[In fact, I remember Justin dismissing, in quite scathing terms, the claim that every individual emancipated slave, and therefore his/her descendants, was entitled to "forty acres and mule," but that was all before I had entered the debate, and he felt his usual -- could we call it predictable? -- compulsion to find some way to appear to be on the other side.]
The real, fundamental issue here is, as I have said here more than once, is whether reparations is an idea with any political efficacy, with any reasonable hope of moving the struggle for racial justice forward. I have argued that it does not have such efficacy, and that it will harm rather than advance the struggle. I have argued that the focus of the struggle for racial justice needs to be on goals which are both politically realizable, on the one hand, and significant goods for communities of color -- such as providing quality education and health care to the inner city -- on the other hand, as well as on defending what gains have been made in the last decades in areas such as civil rights, voting rights and affirmative action. If you read Justin's post far enough you will discover that he eventually concedes that "I am not persuaded that reparations is a campaign worth its costs," and suggests that it might be better to work on reform of the criminal justice system and on defending affirmative action. That sounds like a position it is quite compatible with what I had said, if not exactly the same thing, so one would have to wonder exactly with whom Justin is disagreeing.
Well, a clue to that might be found in the several paragraphs that Justin meanders through on his way to that statement. With numerous twists and turns, he manages to impute to me a position of limiting politics to what he calls the "feasible," which means that I << 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. >>
Now I might just call this a straw argument, and leave it there, but that seems so inadequate a term to describe such a bizarre, bad faith imputation of the opposite of my politics. It reminds me of the scene in _Annie Hall_, where someone runs on for about five minute on how the Woody Allen character is a "Upper West Side, Jewish, socialist youth summer camp..." and he responds, "so nice to be reduced to your stereotype." And all this from a Justin who, a few weeks ago, thought that a discussion of functionalism in which I made reference to a variety of Marxist functionalism other than his own, was such an offensive straw argument that he had to condemn it as Stalinist and announce that he couldn't continue to participate in the thread. Life in LBO-Talk does have its ironies.
Justin: Bless you, Leo, you're so predictable. As I have explained, reparations not not the least impossible or even very difficult to operationalize. One could use a fairly simple mechanism of the sort familiar to managing class action settlements. I will repeat it once more: establish a fund, here appropriated by an act of the legislature; set up a formula to determine eligibility, say demonstrated descent from a slave; send out a notice of elibility to the potential class members; hire or create an administrator to screen applicants; screen 'em, and send out the checks. We do it _all the time_. It's utterly routine.
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
- 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 --
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010325/3351712c/attachment.htm>