One thing I think is helpful is looking at the assets gap, rather than exclusively looking at income, which is the tendency.
Maybe this is a little abstract, but I like DuBois' point that the fight against slavery is in some sense the seedbed for struggles since.
The Women's Liberation Movement owes a hell of a lot to the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power but except among a few radicals all we hear about from academics is how Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) once said something sexist, and the white women fled the movement cause it was 'so bad.' In fact there was plenty of sexism in the whole society, less in the CRM, and the main new thing women took from the experience was how to organize, and that (with the turn to Black Power) they should organize against their own oppressors. (Stokely in the famous 'prone' comment was making fun of himself and sexism in the movement, according to Mary King, who recalls the whole thing in "Freedom Song."--On the other hand Abbie Hoffman, who said 'the only alliance I'll make with the women's movement is in bed,' was not being self-critical, but as usual it's the African-American man who is made the prime example of sexism.) Brief plug: There's an eye-opening speech on the roots of the WLM in the Civil Rights Movement available through the Redstockings Women's Liberation Archives, www.redstockings.org. "Civil Rights Movement: Lessons for Women's Liberation."
It's a material debt in the sense that we should want to contribute to strengthen the source, or at the very least not distort it and rip it off, if we want to see gains in these areas again.
I think the reparations call--for example as Randall Robinson does it--similarly has the potential to illustrate many things about the accumulation of wealth in the U.S. and again bring white people to their senses a little that they in their vast majority are being screwed too. It teaches something about the formation of class and class power in the U.S.
A key reason we don't have universal health care here has been the use of racism--for example they claim that health stats are worse in the U.S. because of the 'heterogeneity' of our population (i.e. people of color, immigrants) not because we have a lousy bloodsucking system set up for the profit of insurance and drug companies whereas other countries don't. If you look at the stats more closely, in our health system even white folks die earlier than they do in other countries with national health care. Again, I'm focusing on how racism is a scam used on whites by the elites, but I can't really talk about this without noting that the black/white life expectancy gap in the U.S. is around 7 years.
>CB: Yes, in the University of Michigan Black Action Movement strike in 1970,
>we argued that affirmative action should be extended to class and poverty,
>and I reiterated this in a recent talk at a retrospective on the strike.
Again and again in our history, the black movement leads on demanding general equality and white folks benefit from the push (public schools are another example). Seems like a broader understanding of that would help.
DuBois (1947): "The slave revolts were the beginning of the revolutionary struggle for the uplift of the laboring masses in the modern world." And "indeed it may be insisted that the revolt of labor against its modern degradation began in America rather than in Europe."
Jenny Brown