Men (people) make their own history, but not just as they please. This is because people are born into a society that is an enormous complex of social institutions built up through history, and these institutions are not instantly dissoluable at the will of the living generation. If that were possible or common, we would not be much different from other species. Our unique species characteristic is our culture and history. Not all of that history and culure is something we want to keep.
To make the history of ending racism will require consciousness of the history of racism and its influences and causes of the present.
Charles Brown
>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 09/24/99 02:29PM >>>
I would have said that the weakness of the 'reparations' strategy is that it projects racial oppression back into the past, as if present day discrimination were simply a hangover from the past, rather than something that is actively recreated in the free-market present.
It was a core theoretical assumption of such apologetic analyses of race as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma that racism would be superceded by the modernisation of American society. The substantial fact is that the capitalist North created a more rigorous separation of the races than did the South.
I heard Clinton once saying that the legacy of slavery would take many generations to overcome (as part of the motivation of his affirmative action programme, I think). Intrinsic to that idea is that social inequality in the here and now is an after effect of slavery. That, it seems to me is no explanation. What happened then does not explain the present.
Better to address the inequalities of the present than to compensate those of the past. After all, no amount of iniquities heaped upon anyone's ancestors would matter one iota, if they were not reaffirmed by discrimination in the here and now. -- Jim heartfield