ... 1f sociological phenomena are only systems of objectivized ideas, [then all that is needed] to explain them is to rethink them in their logical order, and this explanation is in itselfits own proof; at the very most, it will require confirmation by a few examples. Only methodological experiments, on the contrary, can extract from things their real secrets [emphasis mine]." (Durkheim, The Rules ofSociological Method, 144).

By "objectivized ideas", Durkheim was referring to individualistic and psychological explanations of social forces, but since H. use of rhetoric here is plainly ignores institutional "cause and effects" regarding different aspects of American slavery and because throughout his text he regularly reduces the complex economic, political and cultural phenomena to the attainment and enactment of individual morality and mentality, it is accurate to claim that Horowitz pursues an analytic m.o. identical to the procedure Durkheim found so anathema/antithetical to sound social science.

202 See TransAfiica Forum and NCO BRA web articles above. For a fuller definition of rehabilitative reparations, see Darrell L. Pugh, "Collective Rehabilitation," in ·When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 372-73.

107 Eighth Head: Slavery's Class Legacy

Horowitz is most adamant that the exploitation endemic of slavery has nothing to do with the current economic problems of black Americans.Z03 Horov.itz reinforces his claim by drawing on the work of noted historians of the Cliometric school, Robert

William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman.204 These scholars were responsible for ushering in an apparently more "scientific" approach to economic developments in historical studies. Horowitz uses their findings with great relish:

Slaves were housed, clothed and fed by their owners. Since owners viewed their slaves as capital, they had a vested interest in their health and well-being, and not in keeping them in the concentrations camps, fantasized by reparations advocates. Consequently, the diet and shelter of slaves were often comparable to those of the 259 free labor force. ••• Over a slave's lifetime the amount of wealth the owner was able to appropriate from his or her labor (i.e., the amount of labor that was 261 actually unpaid) was approximately 12 percent of the income the slave earned. • . . . The relatively small percentage of actually expropriated slave income does not make slavery less repellent or the expropriation more acceptable; it merely serves to put the claim for the return of "stolen" wealth in perspective.205

259 Fogel and Engermann, Time on the Cross, pp. I 09 et seq.

261 Ibid. Fogel and Engermann also showed that a significant number of planters actually developed forms of reward, profit sharing and payment for their slaves, pp. i 44 et seq.

In an earlier chapter, Horowitz challenges the rebuttal made by John Hope

206 Franklin , the most respected and influential African American historian alive today, to

203 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 13.

204 Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974).

205 Horowitz, Uncivil War, 129

206 John Hope Franklin, "Horowitz's Diatribe Contains Historical Inaccuracies," http:// www.duke.edu/web/jhfcenter/main.html; quoted in Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 79.

108 Horowitz's infamous college newspaper ad, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea - and Racist Too". Horowitz replies:

Franklin's opening statements in this appalling document-- that "all whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery" - sidestepped the argument and was, in any case irrelevant to the dispute itself. No one would argue that slaves benefited from their own slavery. Franklin's statement L~at "all whites" had benefited, on the other hand, was the claim of a racial ideologue rather than a responsible historian ... In any case, Franklin failed to answer the question I had posed in my ad: If all whites alive today are beneficiaries of the wealth that slavery produced, how can one maintain that blacks alive today are not as well? How was the wealth passed through white hands only? How did a black worker in a tobacco state not benefit from the investment that slavers had made? (author's emphasisi07

A better question is, how did a black worker in a cotton state not benefit from the investment slavers had made since cotton was the largest and most lucrative plantation crop, labored on by slaves, grown in the South? Horowitz only need read further into the same book he quotes to find the highly disturbing answer. At first Fogel and Engerman would seem to reinforce Horowitz's interpretation of the economic "mildness" of slavery to blacks:

Odd as it may seem, the optimal combination of force and pecuniary income was one that left slaves on large plantations with more [author's emphasis] pecuniary income per capita than they would have earned if they had been free small farmers .... The average pecuniary income actually received by a prime field hand was roughly 15 percent greater than the income he would have received for his labor as a free agricultural worker. 208

207 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 80-81.

208 Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross, 239.

109 But for all their conceptual and methodological lapses, 209 Fogel and Engerman were not misguided enough to think that in the last all-important analysis of net gains and losses that black slaves "benefited" from either the "economy of scale" of plantation production nor the so-called "investment" they received in their person in the form of material upkeep.210 The authors are both clear and captivating on this point:

That slaves received higher pecuniary incomes than they would have as free agricultural laborers does not mean that their real incomes were higher. For ... there were large nonpecuniary disadvantages to the gang system, equal to at least $75 per year per adult male hand.... For the southern slave population as a whole, gang labor imposed a nonpecuniary loss of at least $90,000,000 [in 1850 alone]. Against this very large loss, slaves received a relatively small pecuniary offset of $6,000,000. Thus their net loss was $84,000,000. 211

Remember, this is the calculated loss for only one year out of246 years of slavery! Horowitz could retort that the authors had stated that "the main gainers from the gang system were not slaveholders but consumers ofcotton... "212 totaling $14 million

209 For a truly eye-opening critique of the numerous conceptual and methodological errors riddling Time on the Cross, see Thomas L. Haskell, "The True and Tragical History of'Time on The Cross' "New York Review ofBooks, 2 October 1975,33.

210 I must take issue with Fogel and Engerman's terminology at this point in part because it lends itself to the kind of misuse Horowitz indulges. The authors define "basic income" for slaves as: "the value ofthe food, clothing, shelter, and medical care furnished to slaves" (p. 151).

While this definition may be correct in the most sociologically stripped sense of the term, I believe it is more accurate to say that the subsistence and upkeep the slave owner supplied slaves was a capital investment not income as we would commonly and practically understand it, i.e., in the form of wages or in-kind exchanges of services. This should be obvious since blacks were legally defined as property, albeit a special kind, and were utilized economically in production as an aspect of productive capital (labor). Outside this production activity, slaves were also assets to be used as collateral for a various endeavors or fancies.

211 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 244.

212 Ibid., 244.

110 in pecuniary gain for consumers versus the $10 million slave owners received in 1850?13

But this defense would only dig Horowitz into a deeper hole because it would show that the non-slave owning overwhelmingly white market for American cotton benefited inadvertently in toto even more from slavery than slave owners! As the authors write,

"Slaves as a class ... suffered a net loss in 1850 of at least $84,000,000 so that the rest of the world could benefit by $24,000,000."214 The fact that most of this "benefit" went overseas in the form of cheaper prices would also draw Britain, a major importer of the good, into the range of criticism from reparationists. Blacks, both slave and free, with their absent or minimal incomes certainly did not have the economic wherewithal to consume a percentage of this surplus value proportionate to their numbers as compared to whites. On the other hand, "for every dollar gained by a typical consumer of cotton cloth, there was a slave laboring somewhere under the hot southern sun [who] would lose at least $400."215

Estimating the amount of labor value expropriated from blacks is a difficult matter, one complicated by the unevenness of historical records and differences in calculation methods. These factors vary significantly the sought-after figure. One thing the following estimates do have in common is that they do not attempt to calculate in financial terms any of the cultural, mental or physical suffering experienced by blacks during slavery. While this omission may strike some as a crass reduction of the pain and

213 Ibid., 245.

214 Ibid., 245.

215 Ibid., 246.

Ill horror of slavery to economic exploitation, these estimates do provide a sound, though admittedly incomplete, starting-point.216

Estimates vary on the amount of labor value coerced from blacks during slavery but all are astronomical. Ransom and Sutch "estimate of the total value of slave capital in the slave states in 1860 is $3.059 billion."217 Noting that "in that year the total commodity output of the entire country was no larger than $1.4 billion"218 establishes the remarkable scale of this (white) wealth but does not indicate the additional value of labor exploited from blacks. James Marketti estimates that between $2.1 to $4.7 trilHon (in

1983 dollars) was expropriated from the total black slave population between the years of

1790 and 1860.219 Larry Neal estimates that 18-year-old enslaved blacks alone had approximately $1.4 trillion (in 1983 dollars) in labor value extracted from them between

1620 and 1840.220

216 It is important not to give this criticism short shrift. Moreover it is important to grasp as well the different social meaning ascribed to identical forms of labor practice by the same person. As historia.'l Jacqueline Jones so clearly put it: "' ...the simple act of cooking a meal became a chore or a celebration, depending whether the black woman worker was catering to the exacting tastes of a well-to-do white family, caring for her own family member after they had spent a long day picking cotton, or preparing food to hawk on a city street in order to earn money to purchase the freedom of a loved one in bondage." See Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries ofBlack and White Labor, 18. Any attempt to callously minimize the additional real costs of psychological and sociological suffering ofblacks during slavery and later periods to their obvious economic losses alone constitutes a dangerous disregard of social science research ... and basic common sense.

217 Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, "'Who Pays for Slavery," in The Wealth ofthe Races: The Present Value ofBenefits from Past Injustices, ed. Richard F. America (New York,: Greenwood Press, 1990). 39.

218 Ibid., 39

219 James Marketti, "Estimated Present Value oflncome Diverted During Slavery," in The Wealth ofRaces: The Present Value ofBenefits from Past Injustices, ed. Richard F. America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 107.

220 Larry Neal, "A Calculation and Comparison of the Current Benefits of Slavery and an Analysis of Who Benefits," in The Wealth ofRaces: The Present Value ofBenefits from Past Injustices, ed. Richard F. America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 100.

112 These figures are colossal. Nonetheless, the above estimates of economic loss to blacks should be combined with a clear sense of how slavery drastically inhibited black property accumulation, a crucial feature of economic stability and progress for any group.

To ignore the curtailment of black property accumulation and capital formation

"seriously underestimate[s] the' wrong or injury'" to blacks in any period and cumulatively, writes Lynn C. Burbridge,221 because "blacks have lived on the margins of the American economy, not only as workers but also as businessmen and wealth holders... Losses of nonwage income and capital gains... have been significant contributors to black-white inequities ... "222 Moving forward and taking a long-view of black economic fortunes since emancipation to the end of the modem Civil Rights

Movement (1865 to 1970) reveals the erosion of adequate conditions for racially proportionate asset accumulation due to racial exploitation and discrimination.

The rise in black wealth and enterprise after the civil war is an irrefutable fact.

Perhaps no other scholars have dedicated more energy on detailing this development than

Loren Schweninger and Juliet E. K. Walker, respectively. According to Schweninger, there were significant regional and demographic differences in property holding among

African Americans before and after the Civil War. Concerning pre-Civil War ownership, the author states that "in all, by 1860, 16,172 free persons of color in the fifteen slave states (and the District of Columbia) had accumulated $20,253,200 worth of property, or

221 Lynn Burbridge, "What Was Lost: The Cost of Slavery and Discrimination for Blacks," in The Wealth ofRaces: The Present Value ofBenefits from Past Injustices, ed. Richard F. America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 191-198.

222 Ibid., 194, 196.

113 $1252 per individual property holder -- an extraordinary accomplishment considering that some of them, only a generation before, had worn shackles as slaves," writes

Schweninger. 223 Yet of this group only those amassing $2000 worth of real estate at minimum could truly be considered "prosperous" at the time. Only 1 in 60 free black families reached this level.224 This ratio stands in sharp contrast to the 1 in 8 prosperity ratio for whites living at the same time. 225 However, black wealth at this level placed these industrious and fortunate African-Americans within the 90th percentile of the

South's black property owners.226

Walker's extensive discussion of black entrepreneuralism throughout all phases of

American history is even more inspiring.227 Whether it be through the sale of produce from "private" garden plots tended by fortunate plantation slaves, "slave-hire" and "self-

223 See Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 96. There were significant regional differences between black property owners who lived in the lower South and those who lived in the upper South. In general, prior to the Civil War, black property owners in the lower South tended to be mostly of mixed racial ancestry, had received property and support from white master/relatives, politically­ allied with white elites with up to 1/4 of their families owning slaves. (See Schweninger, "Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790-1880," 34-40). Propertied black life in the upper South differed greatly. Far fewer free blacks were propertied in this region especially in terms of real estate. This group possessed closer ties to slaves due in part to the fact that many had been slaves. They tended also to be less mixed­ raced than the Southern cohort. Far fewer own slaves and most today and owned in for humanitarian reasons, not profit.

224Schweninger writes that while:

"The value of land and other property fluctuated across the South during different periods, and the U.S. population senses do not offer region-wide property estimates until 1850 through 1870 ... generally... someone with at least $2000 worth of real estate was considered relatively prosperous during the entire hundred years under discussion [1790 to 1880]" (Ibid., 33).

In his book Schweninger seems to give the impression that those with at least $2000 worth of real estate should be called "affluent" while the term prosperous should be reserved for those with assets ranging between $2000 and $5000. See Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 98.

225 Ibid.

226 Ibid., 99.

227 Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America.

114 hire" systems permitted to a few "loyal" slaves, or those who gained bits of profit and property as "salary" for the deft management of the master's businesses as

"intrapreneurs",228 or as free blacks who acquired land and owned businesses (some including slave holding, especially among the mixed-raced element of the Lower South) in small numbers, African Americans and Africans in America did all to better their financial standing. After emancipation, while most blacks were mired in inherited and enforced poverty, some more prosperous blacks continued and expanded their pre-War economic activities (minus slavery). These enterprises included plantation agribusinesses, banks, loan associations, insurance companies, cooperative manufacturing, catering businesses, hotel ownership, hair care and personal beauty and property ownership in over one hundred black towns.229 These enterprises floundered and failed generally due to under-capitalization from their onset, insufficient operating capital, management inexperience and racist barriers.230 Small businesses were more the norm and included scaled-down versions of the above and other activities such as "shoemaking; blacksmithing; clothing, grocery and dry-goods stores; and tobacco manufacturing." 231

These enterprises also suffered from the same problems as larger enterprises.

Yet, as the number of black enterprises increased (especially those providing financial service), property ownership rose.232 Schweninger references several government tables

228 Ibid., 29-30.

229 See Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America, 150-224. Also see Kenneth Marvin Hamilton case study of the economics of five black towns in Black towns and Profit: Promotion ...

230 See Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America, 32-51.

231 Ibid., 158.

232 See Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South. 179.

115 covering the period from 1870 to 191 0 to prove this point. In the Lower South (Alabama,

Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas), black farm ownership increased from 10,926 to 73,721 units, an increase 573 percent.233 Using a slightly different measure on the same table, farm ownership in this region increased from 113,437 units to 131,159 units between 1900 and 1910, an increase of 16 percent. In the Upper South (Delaware, District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North

Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia) black farm ownership between 1870 and 1890 increased 539 percent, a jump from 17,785 units 113,580 units.234 Using a slightly different measure on the same table, the percentage decreased from 1900 to 1910 plus 17 percent, a rise from 177, 858 2207, 815 units. (The year 1910 would prove to be the high watermark in black land ownership).235 Excluding farms, black homeownership also increased dramatically during this period. In the lower South the number of homes owned by blacks rose from 1,665 in 1870 to 125,757 in 1910.236 In the Upper South homeownership arose from 4842 units to 218,634 units in 1910.237 By 1913 African

233 See Table 16: "Black Fann Owners in the Lower South, 1870-1910, by Total Number and Percentage of Owners." Reproduced in Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 164.

234 See Table 18: "Black Fann Owners in the Upper South, 1870-1910 by Total Number and Percentage of Owners." Reproduced in Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South. 174.

235 According to Leo McGee and Robert Boone's 1979 edited study of rural black land ownership, his fonner property holdings reached its apex in 191 0 at approximately 15 million acres. Over the next 70 years black holdings in this area declined to no more than 6 million acres. Some argue that this loss has contributed to the political vulnerability of African-Americans ever since. See William E. Nelson, Jr., "Black Rural Land Decline and Political Power," in The Black Rural Land Owner- Endangered Species, ed. Leo McGee and Robert Boone (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979): 83-96.

236 See Table 17: "Black Homeowners in the Lower South, 1870-1910." Reproduced in Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 170.

237 See Table 19: "Black Homeowners in the Upper South, 1870-191 0." Reproduced in Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 180.

116 Americans throughout the country had secured 555 million homes, 937 million farms,

40,000 businesses and $700 million in wealth.238

The scholarship of these two authors demonstrates that blacks did not passively accept their enslavement or "entrapment" under extreme regimes of racial discrimination.

Both the downtrodden and the privileged sought and a few achieved wealth and the increased personal agency and social respect it usually engenders. Their successes, no matter how minimal, bettered their condition and often advanced their race, even if this simply meant a slightly better life for their offspring.

Yet, the question before us is not whether black wealth and capitalism increased over the centuries of slavery and decades of segregation-it did, as one would expect.

What is more important to grasp at this point is that the institution of slavery and post-

Civil War discrimination overwhelmingly inhibited the normal concentration ofwealth and its distribution throughout the entire black population.

Jay R. Mandie has described how black landlessness, industrial discrimination and outright coercion combined to "entrap", as he calls it, blacks within the sharecropping system that dominated Southern agriculture well into the twentieth century.239 While relatively few blacks were able to escape from poverty to property, the above forces overdetermined the conditions of most. Consequently, according to

Mandie, "The black population experienced very little change in the years between the

238 See Table 6.9: "Black Economic Progress, 1863-1913" in Walker, The History ofBlack Business in America, 181.

239 See Jay R. Mandie, "Black Economic Entrapment After Emancipation in the United States" in The Meaning ofFreedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture After Slavery, ed. Frank McGlynn and Seymore Drescher (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).

117 end of slavery and the beginning of the twentieth century."240 Blacks manifested little regional mobility, industrial mobility or occupational mobility?41 Without the realization of promised land reform ("forty acres and a mule") nor a realistic chance to take advantage of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, and with northern industrialists preferring European immigrants to blacks who wanted to leave their "natural place" in

Southern agriculture, altogether meant that almost a..fler a half-century since their emancipation, blacks were still restricted mostly to the same kind of work they performed during slavery.242

The result was deliberate and predictable: "The former slave population became neither a land-owning class of fanners nor an urban working-class. Instead, the largest fraction of this group was left to seek its livelihood as non-landholding agriculttL.--alists, overwhelmingly still resident in the South."243 With lynchings and credit debt replacing whippings and chains, most blacks found themselves, despite their best efforts, entrapped where they once were enslaved. Wealth accumulation remained a utopian dream for most beyond a fortunate few.

Therefore, despite unprecedented gains in assets and capital and their great socio- economic significance to blacks beyond immediate owners,244 exceptional achievements should not distract one from the overwhelming lack of property ownership, indebtedness,

240 Ibid., 72.

241 Ibid, 72-73.

242 Ibid, 72-81.

243 Ibid, 81.

244See Lila Ammons, "The Evolution of Black-Owned Banks in the United States Between the 1880s and the 1990s," Journal ofBlack Studies 26, no. 4 (March 1996): 469-473.

118 and poor wages experienced by the vast majority of African Americans during the post- emancipation/Jim Crow period. "If we are concerned with the legacy of discrimination intergenerationally," as Burbridge argues and Oliver and Shapiro analyze, "It is important to focus more broadly on barriers to the accumulation of wealth.... [because] focusing on wage income loss does not convey the extent to which blacks were deprived ofchoices with respect to the use of this income" (emphasis mine). 245

For example, blacks owned only 0.5 percent of American wealth in 1865.246 Fast- forwarding over 130 years, we find blacks owning only one percent of American wealth in 1990?47 Moreover, the percentage of black capitalists remained abysmally low in 1988 at one percent ofblack community.248 Wealth disparities between blacks and whites remain alarming in the post-civil rights era. Oliver and Shapiro write, "Black families possess only 14 cents for every dollar of wealth (median net worth) held by white families" !249 This gap narrows significantly when the authors control for income.

However, Black wealth continues to trail white wealth distantly at every income bracket.

Oliver and Shapiro reveal:

245 Lynn Burbridge, "What Was Lost," 193.

246 See Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 25.

247 Ibid, 25.

248These figures originate from "synthetic" class theory of economist Thomas D. Boston and do not rest on a purely wealth definition of class. His perspective combines the class theories of Karl Marx, Max Weber, N. Poulantzas, and Anthony Giddens. See Thomas D. Boston, Race, Class & Conservatism (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 15-20.

249 Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, "Wealth and Racial Stratification" in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell, vol. 2 (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001), 228.

119 In the lowest quintile, the median net worth of white households was $17,066, while that ofBlack... households was $2,500 .... For the highest quintile households, median net worth for white households was $133,607; significantly lower was the median for black households, $43,806. The median net financial assets data are just as revealing. At the middle quintile, for example, the median net financial assets for white households were $6,800, which was markedly higher than for black ($800) ... households. 250

Oliver and Shapiro blame this deplorable racial disparity on three interlocking forces: (1) the "racialization of state policy," (2) the "economic detour" blacks were forced to make in entrepreneurship, and finally (3) the "sedimentation of racial equality."251 State initiated and sanction racism ranging from slavery, non-compensation for past labor, fainthearted attempts at land reform, sharecropping debt peonage~ and Jim

Crow era labor and property policies describe the first factor. The curtailment of business development and scope by segregationist laws and conventions describe the second factor. Finally, Oliver and Shapiro point to the "history oflow wages .. ,poor schooling, and segregation affected not one generation of blacks but practically all blacks well into the 20th-century... Wealth is one indicator ofmaterial disparity that captures the historical legacy oflow wages, personal and organizational discrimination, and institutionalized racism [emphasis mine]." 252

250 Ibid., 230.

251 Oliver and Shapiro, "Wealth and Racial Stratification," 238-40

252 Ibid., 239-40

120 The Class Legacy of Segregation

David Swinton's calculation for the cost oflabor market discrimination against blacks covers only forty of the one hundred years of this practice since the Civil War.

Moreover, the author does not include in his estimates regarding the dollar cost of "pain and suffering" or "the value oflost freedom." However, the figure is still astounding.

Swinton calculates that "the ... 1983 value of the benefits from discrimination in the labor market from 1929 to 1969 is $1,633 billion." 253 Although Swinton provides formula to calculate the negative impact slavery and subsequent racial discrimination had on black capital stocks, he prefers to focus on how much wealth reparation is necessary to close the contemporary wealth gap between blacks and whites. He writes that " ... an overall wealth gap number of$700 billion [in 1983] would probably adequately represent the approximate level of reparations required to repair the cost that discrimination has imposed on the living black population."254 This figure is significantly less than half of

253To give a proper sense of the scale of this loss to blacks almost 20 years ago, Swinton makes the following juxtaposition: " To place these numbers in perspective, we note that the 1983 value of all private non human capital assets in the United States was estimated to be $7.1 trillion. Thus these estimates suggest that it could take more than the entire wealth of United States to compensate blacks fully". See David Swinton, "Racial Inequality and Reparations" in The Wealth ofRaces: The Present Value ofBenefits from Past Injustices, ed. Richard F. America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 156.

254 Swinton's reasoning for this figure is as follows:

" ... On the basis of Black ownership ofbusinesses and receipts from property income, it can be surmised that black wealth ownership per capita is much less than 20 percent of that required for [racial] parity. Estimates of the value of the human capital stock are rarer. However, it half the gap in black earnings from labor could be attributed to differences in human capital, then black human capital ownership would be roughly 85 percent of what is required for [racial] parity. For ownership parity in private property, blacks would have to own roughly $820 billion in private assets. Using the above estimates of the gap in wealth ownership would imply a $656 million gap in private wealth ownership in 1983. Since we have no good estimates of the value of human capital embodied in the workforce, we cannot make a similar estimate of the gaps in human capital ownership. However, in view of the much lower estimated disparities in human capital ownership, this would probably not change the basic order of magnitude of the estimate" (Ibid, 158-159).

121 what is owed to blacks for labor market discrimination between 1929 and 1969 and over five times less than Marketti's upper estimate of the value of expropriated black labor for only 70 years of slavery!

Did slavery, segregation and their class legacies survive past the 1960s?

Inexplicably, some economic historians still wrestle with these temporal connections. While economic historians such as Stanley Engerman, Warren C. Whatley and Gavin Wright do not appear to be opposed to the idea of reparations for slavery and are critical of the racial restrictiveness of the post-emancipation period, each respectively emphasizes "'non-racist reasons" for black economic disadvantage at the time.

Stanley L. Engerman argues that linking the economic legacy of slavery to the present day economic conditions of blacks is difficult to prove particularly in a linear fashion?55 His major point is that agricultural production on small "'40-acre" sized plots would have suffered from economy of scale problems regardless of the farmer's race.

Cotton, the largest export crop at the time, was grown "on units larger than the family- sized farm."256 The production of most export crops in most post-emancipation societies

"declined sharply" with cotton being unexceptional in this regard. Less production meant less income and profit in general but especially for those who generated fewer crops in the first place. Second, and perhaps more controversial, Engerman doubts whether the

255 Stanley L. Engennan, "Past History and Current Policy: The Legacy of Slavery"', in The Wealth ofthe Races: The Present Value ofBenefits from Past Injustices, ed. Richard F. America (New York,: Greenwood Press, 1990),17-29.

256 Ibid., 22.

122 attainment of"forty acres and a mule" by blacks immediately after the Civil War would have produced long-term economic stability for blacks. While he is sure that they would have benefited in the short-term (perhaps as late as the 1890s), he argues that increased small-scale land ownership by Southern whites after the Civil War was substantially eroded by economic adversity, especially during the last ten years of the nineteenth- century. In other words, since whites owning plots ofland, around the size blacks were promised, were undercut by the size of their landholdings as well as the "economic hardships" that occurred during the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, Engerman believes that most African Americans holdings would have seen identical (if not worse) erosion from their holdings.257

Warren C. Whatley and Gavin Wright's essay in the same collection can be taken as an expansion ofEngerman's thesis in its details but not in its ultimate conclusion.258

Throughout the piece the authors point to macro-contextual, non-racist factors that to their minds heavily determined the economic fortunes of blacks. They also problemitize any direct connection between slavery's expropriation and subsequent economic experiences through " a single persistent structure of discrimination through the past century of American history, but instead [through] a series of [racist] regimes with very different properties and implications."259 However, for all their reasonable caveats, they must acknowledge in the end "that out of what ever changes that have occurred new

257 Ibid., 22-23.

258 Warren C. Whatley and Gavin Wright, "Black Labor in American Economy Since Emancipation: What Are the Legacies of History?" in The Wealth ofthe Races: The Present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices, ed. Richard F. America (New York,: Greenwood Press, 1990) ,67-86.

2591bid., 67.

1?"'_.) institutions have emerged that tend to reflect the initial conditions. We study these changes ... to understand how these institutions continue to reinforce outcomes for which no one is willing to be held responsible. "260 Once again, while the forces impacting African American economic advancement are multiple, the original sin of slavery has operated since emancipation through the uncompensation of blacks. Without compensation blacks were economically far more vulnerable to exploiters than whites.

Their economic disadvantage was reinforced and replicated overtime through intentional and unintentional factors.

But it is just these "reinforcements" and "replications" which can rightfully be called economic "badges ofslavery." 261 Unintentional factors negatively affecting black economics owe a great deal of their adversity the disproportionate economic vulnerability blacks have experienced because they were not compensated for their slave labor. As this compensation remained unforthcoming every decade after the end of slavery, so did this economic vulnerability. Customary and legal restrictions to jobs and political rights coupled with racial terrorism were, in heavy part, so effective at hampering the progress of blacks because most blacks did not and could not own enough wealth coming out of slavery. Nor did this change sufficiently in the decades subsequent to enslavement even as blacks became less vulnerable to economic downturns, union exclusion, or falls from white political favor.

260 Ibid., 86.

261 See Justice Harlan's Gssent in FindLaw, '"U.S. Supreme Court Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883)," [legal resource on-line]; available from http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navbv=case&court=us&vol=l 09&page=3#3 ; Internet: accessed I 9 November 2002.

124 One can reasonably argue, returning directly to Engerman's economy of scale point regarding "forty acre" allotments, that ownership of such land in and ofitself would have been a major financial accomplishment, an asset in regardless of its productivity that would have provided some collateral to realize better consumption patterns. Increased black landholding through compensatory land reform would have translated into greater life chances for blacks that owned, their children, and the black community at large. The black community would have been better able to fmance its educational and entrepreneurial endeavors. Through the cooperative activities of civic organizations such as churches and fraternities, organizations most central to the formation of black banks and insurance companies beginning in the 1800s,262 there is every indication that blacks would have parlayed land-based wealth into a more diverse portfolio of holdings. Yet, since blacks were "entrapped" in Southern agriculture due to racism and were not permitted to enter the growing industrial sector, they were unfairly prevented from earning the superior wages available in this sector and subsequently transform some portion of these earnings into wealth.

Such wealth generation certainly would have included the purchase of more land.

Incomes could also have gone theoretically to subsidize the agricultural activities of kin, friends or even commercial investments in the farms of non-kin. Without land reform and equal access to industrial work, most blacks lacked the economic wherewithal to possibly offset to a greater degree the economy of scale problem. Even partial success in this area would have meant a greater transmission of wealth into the twentieth century

262 See Lila Ammons,·' The Evolution of Black-Owned Banks in the United States Between the 1880s and 1990s."

125 and perhaps to the present day. Much of this effort would have gone toward strengthening the economic infrastructure of black America.

The intentional eradication of black wealth and economic stability as witnessed in the racially-motivated deconstruction of black towns during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would surely have occurred also in a properly land-refonned America.

However, it is unlikely that such violence would have destroyed all traces of black town wealth amassed and circulated. Cynically speaking, if blacks had started out with more after slavery, then more of this wealth would have survived to the present, albeit in different fonns, despite racial discrimination and terrorism. This pennutated wealth, altered by both coercion and independent choice, would have increased the quantity and quality of life-chances within the first free generation and each subsequent generation.

Even under different regimes of racism, more black wealth would have survived from earlier periods and more wealth would have been generated within each subsequent generation as the latter built upon the fonner. This is what happened for most whites over time even when they faced periodic economic adversity.263 Black wealth amassment would have still remained proportionately less than it was for whites, but it is not unreasonable to believe that more of this wealth would have survived to the present.

The 1999 work of sociologist Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red:

Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America, offers current-day sociological support for this historical hypothesis. In this text he investigates "the source of black-white

263 While he uses income for his definition of class, sociologist Bart Landry offers a suggestive, if sobering, statistic: the child of an African-American middle-class family prior to the 1960s was more likely to descend into the working-class than remain in the middle-class. Another way of putting this is that generally speaking, the African-American middle-class did not achieve widespread intergenerational economic stability until the middle of the twentieth century!

126 differences in net worth, focusing on the question of whether this gap is the result of the legacy of the past [slavery and de jure segregation] or the result of contemporary dynamics."264 Surprisingly, he fmds that "several simple explanations of the racial gap in wealth -- among them, differential savings rates and discrimination based on skin color

-do not appear to account to account for the black-white wealth gap among the post-

1960s generation of individuals. Rather, accounting for the historical legacy of asset accumulation (or the lack of it) -- that is, the wealth of parents -- appears to explain the gap in net worth between this cohort of blacks and whites."265 Conley found that

"parents' net worth" is the most important variable predicting the net worth of the tbllowing generation, even greater typically than "the individual's own labor market success as well as his or her own savings and investment behavior" because, "most likely, this effect represents the impact of parental gift giving in the form of trusts, down payments on first homes, and the like." 266

At first glance this finding would seem to contradict my argument. However,

Conley is careful to add that while "the locus of black-white wealth inequality lies in the realm of class relations rather than reflecting racial differences per se . ... [I]t is almost certain that the all-important wealth levels of the parents of these respondents were determined in large part by skin color. "267 In other words, the uncompensated black labor of slavery, and income and asset accumulation discrimination from 1865 until at least the

264 Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red, 47.

265 Ibid., 52

266 Ibid., 50

267 Ibid., 49-50.

127 late 1960s transmitted a racially disproportionate lack of wealth inter-generationally among blacks up to the previous generation at least. This generation did not have the capital accumulation normally expected due to the racist experiences of its people historically and the specific racial discrimination it suffered during Jim Crow. Hence, this cohort did not and could not possess and later pass on enough wealth to today's black generation to close the asset gap between the races in general or of those sharing similar income levels.268

The "slavery deficit" heavily constituting the earlier generation's relative lack of wealth was compounded by a specific "racism regime" known as Jim Crow segregation.

The ''asset impact" of discriminatory practices in this era is laid out by historian Philip

Rubio.269 He argues that ''the first half of the New Deal aimed to rebuild the white property status quo.''270 Rubio continues his point by quoting sociologist Charles

Abrams:

The federal recovery program that began in 1933 sought primarily to correct economic imbalance not social inequalities. The emphasis on housing and land was no accident, for the groups chiefly affected by the economic collapse were homeowners, farmers, farm tenants, slum-dwellers, mortgage-lenders, and cities dependent upon tax revenues. No real pump-priming could be done without restoring these groups to a functioning role in the economy. 38

268 Ibid., 25-37.

269 I focus here on programs intended to directly increase the wealth-holdings of American citizens during this period. Of course there were other policies designed to increase the labor remuneration of white workers that certainly contributed disproportionately to white wealth formation but less immediately. See Philip F. Rubio, A History ofAffirmative Action: 1619-2000 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 90-113. Do recall that income is the second most important variable in net wealth amassment, according to Conley Dalton, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America, 51. The class legacy of slavery and the discriminatory policies and conventions that followed up to and including the practices of this sub-period made it much harder for black parents to pass wealth to their children.

270 Rubio, A History ofAffirmative Action, 97.

128 38 Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors: A Study ofPrejudice in Housing (New York: Harper, 1955), 227. 271

Components of the federal effort included the 1933 Home Owners Loan Corporation and the 1934 Federal Housing Association. These initiatives were designed during the

Great Depression to help stabilize the economy by transforming white renters into homeowners. 272 "Both agencies not only respected existing segregated neighborhoods and racial housing covenants, they encouraged and institutionalize them while paving the way for the postwar white suburbanization of America" 273

Another ''white-affirmative action" program was the 1933 Agricultural

Adjustment Administration. This initiative "'rescued white farmers with cash grants for plowing under crops and slaughtering hogs, [but] it was also misappropriating black farmers' grants, allowing ma!lY black sharecroppers to be cheated out of their checks, and subjecting black Southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers to local white control. "274

After WWII another major attempt was made to increase white asset ob~'"liilent.

Rubio reminds us that through the GI Bill many more whites than blacks disproportionately received very low interest home loans through the Federal Housing

Administration. Rubio quotes historian Stephanie Coontz:

FHA policy required down payments of only 5 to 10 percent of the purchase price and guaranteed mortgages of up to 30 years at interest rates ofjust 2 to 3 percent on the balance. The Veterans Administration asked a mere dollar down from veterans [author's emphasis]. At the same time, government tax policies were

271 Ibid.

272 Ibid.

273 Ibid.

274 Ibid., 98.

129 changed to provide substantial incentives for savings and loan institutions to channel their funds almost exclusively into low-interest, long-term mortgages.36

36 Coontz, Never Were, 77. Italics added. 275

Institutional discrimination blocked many blacks from taking advantage of these asset- increasing programs. 276 This discrepancy in financing continued even after the 1948

Shelley v. Kramer decision which established that the Supreme Court would no longer constitutionally support racially restrictive housing covenants.277

Together the above white privilege policies led to a massive demographic shift and asset increase for European Americans. Between 1940 and 1970, the white population in the United States goes form being one-third suburban to mostly suburban. 278

"This sedimentation ofinequality,"279 as Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M.

Shapiro call this process, haunts the progression of black wealth obtainment today.

However, it is erroneous to believe that contemporary racist practices have ended and

275 Rubio, 12 1

276 Rubio quotes the 1947 U.S. President's Committee on Civil Rights:

"When Negro veterans seek 'GI' loans in order to build homes, they are likeiy to find that credit from private banks, without whose services there is no possibility of taking advantage of the GI Bill of Rights, is less freely available to members of their race. Private builders show a tendency not to construct new homes except for white occupancy. These interlocking business customs and devices formed the core of our discriminatory policy" See Philip F. Rubio, A History ofAffirmative Action: 1619-2000 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001 ), 121.

m Ibid., 123

278 Ibid., 120

279 The authors define the concept:

"'The notion embodied in the 'sedimentation of racial inequality' is that in central ways the cumulative effects of the past have seemingly cemented blacks to the bottom of society's economic hierarchy'' (Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/ White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality [New York: Routledge, 1995], 5) .

130 hence do not heavily structure the accumulation of assets currently. Oliver and Shapiro in another work present exhaustive evidence to the contrary in their examination of racial differences in homeownership?80 Oliver and Shapiro cite several of the same reasons as

Rubio for the historical evolution of this disparity. But they stress that it is contemporary factors that reinforce past patterns. For example, the authors write t.h.at "even when applicants are equally qualified -i.e., 'creditworthy' -Black families are still rejected for home loans 60 percent more often than equally qualified white families. "281 Second and almost as disturbing, "there is a mortgage rate difference for blacks compared to whites that is not determined by where the home is located, the purchase price, or when the home was bought. On average, black families pay about 0.33 percent, or one third of a percent, more in mortgage interest rates than white families. " 282 This one-third of 1 percent turns out to be nothing to scoff at. It is best to quote the authors' findings at length:

Consider that the median home purchase price is about $120,000 with, say, $12,000 down payment, leaving a mortgage of$108,000.0ne-third of one percent may not sound like much, but on a typical 30-year loan this amounts to a $25-a­ month difference- for 360 months. Thus, over the loan period, a typical black homebuyer will pay $9000 more in interest to financial institutions than the average white homebuyer. Bankers contend that they do not discriminate in setting mortgage interest rates on home loans. Instead, they say, it is more typical for whites than blacks to use larger down payments and financial 'gifts' from family members to secure lower mortgage rates.2 But many people, blacks particularly, cannot afford large

280 The authors choose homeownership because it is "without a doubt the single most important means of accumulating assets for the typical American family. Home equity constitutes the larger share of net worth, accounting for about 44 percent of total measured net worth": (Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, "Wealth and Racial Stratification", 240).

281 Ibid., 241.

282 Ibid.

131 down payments or did not have access to in vivo transfers; and based on accumulated related evidence, we are firmly convinced that this process reveals a key to understanding how past inequality is linked to the present, and how present inequality will project into the next generation. Essentially, past injustice provides a disadvantage for most blacks and advantage for many whites and how home purchases are financed. Because similar home mortgages cost black families $9000 more, blacks pay more to finance their homes and end up with less home equity in the future.

2 In the course of this research project... two pay points.283

In conclusion, the above evidence demonstrates that Horowitz's assertion that

"the Black middle class .. .is a prosperous community,"284 is simply not supported by the evidence. Blacks did make substantial gains over the last 150 years. This progress should not be ignored or scoffed for it represents the creativity, hard work and personal sacrifices of generations of blacks and their non-black supporters.285 Yet, however noble and bountiful these Herculean efforts were, they were also not enough to overcome the class legacy of slavery and segregation. Group progress does not mean sufficient progress has occurred for a healthy black economy to exist nor does it indicate this progress has been proportionate to other races. When another racial group is shown to have exploited and suppressed the progress of another group through overt and covert means, then it is fair to identify what this oppression has cost and how it has profited the oppressing group. Therefore, a comparative historical class analysis is justified for a proper accounting of what is owed and should be compensated.

283 Ibid .• 242.

284 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 13.

285 For this perspective, see Orlando Patterson, Ordeal ofIntegration (Civitas Counterpoint: Washington D.C., I 997). Also, Walker's The History ofBlack Business in America..

""? 1~- This hydra head has one last bite left in it. Horowitz asserts that even though living blacks do not deserve reparations, it has already been paid to them. He argues that:

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African­ Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions}-all under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances... .If trillion-dollar restitutions and a wholesale rewriting of American law (in order to accommodate racial preferences) is not enough to achieve a "healing," what is?286

This position is easily defeated. Writing in 1990, economist David H. Swinton presents a conceptual and quantitative refutation to Horowitz's thesis. Conceptually speaking, a "healing" between blacks and whites (not "other Americans" as Horowitz

28 incorrectly over-distributes the racial "debt" of whites and the American government) i would require "'repair to the racial disparity in the ownership of capital stocks, which is the legacy of history ...to ensure the achievement of equality. "288 When focusing on this best measure of wealth and class position, "it is reasonable to discount these payments as reparations in the sense of repairing damages to the [black] capital stock. These payments are more like compensation for current damages experienced each year for the failure to correct historic damages."289 Quantitatively, Horowitz is also incorrect in his sum.

Swinton puts forth this staggering comparison:

Rough calculations suggest that to repair the damages of slavery and discrimination would require expenditures of$650 billion. Programs of the past two decades to benefit blacks provided no more than $150 billion in current [1990] value.

286 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 14.

287 Ibid.

288 Swinton, "Racial Inequality and Reparations," 158.

289 Ibid., 159.

133 Thus, reparations of more than $500 billion would still be required to compensate for the damage slavery and discrimination did to capital stocks owned by the living black population. Furthermore, reparations, which adequately repaired the damage to capital stocks, [but did not compensate for all exploitation and suffering of slavery and segregation] would be sufficient to end racial disparities in economic life. 290

The hydra of myth also had one immortal head, a head even Hercules could not destroy. So it is in the case of Horowitz's hydra. This head is actually the heart of all his attacks against black reparations. I call this ninth head "Denial." Welfare transfers and affirmative action access are not assets, sharing civil rights is not contrition, African and

Arab enslavement of blacks is secondary, white abolitionism deceptive, most non-slave- owning whites complicitous, white slavery miniscule, free blacks not free, black slave- ownership a side issue. These positions, held by many reparationists, may seem too cynical to their opponents but after a careful scientific exa.."'lination of the historical record, an approach Horowitz demands but does not demonstrate, how can any find serious fault with their conclusions? The price of peace between blacks and whites is the atonement of assets and an apology for America Racial animus is bound to rise as the new nadir continues to polarize blacks and whites materially. The continued prima facie rejection of reparations as a legitimate means of ameliorating contemporary and chronic inequities will in all likelihood led to increased ethnic conflict as societal indicators worsen. In the following concluding chapter, we shall see if black reparationists are in any position to win peace and prosperity for their people.

290 Ibid., 161.

134 CHAPTER FOUR

RANDALL ROBINSON AND THE END OF RACE AS WE KNOW IT

The color-line is not static; it bends and buckles and sometimes breaks.

St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis

African American reparationism is an "emerging" movement still in its embryonic stage of development. It is not powerful enough to win economic redress or reform race relations at present. One weakness of the movement is its lack of broad-based active support among African Americans. 1

This could change, however, as activists expand their outreach to the general

African American community. One scholar-activist who has stressed this aspect is C. J.

Munford. He argues that there is a significant "recruitment" role for culture and consciousness in the movement. He writes:

Supporters of reparations must strive to create an alternative [author's emphasis] discourse within the Black community, one that has the potential to

1 According to a January 2002 CNNIUSA Today/Gallup Poll of I ,Oil adults nationwide (820 whites and 146 blacks), 68% of blacks believe '"corporations who made profits from slavery in the United States should apologize to black Americans who are descendants of slaves"; 57% of blacks believe "corporations who made profits from slavery in the United States should make cash payments to black Americans who are descendants of slaves;" 75% ofblacks believe corporations who made profits from slavery in the United States should set up scholarship funds for black Americans who are descendants of slaves;" 55% of blacks '"think the government should or should not make cash payments to black Americans who are descendants of slaves." See CNN/Gallup/USA Today, "PollingReport.com" [report on­ line]; available from http://www.pollingreport.com/race.html; Internet; accessed 20 November 2002.

This is probably a source of optimism for reparationists. However, as I am sure they know well, favorable opinion is a far cry from a direct commitment of personal time and resources to any movement.

135 become the dominant discourse. By discourse we mean both formal discussion in writing and open public talk of tactics and strategies, appropriate to Black emancipation and uplift at millennium's end. This must be our conscious purpose, if"honing the weapon of theory" is not to be an empty slogan. We must craft derivative political projects and maneuvers in such a manner as to win the battle of ideas, not merely in the Black academy, but more importantly among our ordinary people, inner city included. Reparations' slogans and buzzwords must become household words across Black America We must put our issues and topics on every African American lip. Thereby we may hope to regenerate the mass Black liberation movement that has languished in suspended animation since the 1970s?

Social Movement Frame Analysis

Stated in social movement terms, Munford is urging reparationists to engage in the difficult task offrame alignment. Sociologist David Snow, et al. are the original interpreters of sociologist Erving Goffinan's concept offrame analysis.3 Snow, et al. delineate various generic framing tasks required to connect individuals ideologically to a movement. Frames are ""schemata of interpretation' that enable individuals "to locate, perceive, identify, and label' occurrences within their life space and the world at large.'.-4

They delineate four framing tasks for movement organizations. The first is frame bridging, which is "the linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem. "5 Second is frame

2 C. J. Munford, ·'Reparations: Strategic Consideration for Black Americans" in When Sorry lsn 't Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University Press, I 999), 422.

3 For a convenient survey of Goffinan' s work in frame analysis and other research methods and theories. Also see Erving Goffinan's germinal text, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I 974).

4 David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, "Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation," American Sociological Review 51, (August, 1986): 464.

5 Snow, "Frame Alignment Processes," 467.

136 amplification, "the clarification and invigoration of an interpretive frame bearing on a particular issue. "6 Third is frame extension, the process by which the movement seeks to

"enlarge its adherent pool by portraying its objectives or activities as attending to or being congruent with the values or interests of potential adherents."7 Finally, the most ambitious project, frame transformation, when "new values may have to be planted and nurtured, old meanings or understandings jettisoned, and erroneous beliefs or

'misframings' re:framed. "8

Frame analysis theory has advanced significantly since Snow et al.' s contribution to movement studies. Movement analyst Hank Johnston's development of micro- discourse analysis, involving meticulous coding and interpretation procedures designed to illuminate "the "black box' of mental life," is certainly an advance in the field.9

Johnston believes "that with a micro focus on discourse, namely on the spoken and written texts ofsocial movement participants [my emphasis], and with a microanalysis of frames, namely of the mental schemata by which experience is interpreted, the cultural analysis of social movements can become more conceptually specific and systematic."10

In light of these theories, we can say that Robinson and Horowitz are both engaged in frame alignment through particular forms ofdiscourse. (I will limit my

6 Ibid., 469.

7 Ibid., 472.

8 Ibid., 473.

9 Hank Johnston, "A Methodology for Frame Analysis: From Discourse to Cognitive Schemata," in Social Movements and Culture, eds., Hank Johnston and Bert Klanadennans, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 217-246.

10 Johnston, "A Methodology," 219.

137 analysis mostly to Robinson's text). A micro-discourse analysis of interview transcripts of supporters and opponents of black reparations is beyond the scope of this study.

Fortunately, this method is not the only one available to understand Robinson's "framing activity." We can use cultural theory to interpret his effort. I theorize how Robinson's text, a "formal discussion in writing ... of tactics and strategies," operates as "an alternative discourse ... that has the potential to become the dominant discourse" on reparations in the black community and beyond by executing certain framing tasks.

Micromobilization and The Debt

Robinson has chosen a choppy course between the Charybdis of consciousness and

Scylla of culture in order to micromobilize more potential reparationists. His argument has a trajectory almost teleological in its conclusion, one he follows through his heavily aestheticized, historical, sociological, and quasi-autobiographical text.

In Our Heritage: The Past in the Present ofAfrican-American and African Existence,

Tsenay Serequeberhan clarifies what I think Robinson truly wanted to accomplish with his evocative rendering of slavery and the new nadir beyond their use as justifications for reparations. 11 Like Serequeberhan, Robinson takes the reader on a quest meant to spur one to closely examine "the ground or underlying historical edifice of live experience - the actuality of a heritage - that structures and forms the bedrock out of which poems and their audiences arise." 12 Both authors are quite concerned about the deplorable socio-economic state of most

11 Tsenay Serequeberhan, Our Heritage: the Past in the Present ofAfrican-American and African Existence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

12 Ibid., xi.

138 persons of African descent living around the globe even after the attainment of liberty and

civil rights. Both wonder what the paradox of formal freedom without sufficient financial or

political power is doing or could do to the collective morale and vision of blacks today

(Robinson states this question more forcefully than Serequeberhan). However,

Serequeberhan employs different theory of history than Robinson's ''vindicationalist-

13 14 contributionalist" version : Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of"effective-history."

Serequeberhan begins by saying:

Thus the civil rights movement and its analogue, the African anticolonial struggle - both heroic, historic, and necessary movements - inspired much hope but managed to attain only minimal results. It is, then, within this context that the question of heritage has to be posed for African-American and African existence, for this is the continental and global lived politico-economic milieu- that is, the inheritance -- that frames our present. 11

11 For thinking that moves along similar lines, see Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996). 15

He continues:

This kind of reflexive engagement is in my view, a critical act of theoretic service. For our shared heritage, "whether we are expressly aware of it or not," is the "effective-history" that constitutes us as who we are in the present moment of time. 12 To this extent, to explore our heritage- the coagulated cluster oflived and efficacious prejudgments that constitutes our present- is to stake out and explore the possibilities of our "effective-history," the sedimented layering of our past that constitutes our present identity. 16

13 See Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots ofAfrican American Popular Histo1y (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21-23, for a discussion of this type of Afrocentricism.

14 This notion is very similar to the idea of origin myth:

"'The common or shared historical experiences that serve to unite and distinguish the group from other groups and give it a distinct social identity." James Peoples and Garrick Bailey, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Belmont: Thomson Publishing, 1997), 352.

15 Serequeberhan, Our Heritage, xii.

16 Ibid.

139 12 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Cross Road Pubiishing Co .• 1982), p. 268.

Robinson intends to slow what he sees a seemingly inexorable decline in the political agency of blacks since the end of the civil rights movement. Past the halcyon days of civil rights and black power, the time of Robinson's political coming-of-age, lies today's moribund black community wracked with most of the same problems they had before King's assassination. Robinson is, of course, worried about this situation and the political and economic measures that need to be taken. But his concern is deeper than this. He feeis that black identity and cooperation is defined too much by crisis and compromise both present and past. Consequently, according to Robinson, African Americans do not possess, in large part, a collective sense of themselves as beings who control the basic elements of their yearnings or concrete existence.

Robinson thinks that greater knowledge of the strivings and successes of blacks recorded in African and African American history will lift the black collective consciousness of itself above the oft-told tales of humiliation, frustration and defeat. He also believes that even the initial intention to learn more about black history will stimulate cognitive changes before much new information is learned. Spurring a re-orientation in black L~ought toward affirmative, progressive and cooperative activity is the underlying impetus for writing his book. The deepest raison d 'etre of this text includes the demand for economic reparations, of course. But his most "critical act of theoretic service" is pedagogical. He impels an inversion in thinking made possible less through a survey of"names and dates" than by his synthesis of several aesthetics of language and genre, thereby "suggesting ... how we should both

140 constitute and [author's emphasis] feel about an [African/African American] object of knowledge," as literary theorist Houston A. Baker, Jr. wrote in another context.17 It is not that

Robinson wishes to fully ignore '"the bad" that was ba."lished from the African Diaspora's history - how else can blacks learn from their mistakes and hopefully progress? - but, rather, to let what is "noble and good" in this history be renowned and eternalized more as this is done by every other ethnicity and race. What could come forth is a history blacks will and can abide rather than be ashamed.

The word "abide" has surplus meaning here. Of the various nuances of the term, the definitions to "accept without opposition or question ... [,] to pay the price or... suffer for ... [and] to remain steadfast or faithful to ..." 18 are most indicative of what Serequeberhan means when he writes that '"our identity' [African/Africa American] is composed of the constantly stratified layers of our abiding [emphasis mine] past- our heritage or 'effective- history' through which we appropriate a possible future." 19 In some ways we can think jointly of the word "abide" and the term "effective-history" as a selective process of"what will be abided" in a conscious appropriation of history (an active and perhaps critical investigation of"what happened" history) and the unreflexive appreciation of history (a

17 Inspired by the work of another literacy intellectual, Hayden White, Baker employs White's insights on ''tropological thought" as part of an interdisciplinary analysis of Richard Wright's novel, Black Boy. Baker writes:

"The introduction ofunusual metaphors (or tropes) where objects oftraditional knowledge are concerned generates new conceptual images."

See Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University ofChicago Press 1984), 144.

18 Webster Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary (1989), s.v. "abide."

19 Serequeberhan, Our Heritage, xiii,

141 passive acceptance of "what-we-are-told" history) as both instances, respectively, of constructing and accessing "history as we come to believe it." History, in this formulation, is never an innocent investigation of "what was" but often a politics designed to serve as a past likely to invigorate a group as it secures its future.

Historical claims are therefore more than "objective facts" interpreted as best by scholars. They are also intrinsically affective arrangements constituting what cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams referred to as structures offeeling. Williams developed the concept because it captures both the restrictiveness and the effusiveness of cultural forms for group members living in a particular time period. 20 Williams acknowledges:

The term is difficult, but ''feeling" is chosen to emphasize a distinction from [the] more formal concepts of''world-view" or "ideology". It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable) over a range from formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experiences. 21

He continues:

We are ... defining these elements as a "structure": as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is till in process [author's emphasis], often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but

20 According to Jenny Bourne Taylor, "Williams develops his concepts ... to help understand the complex ideological negotiations which might exist at any particular moment and the uneven ways these structures offeeling shift historically, and both dominant and oppositional forms emerge." See Jenny Bourne Taylor, "Williams, Raymond" in A Dictionary ofCultural and Critical Theory, 564.

21 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

142 [when analyzed] ... has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics ... 22

Like Williams Robinson is not content to merely describe the "spirit of the age" in idealist terms. The current post-soul structure of feeling, comprised of "a common set of perceptions and values shared by a particular generation ... most clearly articulated in particular and artistic forms and conventions,"23 is not a cipher. Frenetic for some, funerdl"Y for many, it has a traceable history. It is a new formation but also one drawing on residual notions of viable (real and imagined) community that are in danger of being incorporated as affective and aesthetic adornments upon otherwise ineffective mainstream politics. This is what I believe Robinson dreads.

Critically and absent-mindedly "the past" is "tapped" through "public narratives" and personal "'ontological narratives24 to enliven or enervate a people's sense of themselves as a people who are building upon but yet moving beyond the minutiae and milestones they claim to be evidence of their past greatness. Robinson's yearning25 for his people's betterment

22 Ibid., 132.

23 Taylor, "Williams, Raymond," 518.

24 According to social theorists Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, "[o]ntological narratives are used to define who we are; this in turn is a precondition for knowing what to do." By constructing "identity and the self[as] something that one becomes," ontological narratives become "basic to agency." Since "ontological narratives are social and interpersonal," it is possible for "agents to adjust stories to fit their own identities." However, individuals do not possess unlimited free-play in their self­ constructions. They are constrained by "public narratives" that are "attached to cultural and institutional formations larger than the single individual, [and] to intersubjective networks or institutions. however local or grand, micro or macro ... " See Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, "Reclaiming the Epistemological 'Other': Narrative and the Social Constitution ofldentity" in Social Theory and the Politics ofIdentity ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994): 61-62.

25 I employ a conception ofyearning here similar to the one social theorist bell hooks developed in one her book of the same title. For my purposes, I use the term yearning to speak of distinctive structures of feeling shaped by particular historical developments, contemporary conditions, and cultural strategies. Unlike hooks' broader application to other races, classes, genders, and sexual practices, I apply the term in

143 accesses existing structures of feeling shaped through collective "racial memory" and historical scholarship by using generic conventions and literary devices. Through them, he wishes to fashion a more agential sense of black community as one vvith a more integrated collective destiny that can subsequently mount a successful redress movement.

Robinson is not a historian nor does he operate much like one in his text. But neither is he a "mere" writer of fiction. His mixed-genre work is a "poetic" but political essay, one utilizing history to construct a meaningful past possessing a powerful structure of feeling intended to extend the reparations frame to more persons.

Horowitz 's book would seem to warrant the same easing of evaluative standards since he too produced a mixed-genre text, a political essay combining comparative history, sociology, cultural criticism and personal experiences. His book, like Robinson's, is also designed to tap and refine structures of feeling, but this time in the ser.rice of reparations' opponents. However, his far more academic mobilization of historical scholarship requires stronger social scientific scrutiny. Moreover, Horowitz invites this kind on analysis with his loud call for "scientific" proof of slavery's legacies to blacks. 26

Robinson obviously sees himself as straddling two different paradigms: One characterized by an ''evidentiary-objective" philosophy and the second characterized by an

"imaginative-subjective" philosophy which together form the inner and outer limits of his a more circumscribed manner for the purpose of elucidating a form of collective consciousness shared unevenly among members of diverse black populations within black communities. With this focus, a yearning is redefined as a continuously evolving, culturally specific process of collective consciousness produced within a group but is also connected to developments within broader society. See bell hooks, Yearning: Race, gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

26 I do not expect either writer to achieve methodological perfection. Nor do I expect it of scholars. However, glaring conceptual or evidentiary transgressions should be noted, and if possible, corrected. This is the standard I apply to both writers in ways dictated by the specific configuration of each one's text.

144 disciplinary research and his creative activity His "middle path" is a marriage of these principles into what could be called an " evidentiary-subjective" mode of communicating with his readers. This is discourse is composed of what Merleu-Pontiat"l phenomenologists describe as "experience-near ... body words- that is, on descriptive terms relating to the corporeality of human experience ... stated in terms of a 'body feeling' rather than in terms of a abstract idea."27

This principle, one that runs through every writing style Robinson employs including

"historiography," fiction, autobiography, and social science as he makes his case. The Debt is therefore not only a political manifesto -a "public narrative"-it is more uniquely an intimate story capable of facilitating shifts in thinking on a personal leveL 28 This is cognitive micromobilization. Robinson's text is his way of circumventing "incorporated" black political culture and its unreliable post-soul counterpart in popular culture by attempting to make a personal empathic identification through his use ofliterary tropes to establish a strong

'"I and Thou" identification with his readership.

He wrestles outright with his "evidentiary-objective" and "imaginative-subjective" sides because he wishes to find the best way to connect (bridge) with his readership so that

27 See Howard R. Pollio, Tracy B. Henley, and Craig J. Johnson, The Phenomenology ofEveryday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 49).

28 Reactions to the text have been mixed, of course, but judging from informal responses to the book I believe some reader experienced actual epiphanies from reading the material. An epiphany can be defined several ways. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, an epiphany is a "Christian festival held on January 6 in celebration ofthe manifestation ofthe divine nature of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi," 460. I prefer to merge this definition with a less doctrinal version of the concept. An epiphany can also be defined as the "comprehension or perception ofreality by means of a sudden intuitive realization." The American Heritage Dictionary (1982), s. v. "epiphany." Theorist Jean W. Scott reminds us, however, that a change of identity or experience is not a wholesale '"conversion" that breaks all ties to the past Instead, it is a substitution (either unexpected or calculated) of interpretations. See Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. (Routledge, 1993), 410.

145 he can gradually stretch (extend) their "habitual" way of conceptualizing race relations by imagining they can transform it (and reality) through reparations politics. Robinson inserts himself and his imagination into the text not solely for the literary freedom and effect but equally to establish explicit personal accountability for his interpretations and agenda. 1bis push toward self-inclusion is based too, one can surmise, on personal principles born of his decades of political experience on at least two continents:29

Social policy advocates are prone to talk one-way and write another. They speak with compassion and empathy but write like academic prisoners of statistics and bar charts. We cerebral activists are innocent victims of our own very traditional training. Oftener than not, there is no pain or joy, no hope or despair in our writing. Emotion is verboten. Objectivity is the object. We likened it straight lines to high intellect. Only our speech is personal or sincere. Even in its periodic untruths it requires of us, at the very least, accountability. I think !feel. I believe. I love. I hate [author's emphasis]. Speaking in the first person extracts from us a certain homage to truth, both in his observance and avoidance. 30

He continues:

Most of us in our writing substitute it for I [author's emphasis]. This practice is generally deceitful (unless one is writing fiction). The it [author's emphasis] style excuses the absence of feeling. Feeling is not accepted as a critical component of any truth worth seeking. 31

He ends:

Writers of nonfiction, from news copy to college textbooks, likewise hide behind it [author's emphasis], claiming for their assertions and indefinable, unachievable objectivity. Perhaps, in a counterpart to truth-in-lending laws, writers should be required under some truth-in-writing statute, to write in the first-person singular- or, if not, at

29 This '"principle" could is also likely born of a historically-rooted "cultural adaptation" to intellectual racism according to philosopher Lewis R. Gordon. See Lewis R. Gordon, "The Problem of Biography in the Study of the Thought of Black Intellectuals," Small Axe 4, September 1998,47-63.

30 Robinson, The Debt, 36-37.

31 Ibid., 37.

146 least required like cigarette makers to print a warning: "This writing constitutes opinions of the author and the author's view alone of the facts averred.32

Personally, professionally and passionately Robinson tries to articulate whatever residual structure of feeling that remains of the Civil Rights political culture and Black Power cultural politics with an emerging but inchoate proto-nationalism among nadir-weary African

Americans, as Walton and Smith indicated in chapter one. This strategy is apparently effective, meaning, Robinson's message is likely to "resonate"33 with many blacks and

"micromobilize" them into considering reparations as a legitimate and necessary way to transform race relations through redress.

32 Ibid., 37.

33 On the issue of a frame's "resonance" with a potential participant pool, see David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, "Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization," in From Structure to Action: Comparing Movement Participation Across Cultures, vol. 1 of International Social Movement Research, ed. Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Krespi, and Sydney Tarrow. (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1988), I 97-217.

147 CONCLUSION

It is my intention that the multidisciplinary and comparativist approach conceived and applied to this public matter of African American reparations can also serve as a general framework for interdisciplinary social critics investigating other public matters. As this dissertation shows, such individuals must not only be acquainted with one or more substantive issues but also with various academic disciplines necessary to appraise pressing public matters.

In the last chapter we saw how Randall Robinson, perhaps the best known black reparationist in America, has addressed through his celebrated and reviled book, The Debt, the problem of micromobilization-the attraction of individual "hearts and minds" toward the movement through a deft usage of culture.

Unfortunately, this redress movement also face several more banal problems of macro-frame alignment such as achieving consensus around what form reparations should take, its priority among other social issues, how much (or little) would be acceptable, which

persons or what institutions would be eligible, and so on. Having examined the arguments

surrounding African American reparations for slavery and segregation, I have shown that

positions taken by supporters of this public matter have not been successfully overturned by

opponents. Despite this author's belief that the argument on behalf of reparations is superior,

it must be said that the public matter of African American reparations is unresolved and is

likely to remain so as long as the emerging reparationist movement is relatively weak. Thus,

148 reparations for African Americans remains an open question for American society, no matter the certitude of proponents and opponents alike. Regardless of its current status, reparationism signals the likely beginning of a paradigm shift in black/ white thought and politics that may one day end race as we know it.

149 '

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