<clowe@igc.org>

Regarding John Thornton's response to my "thoughts on Reparations," I was
not making a case for them, either in the U.S. or in Africa. I was
criticizing a poorly informed, badly reasoned, intellectually dishonest and
tendentious case against them, by David Horowitz.

Horowitz' piece focused primarily on the U.S. So thus did my reply to
Kathryn Green, whose question was specifically what I thought of David
Horowitz's column/ad. Perhaps I erred in sending that version of my
thoughts to this list, especially given its length. If so, I apologize to
anyone inconvenienced by it.

In my earlier message I explicitly expressed uncertainty about
"reparations" as a mechanism for redress. That uncertainty is genuine.
What I do not doubt is that there is a just moral claim for redress. One
of the reasons why I object to Horowitz' misstatement of the case is that
he is using an attack on "reparations" as a stalking horse for attacking
*any* form of recognition of a just moral claim to collective redress by
black people.

The question of mechanisms for redress seems to me a separate one from the
question of the justice of the claim. Horowitz seeks to muddy that
distinction. I am not sure if John Thornton and Peter Gilliland recognize
it. I urge people who oppose the idea of reparations primarily on the
grounds of mechanism questions to read Horowitz' piece carefully, to see
how much further than that he is going.

As I said in my earlier post, what I think requires redress is not
"slavery" as such. This argument applies to continental Africa as well as
to the diaspora, in my view.

What requires redress is an ensemble of related phenomena. The ensemble
includes the historically unique racialization of *enslaveability* within
Europe-focused capitalist development, the recursive iteration and
rigidification of conceptions of "race", both during the period of
capitalist slavery and afterwards. It also includes the resulting range of
systematic discriminations, in both formal law and custom, and of
unsystematic cultural and psychological discriminations in collective
social practice, in the societies of Europe, its settler diaspora, and its
areas of colonial domination, from the 15th century down to the present.

The questions raised by John Thornton and Peter Gilliland about reparations
I suppose might be extended to other forms of redress. There are several
areas of possible disagreement among us, though I am not sure exactly what
position either of them may hold on any given issue.

Both responses are focused on the slavery era, and indeed on quite narrow
locales and event-horizons within the slavery era. Part of my answer is
already indicated -- even if Queen Nzinga, or Yoruba rulers who expanded &
commercialized internal slavery after the abolition of the legal British
and U.S. slave trades, benefitted from enslaving others, I would argue that
even their descendants as individuals, and also the communities and
societies of which they were part, have suffered under systematically
racialized social practices since. And, of course, racialized
enslaveability in the slavery era extended to African royalty and royal
kin.

Another part of my answer is that we appear to have fundamentally different
assumptions about the nature of claims for redress. My own belief is that
the claim is in the first instance a collective one, by members of a
collectivity that was constituted primarily by European and Euro-diaspora
racialization of enslaveability and its recursive entailments, and only
secondarily by defensive "racial" responses to white practices and
ideologies. I also see the claims as lying partly in practices that
persist even today.

Professor Thornton and Dr. Gilliland on the other hand appear to see any
possible claims for redress as requiring individual level discrimination
among descendants of "deserving" vs. "undeserving" (or "victimized" and
"victimizer") Africans. They also appear to regard it as a question of
claims based in the slavery era, without regard to any that might derive
from the 19th century "imperialism of free trade," the era of colonial
subjection, the high colonial era, or the post-colonial era.

Further, it appears that Professor Thornton and Dr. Gilliland assume that
it is more important to avoid giving "undeserved" compensation to the
descendants of individual Africans who may have benefitted from the
capitalist slave trade at some point, than to provide redress to the
descendants of those hurt by it. Still further, it appears that in the
case of persons who may have both sorts of ancestors, it is the
"undeserving" ancestors who should count.

My own view is that it is more important to recognize and redress the
wrongs to the overwhelming majority created by racialized enslaveability
and its recursive consequences, over the long sweep of time, than to obsess
about who may have ancestors who were "undeserving."

Another point about which I am pretty certain I have disagreements with
John Thornton, but am less sure in the case of Peter Gilliland, is about
whether the racialized capitalist slave trade is best understood as
supply-driven or demand-driven.

Professor Thornton, in a book that I take seriously and have taught to
students as one that they should take seriously, _Africa and Africans in
the Making of the Atlantic World_, has argued for the former, or something
very close to it, at least or especially in the 15th to 17th centuries CE.
I disagree, even for the early period, but especially for the late 17th
century through the 19th century in which the capitalist slavery system was
at its flood-tide, the majority of enslavements and related conflicts took
place, the racialization of enslaveability became entrenched, and white
racial ideologies congealed and became increasingly elaborated.

The Yoruba example offered by Peter Gilliland, and related cases to be
found elsewhere in West Africa, seem to me to support a demand-side case.
That is, when European and Euro-diaspora demand shifted from commodotized
persons to non-human commodities, African supply followed, not the other
way around. The template for how such commodities should be produced was
set by the global capitalist system, which continued to employ slave
production of commodities in varying degrees down to the 1880s, and
substituted highly coerced, exploited and racialized indentured labor in a
great many places following the abolition of hereditary life slavery.

I also think Mr. Gilliland presents an overly roseate view of the complex
interaction of abolitionist/ humanitarian ideology, colonization, and the
actual course of practices of slavery and unfree labor in 19th and 20th
century Africa. In particular, his portrayal of expanded internal slavery
& external aggression as enriching the entire Yoruba society deserves
scrutiny. So does his interpretation about commerical African internal
slavery's relationship to the limits of 19th century humanitarianism, in
definitions of "legitimate trade," definitions quite relevant to "free
trade" and labor exploitation & intellectual property rights debates today.
Likewise with late-19th century use of anti-slavery rhetoric to justify
colonization, which was often hypocritical in the extreme.

Finally, though, and at bottom, there may be philosophical differences
among us about ideas of social responsibility, collective benefit, and
economic redistribution. I'm sure my relative openness to collective
claims for "racial" redress is linked to my broader view supporting the
social limitation and regulation of individual and corporate property
rights and the robust social provision of the requisites for "third
generation" human rights. I am not sure where Professor Thornton or Dr.
Gilliland stand on that, but it is clear enough that David Horowitz'
arguments relate to fighting such a linkage going the other direction.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS