You and I have a rather different appraisal of the value and substance of McGee's intervention on this topic. I see little or nothing of substance in what he had to say; at best, it was 9 parts invective for every 1 part substance. Perhaps it is because I have seen him engage in precisely this type of intervention on a number of different listservs that it seems like the same old "race baiting" to me.
Truth were to be told, there have been no really substantive contributions on the topic of reparations in this exchange, but that is at least in part the effect [I would even go so far as to say the _desired_ effect] of McGee's intervention: we are not supposed to have a discussion on its efficacy as a political strategy -- the commissar has spoken, and that is all we need to know.
But it is the efficacy of reparations as a political strategy to bring even a modicum of justice to the African-American [and native Americans and so on] that must be discussed. For if we are to be serious about anti-racist politics and struggle, if it is not to an arena we simply cede to the intellectual bullies and then ignore, then surely we must have some confidence that the strategies we support and pursue have some reasonable hope of success. Reparations has such a political efficacy in South Africa today, and it has had such an efficacy for Holocaust survivors, but it is/was the particular historical circumstances, with the widely acknowledged sense of governmental and national responsibility for the most vicious acts of racism, combined with what they saw as an indisputable connection between those acts and individuals who had directly suffered from them, which made it possible to undertake reparations on a mass scale in both instances. There is nothing remotely like that in the US today. As a political strategy with any reasonable hope of success in any near or middle term, reparations in the US will be very limited to specific historic acts, like Rosewood and the Tulsa riots, where state governments provide token monetary compensation to a small number of living survivors; this also follows from the situation of the rather limited compensation given to the remaining survivors of the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII.
But if you want a political strategy with some hope of success, if you think that it might actually be important to remedy at least some of the injustices which African-Americans face because of the institutions, structures, and legacies of Racism, and do it some time "before the long run" and "the revolution," whenever those millenial moments will occur, reparations are not the means to that end. I am not about to take up the struggle for reparations, for example, as a means to providing African-American children with a quality public education; there are many far more promising strategies for achieving that very important end. For some "revolutionary" nationalist folk, this lack of political efficacy does not matter, however, because either (1) they don't believe that any remedy of racist injustice is possible in a multi-racial American society, or under capitalism, etc., or (2) what is more important is the way in which the demand reparations contributes to the production of a certain narrative of African 'nationhood' in the Americas. I think that, at the very least, they should be upfront about those presuppositions, and be prepared to debate and defend them.
> i agree that art engaged in the old standby --action/practice is somehow
> more important that discussion and theorizing. i've spoken often here
> about how silly such comments are -- at a discussion list. i've also
> spoken about how sexist i think they are -- generally when i rag on carrol
> or mike yates for thinking we spend too much time in front of a computer
> instead of organizing, etc. i thought about responding but thought
> better of it b/c i think it happens a great deal and, indeed, leo, you've
> made similar gestures yourself.
>
> art made an appropriate critique -- it is a comment grounded in a great
> deal of theorizing on the part of people of color. i'm most familiar with
> it in terms of feminists of color: bell hooks, gloria anzaldua, gloria
> yamato, etc.
>
> i think brad's comment was useless. utterly useless, at best --
> particularly from someone who generally manages to pump out some major k's
> on other topics. doug at least had a theoretical critique! it was useless
> because he seemed to make an equivalence. there wasn't one. white people
> speaking about black nationalism and reparations is fine -- as is men
> speaking about feminist theory and practice -- but do your fucking homework
> and don't be surprised if someone steps out of the shadows and upbraids you
> for not doing your homework. people who spend a lot of their time reading
> and pontificating because that's their work or because that's what their
> lives afford at the moment --like us --the us that bitches about dumb
> conservatives -- owe one another that much.
>
>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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