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On Reparations
Reed, Adolph
Publisher: Progressive magazineYear Published: 2000 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX24401 The notion that the United States government, or white institutions in general, owe reparations to black Americans for slavery and its legacy has been around for some time. Recently, however, talk of a movement to demand reparations for black Americans has been spreading beyond the nationalist enclaves where it has usually been contained. How has this happened? And what is its significance? To put it more provocatively, how does a project that seems so obviously a nonstarter in American politics come to capture so much of the public imagination? Abstract: - There's a more insidious dynamic at work in this politics as well, which helps to understand why the reparations idea suddenly has spread so widely through mainstream political discourse. We are in one of those rare moments in American history -- like the 1880s and 1890s and the Great Depression -- when common circumstances of economic and social insecurity have strengthened the potential for building broad solidarity across race, gender and other identities around shared concerns of daily life, concerns that only the minority of comfortable and well-off can dismiss in favor of monuments and apologies and a politics of psychobabble. Concerns like access to quality health care, the right to a decent and dignified livelihood, affordable housing, quality education for all. These are objectives that can be pursued effectively only by struggling to unite a wide section of the American population who experience those concerns most acutely, the substantial majority of this population who have lost those essential social benefits or live in fear of losing them. And isn't it interesting that at such a moment the corporate-dominated opinion-shaping media discover and project a demand for racially defined reparations that cuts precisely against building such solidarity? Subject Headings |