Yoshie wrote:
>I'll be speaking at the teach-in tomorrow, mentioned by my friend
Hope it gets a good showing tomorrow. These kinds of events can hopefully turn Horowitz's screed into a useful educating moment. (BTW, did you know the first teach-in was the brainchild of Marshall Sahlins, at Michigan in 1965? He's giving the commencement address there in a couple weeks, entitled something like "How to become a footnote to history with an advanced degree from UofM," though I suspect it'll be about his evolving pensÈes on structure, event, and history.)
In the dozens of rejoinders I've seen since Horowitz first publicized his screed, response to his arguments about "Africans" -- either the slave trade participating ones or the contemporary poor ones, seems to have gotten short shrift. This is unfortunate because to most mainstream Americans it's probably the most emotionally resonant part of his argument.
Below is a part of a Horowitz response, written informally on a different listserv, that's the most to-the-point treatment of the Africa aspect I've yet come across. (In fact Chris Lowe's whole response was good, but since it's 22K I'm only posting this segment here. But if anyone is collecting Horowitz rejoinders let me know and I'll happily and with CL's blessing pass on the whole response.)
Maureen *** [Chris Lowe:]
Let me conclude with Horowitz' argument about African participation in the slave trade. This again belies Horowitz' ostensible rejection of race in favor of individualism.
As we know, intersocietal enslavement to feed trans-Atlantic demand was not "blacks enslaving blacks," but Africans of one nation or society enslaving those of another. Benefits accrued unequally. European and Euro-diaspora demands for slaves strengthened the hand of those in African societies willing to benefit from enslaving others. Slavery-related wars created pressure for societies to enter the system out of self-defense, and so on.
Yet, strangely, although Horowitz decries present-day black racial identity, he *assumes* historical racial identity where none existed. In effect he blames historical Africans for not acting racially. Yet to expect such action is entirely anachronistic. We encounter this sort of error often enough among undergraduates beginning their first serious engagements with the issues of African and black history. It is a disgrace coming from the pen of someone claiming to be a professional historian. The common identity of the enslaved with many front-line enslavers as "black" only makes sense within terms and conceptions of race created by the structure of discriminatory enslaveability, and its recursive iterations in the deepening of Euro-diaspora racisms.
Whatever culpability individual African rulers, soldiers or slave-dealers may have had, it removes not one jot of the culpability of individual whites. Nor does it, or any subsequent forms of opportunistic individual "collaboration," change in any way the secular tendency of slavery, colonialism, legally enforced discrimination and customary discrimination to have impoverished continental African societies, to the benefit of European and Euro-diaspora nations. Nor does any individual black culpability or "collaboration" (always sought by whites, including presumably the anti-separatist Horowitz) affect the fact that those same historical processes have impoverished black people as racialized classes *within* European and Euro-diaspora nations (even as those classes have been racialized in culturally-differentiated ways).
Horowitz moves from the idea that some Africans benefitted or were culpable, to the idea that the victims of the entire system have no moral claim to redress because they had similar skin tones, or came retrospectively to share a "racial" identity with culpable Africans. This move is a complete non-sequitur. The identities were a post-facto result of racist cultural categories emerging from the processes of the same system. It is also completely contradictory to Horowitz ostensible rejection of "race."
Apparently all black people can be guilty as a race for individual acts in the slavery system, but cannot be recognized as a race or any other sort collectivity that has been collectively harmed by systematic legal discriminations (of enslaveability and after), even though those laws explicity defined them as a collectivity. They can have collective identity, responsibility, and blame (unlike whites) for purposes of denying them redress, but no collective claims to redress.
One might just as well say Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide or their descendants have no moral claim on the Germans, because Jews and Germans are all white. Or, perhaps, that German-Jewish survivors or their descendants who did not flee at the first rise of Hitler should lose their moral claim, because they erroneously believed their Germanness would over time outweigh their Jewishness for most other Germans. Or that the existence of people whom other Jews came to regard as collaborators eliminates general Jewish moral claims and exculpates Nazis.
These would all be ridiculous propositions. So is the proposition that the existence of black beneficiaries of slavery (whether in Africa or in the U.S.) somehow negates the fundamental fact that *Europeans* and their diaspora came to define Africans as uniquely enslaveable in *European* settled territories, or negates the subsequent historical entailments in racial ideas and social practice of that definition.
It is that fundamental fact and its historical entailments that still require redress, whether as "reparations" or in some other form.