Now I very seriously doubt whether it will happen. But that is not because it cannot be operationalized. It is because the political will to do it is lacking, probably for the reasons Kelly mention, namely, most white Americans do not feel any responsibility for slavery, or think that whites owe blacks anything. Indeed, there is probably a more or inchoate and utterly irrational suspicion that blacks have a lot of advantages whites don't, affirmative action and the like. Therefore, they do not feel inclined to sacrifice anything to benefit blacks. No doubt if the campaign got off the ground, reparations would be depicted as just more welfare for the shiftless.
The best argument _for_ a reparations campaign, even one unlikely to succeed, is that it provides us with an opportunity to fight these attitudes, to show "the debt," as Randall Robinson puts it, that America owes to blacks. Campaigns for "regulative" or educative goals are not uncommon on the left, and they make a lot of sense in many contexts. If we ask only for what it seems feasible to get here and now, which is what you, Leo, have consistently advocated over the years, we will get a good deal less than that.
We lose if we let the other side set the parameters of the debate. Right now, what seems "feasible," is to give up the goals of the civil rights movement, forget voting rights, abandon affirmative action for a color blind "class based" alternative, throw in the towl in prison and welfare reform, and chuck employment duscrimination law--because after all, that is the way things are going, Congress won't defend the gains of the past, the courts hate them and are restricting them, and they aren't popular with the white public.
The argument against a reparations campaign is that it looks like guilt trip and not a way to revitalize interracial cooperation for justice; it's divisive, zero sum, backwards looking rather than forwards looking, and doesn't address the current racial problems in a clear way. I don't mind that the Horowitzes of the world hate it. They'd hate anything that looked like racial justice. But I would like to see organizing around some racial justice issues that might energize black-white cooperation. Reform of the criminal justice system comes to mind. Some divisive campaigns are necessary, but these address current problem--defense of affirmative action, for example. I am not persuaded that reparations is a campaign worth its costs.
As to supposed censorship stuff, although I think the Brown students' action in destroying the papers was foolish, it hardly matters. My own experience suggests that any left objection to right wing speech will be attacked as censorship, whether it happened or not.
--jks
>
>What is the mystery here?
>
>The problem is that reparations is such a sure political loser and
>nonstarter
>that even a complete dumb shit like Horowitz, with the worst, most bad
>faith
>arguments, can make it into a cause celebre for the right. Now, on my
>Social
>Studies teachers list, all of the right wing teachers are making hay by
>pointing out just how impossible it is to make reparations "operative" [if
>I
>may borrow Doug's phrase] in any meaningful way and just how authoritarian
>and censorship minded anti-racists are. People on every left list I
>subscribe
>to are caught up in useless discussions over it, with some folks talking
>the
>inane position that if newspapers don't print Horowitz's ads, that in
>itself
>constitutes an act of censorship. Once you make the front page of the _New
>York TImes_ in the way Horowitz did, you have it made -- at least for the
>short term.
>
>For all you Hegelians, Minerva's wings have spread: the very thing that our
>good friend Art, mirror image of Horowitz, did not want us to discuss, the
>political efficacy of such a campaign, is what now stares us in the face.
>One
>victory for the racists; one loss for the anti-racists.
>
>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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