<clowe@igc.org>

[This is a somewhat edited version of my correspondence with Kathryn
Green about David Horowitz's anti-reparations piece, to which Kathryn
alluded in making her query. For those interested in aspects of the
debate concerning the ads in college and university newspapers and
related "free speech" issues, the most recent twist is that Horowitz
is refusing to pay the Princeton newspaper over $1000 for the ad they
printed, because he objects to the content of an editorial against
the ad that they ran simultaneously with it.  Apparently "the answer
to speech we dislike is more speech" applies more equally to some
than to others.

See:
<http://www.poynter.org/medianews/index.cfm>
<http://www.nj.com/mercer/times/index.ssf?/mercer/times/
        04-07-BQQR2Q_B.html>
<http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/2001/04/04/edits/503.shtml>
<http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/2001/04/09/edits/519.shtml>]


As is often the case with Horowitz's screeds, this one is
tendentious, deliberately inflammatory and internally contradictory.
I disagree with much of the reasoning even when it is not internally
contradicted, and with a number of the factual assertions and
presumptions Horowitz makes.

I should say that I have not read Randall Robinson's _The Debt_, which
is the only specific articulation of the reparations argument to which
Horowitz refers.  Nor am I personally settled in my mind as to what I
think about the reparations question generally, either philosophically
or strategically.  And, of course, there are different variants of the
reparations arguments -- some focused on the U.S. (as Robinson's seems
to be) and others more pan-Africanist in one way or another.

The question of what Robinson says may matter a liitle, insofar as one
of the largest objections I have to Horowitz' column is the
presumption that what requires redress is "slavery."  Unfortunately,
both reparations and affirmative action arguments are often couched,
not only by opponents but by supporters, simply in terms of
"slavery," "the legacy of slavery," or "past racism."

My own view on U.S. affirmative action is that it is indeed needed to
redress the consequences of enslavement, of a subsequent century of
legally-enforced and customary racial discrimination.  However, it is
also needed to redress CURRENT persistent informal racially
discriminatory practice, along with continuing, though perhaps now
usually psychologically incoherent, anti-black racist attitudes.  By
that I mean is racisms that are not self-consciously recognized, and
often explicitly denied, in contrast to overtly affirmed racisms in
the past.

Possibly Horowitz' stress on slavery derives partly from what he
responds to.  Even so, it is still intellectually dishonest of
Horowitz to frame his own consideration of slavery mostly in a way
that obscures or ignores its connection to the character of
post-emancipation legal and customary discrimination.

For instance, one might take into account that most of the white
abolitionists whom Horowitz lauds (and uses to give "racial credit" to
all whites, in contradiction to his individualist professions) favored
post-emancipation reparations for ex-slaves.  They simply lost the
battle to achieve them.  The most famous formulation of that struggle
was "forty acres and a mule."  Rejection of that claim was a conscious
choice on the part of mostly white power-holders, including
anti-secessionists whose agreement to abolition was tactical in the
context of the war, and based on the view that slavery threatened the
Union, not that it was wrong _per se_. Their choice after the Civil
War was to restrict what ex-slaves got to "nothing but freedom," as
Eric Foner put it (or quoted it) in the title of his interesting
little book on Reconstruction politics.

If white Americans are going to stake our moral claims about
relationships and duties to black Americans on an ostensible
abolitionist heritage, as Horowitz says we may, and urges us to do,
perhaps we ought to take into account what those abolitionists
thought?

Of course, this is even more hypocritical in the case of conservatives
like Horowitz, whose allies in this fight are not for the most part
the intellectual heritors of the abolitionists.  Rather they are those
who fought bitterly against civil rights laws (often very powerful
people like Strom Thurmond & Jesse Helms -- & I would love to know
what Trent Lott did as a college student at Old Miss' in the 1960s)
and even now often defend a "Southern Heritage" from which they would
exclude black southerners, and willingly seek political support from
organizations descended from the White Citizens' Councils (as Lott has
done).  I think it's funny to see people simultaneously trying to
claim racial credit for the abolitionists or to be the "true
defenders" of a supposedly "color-bline" abolitionist and civil rights
heritage, against ostensive debasement by "racist" liberals, and to
defend or honor Confederate symbols.   But then not everyone shares my
sense of humor.

Despite their pretensions, Horowitz and his co-thinkers, the
organized, programmatic intellectual opponents of affirmative action
and now reparations, are not the heritors of the abolitionist or civil
rights traditions.  In fact their post-Civil Rights movment role
mirrors that of the post-Reconstruction intellectuals who promoted,
condoned or apologized for the gutting of Emancipation and
Reconstruction, and the effective nullification of the 14th and 15th
amendments for nearly seventy years.

Interesting, too, how later immigrating whites are not responsible for
the actions of white slave-owners or non-owners who condoned or
accepted slavery, but get racial credit for white abolitionists.

The idea that all of the founders of the abolitionist movement were
white Christians is simply wrong.  From the beginning there were black
abolitionists.  Nor can there be any question that the growing
conviction of many white Christians as to the sinfulness of slavery
came exactly from the proddings of black Christians, concerning both
how Christians should treat one another, and the obstacles that
slavery posed to evangelization of the enslaved.

Here again Horowitz' attribution of a racial definition to both
Christianity and abolitionism belies his supposed rejection of race.

Concerning his claim that other "ethnic" reparations efforts have been
purely individual, this is certainly not true.  There is a substantial
sense in which international support for the creation of the state of
Israel was a form of collective reparations to Jews as a people.
Indeed it responded explicitly to those Jews who saw Judaism as
constituting a nationality as well as religion.  This was not least
because the Nazi genocide reinforced the histories of discrimination
that had hampered Jews from being fully accepted as members of another
nation, with a particular religious belief system or identity.
Genocide made Zionism seem necessary to most surviving Jews.  Beyond
the formation of Israel, Germany also made explicitly collective
reparations to Israel as a nation.

Insofar as black reparations arguments are related to varieties of
black nationalism, that is no more inherently "separatist" than Jewish
support for the existence of Israel.  I'm not too much of a fan of any
form of nationalism.  But in all nationalist traditions there is a
range of degrees of chauvinism and separatism.  Horowitz is unwilling
to look at black nationalism or pan-Africanism in that light, or to
acknowledge that (like Randall Robinson) one may be a reparationist
without being a racial chauvinist or separatist.

Horowitz' claim that there may be some black Americans whose families
were not hurt by slavery is specious.  The number of African-Americans
whose only ancestors were black slave-holders must be vanishingly
small, if there are any.  Slavery-era free blacks were children or
descendants of slaves (though also sometimes of slave-owners).  They
remained vulnerable to kidnapping and enslavement through fraudulent
misrepresentation of their status.  And, here again, Horowitz'
deliberate slighting of post-slavery discrimination matters.  Jim Crow
destroyed the livelihoods, success and property of many black persons
and families who had managed to build skills or resources in the
antebellum and Reconstruction periods.  Redress is needed for the
whole history and present, not just enslavement.

One might also look to the practice of war reparations imposed for
aggression after in the two world wars.  In those cases, the nations
making reparations paid as a whole.  Yet Nazis were only a minority of
Germans, even as slaveholders were only a minority of U.S. Americans,
or southerners.  Likewise, the collective national benefits accruing
to the victorious nations were not restricted by the fact that some
individuals or corporations benefitted from war profiteering, or
cost-plus contracts (never mind those that maintained subsidiaries in
Axis countries).

Likewise specious is the claim that post-Civil War white immigrants
and their descendants have gained no benefit and should have no
responsibility for the history of inequality that requires redress.
Speaking personally, although all of my immigrant ancestors came to
the U.S. after the Civil War, I have no doubt that they, the
intervening generations, and I myself have gained real material
benefits from the racial structuring of social inequality and class in
the U.S.

Moreover, I am sure that if matters continue as they are now, my
daughter will also so benefit.  Unfortunately, this will not be simply
through the inheritance of previous generations' benefits.  It will
also be because of continuing racial structuring of inequality, class
and opportunity, racialized inequality that is being deepened by the
racial reaction promoted by Horowitz and his allies.

This picture would be a bit more complicated if my ancestry were
Eastern or Southern European, and, to a lesser extent, if it were
Irish.  But only a bit.  It would be quite a bit more complicated if I
were of Asian ancestry. The argument is perhaps most valid with
respect to recent Latino and working class Asian, Caribbean and
African immigrants, who like U.S.-born African-Americans face severe
racial discriminations.  Yet the fact that other groups have faced
forms of discrimination does NOT negate the realities of black
history.  On the contrary, U.S. racial and racial-national ideologies,
that have shaped the racist immigration policies, laws and customs
affecting other groups, are all historically keyed to foundational
racial concepts built upon defining black people and Native Americans.

One might look at the questions more in class terms.  If I imagine
persons with the same native endowments I began with being raised
black in poverty (say in urban Roxbury rather than suburban Needham,
Massachusetts), white in poverty (say in poor parts of Dorchester), or
black in similar middle-middle class circumstances in Needham to my
actual ones, I am convinced that my actual overall life-chances would
have been better than any of the others, and that the overall
life-chances of the poor white person would be better than those of
the poor black person.  I think this would also be true of similar
comparisons of life-chances in my daughter's generation.

As between the middle-class black person and the poor white person, it
would not be as clear a call. The relative advantages of racial and
class privileges are hard to compare.  What is clear is that upwardly
mobile whites can gain both.  Meanwhile, relative growth in the
security of middle class black class privileges in recent decades, due
to civil rights laws, remains unstable as interpretation of those laws
shift.  Horowitz and his co-thinkers are trying to reduce that
security.

In an ideal sense, I personally think some aspects of what the
reparationists try to address would best be handled by creating strong
social democratic redistributive institutions for everyone -- social
security, or democratic socialist security, in a broad sense, for all.
 But that's only a dream.  It's not on the political horizon in the
U.S.

In fact, Horowitz and his conservative allies are working as hard as
possible to shift matters even further to redistribute wealth upwards
and exacerbate class inequality.  They do so even while trying to
entice "class not race" liberals and social democrats to oppose
affirmative action.

Perhaps most bizarre and offensive is Horowitz' argument that since
some blacks have succeeded economically, in relative terms, those
blacks who have not "made it" despite the history of enslavement,
systematic discrimination, and casual or informal discrimination, must
have failed because of individual  or group/cultural characterological
flaws.

On the contrary, there can be little doubt that a key function of
racial discrimination has been to save a good many "successful"
whites, or their children, from the consequences of their own
character flaws.  Had such discrimination not existed, some more
whites would have "failed" economically.  Meanwhile proportionally
many more blacks would have "succeeded" (given the relative size of
the populations).

Horowitz' invocation of black Caribbean immigrants better supports
this view than his.  The societies from which such immigrants come
have been majority black societies, in which the variety and
proportion of social roles and wealth-earning positions open to black
persons was perforce much larger than for U.S. blacks for most of
history.

Assuming that economic success reflects good character, and economic
failure bad character, is in any case a dubious business.  I am quite
prepared to see willingness to make wealth off of slave labor or
exploited wage labor as a character flaw (as did the abolitionists
Horowitz claims credit for), even if Horowitz is not, regardless of
the racial identity of who is doing it.

Further, if we are going to go into character issues, we should put on
the table whether specious, self-defensive denial of racial privileges
might not be considered a character flaw.

As for "black success," Horowitz fails to face up to the
well-recognized fact that a good deal of recent middle class black
success has come directly from the affirmative action he reviles.
This was not due to any deficiency on the the part of those
succeeding, but was a justified and necessary response to persistent
discrimination.

Another large chunk of "black success" in the U.S. has from
disproportionate participation in military and civil service
employment. There relatively strict procedures tend to limit the
informal discriminations allowed and still carried on in the private
sector. Conservative pressures for privatization and deregulation run
contrary to such strict procedures.  So do pressures to be "color
blind" and not measure change.

With questions of measurement and "color blindness," another
hypocritical irony emerges.  Thanks to conservative corporate legal
and legislative work, and the rulings of conservative judges,
aggregate outcomes may not be used as evidence of discrimination by
black persons seeking to prove private discrimination.  But exactly
that sort of evidence is what the opponents of affirmative action use
to claim that it constitutes anti-white discrimination.

Finally on this point, Horowitz weirdly assumes that blacks who have
"done well" would not have done better, had their ancestors not faced
discrimination.  Although there is no way to prove a counterfactual,
simple logic suggests that had earlier generations of middle-class
blacks been able to provide their children all of the benefits that
middle and upper-class whites provided theirs, there would be a larger
class of really wealthy blacks.  That in turn would have widened the
basis for intra-ethnic patronage, kin-based investment networks,
payments for schooling and so on that have been the stuff of "group"
advancement among persons of immigrant ethnicities (though of course
this sort of ethnic progress ideology in fact masks persistent
intra-ethnic class inequalities among "whites" as well as more recent
"model minorities" such as Asian or Caribbean immigrants).

To go a bit further, but not too much, absent that discriminatory
history, might not Colin Powell might be our president, rather than a
man who went from being a legacy admission to Yale to being a legacy
beneficiary of the country's most powerful political fundraising
machine?  I once saw a t.v. interview with Harry Belafonte in which a
white interviewer (Morely Safer?) asked him why he had supported the
civil rights movement:  surely he of all people had not suffered from
discrimination?  Belafonte replied that if he hadn't been black, he'd
have been president.

Let me conclude with Horowitz' argument about African participation in
the slave trade.  This again belies Horowitz' ostensible rejection of
race in favor of individualism.

As we know, intersocietal enslavement to feed trans-Atlantic demand
was not "blacks enslaving blacks," but Africans of one nation or
society enslaving those of another.  Benefits accrued unequally.
European and Euro-diaspora demands for slaves strengthened the hand of
those in African societies willing to benefit from enslaving others.
Slavery-related wars created pressure for societies to enter the
system out of self-defense, and so on.


Yet, strangely, although Horowitz decries present-day black racial
identity, he *assumes* historical racial identity where none existed.
In effect he blames historical Africans for not acting racially.  Yet
to expect such action is entirely anachronistic.  We encounter this
sort of error often enough among undergraduates beginning their first
serious engagements with the issues of African and black history.  It
is a disgrace coming from the pen of someone claiming to be a
professional historian. The common identity of the enslaved with many
front-line enslavers as "black" only makes sense within terms and
conceptions of race created by the structure of discriminatory
enslaveability, and its recursive iterations in the deepening of
Euro-diaspora racisms.

Whatever culpability individual African rulers, soldiers or
slave-dealers may have had, it removes not one jot of the culpability
of individual whites.  Nor does it, or any subsequent forms of
opportunistic individual "collaboration," change in any way the
secular tendency of slavery, colonialism, legally enforced
discrimination and customary discrimination to have impoverished
continental African societies, to the benefit of European and
Euro-diaspora nations.  Nor does any individual black culpability or
"collaboration" (always sought by whites, including presumably the
anti-separatist Horowitz) affect the fact that those same historical
processes have impoverished black people as racialized classes
*within* European and Euro-diaspora nations (even as those classes have
been racialized in culturally-differentiated ways).

Horowitz moves from the idea that some Africans benefitted or were
culpable, to the idea that the victims of the entire system have no
moral claim to redress because they had similar skin tones, or came
retrospectively to share a "racial" identity with culpable Africans.
This move is a complete non-sequitur.  The identities were a
post-facto result of racist cultural categories emerging from the
processes of the same system.  It is also completely contradictory to
Horowitz ostensible rejection of "race."

Apparently all black people can be guilty as a race for individual
acts in the slavery system, but cannot be recognized as a race or any
other sort collectivity that has been collectively harmed by
systematic legal discriminations (of enslaveability and after), even
though those laws explicity defined them as a collectivity.  They can
have collective identity, responsibility, and blame (unlike whites)
for purposes of denying them redress, but no collective claims to
redress.

One might just as well say Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide or
their descendants have no moral claim on the Germans, because Jews and
Germans are all white.  Or, perhaps, that German-Jewish survivors or
their descendants who did not flee at the first rise of Hitler should
lose their moral claim, because they erroneously believed their
Germanness would over time outweigh their Jewishness for most other
Germans.  Or that the existence of people whom other Jews came to
regard as collaborators eliminates general Jewish moral claims and
exculpates Nazis.

These would all be ridiculous propositions.  So is the proposition
that the existence of black beneficiaries of slavery (whether in
Africa or in the U.S.) somehow negates the fundamental fact that
*Europeans* and their diaspora came to define Africans as uniquely
enslaveable in *European* settled territories, or negates the
subsequent historical entailments in racial ideas and social practice
of that definition.

It is that fundamental fact and its historical entailments that still
require redress, whether as "reparations" or in some other form.

In short, Horowitz' case against reparations is completely
unpersuasive and often despicable.

My own doubts about reparations come mainly in two forms:  to what
extent are they a distraction from more practically achievable demands
(though perhaps they do put the small scale of actually existing
affirmative action and other sorts of demands in perspective)?  And to
what extent would reparations tend to fall mainly into the hands of
those black persons who already have done relatively well, despite
all, if they were instituted within an otherwise unreformed American
capitalist system, failing to reach those most profoundly hurt over
the generations by the racialization of class in the U.S.?

But I have no doubt whatever that the current generation of black
Americans has a moral claim to historical redress, as will a number of
generations to come.  Nor do I doubt that David Horowitz, as an avatar
of our present post-Civil Rights era Neo-Redemptionism, is doing his
damnedest to ensure that the next generations' just claims for redress
will be not less or equal, but greater than those at present.

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