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April 3, 2002, 8:30 a.m.
Slavery Shakedown What reparations are all about. What is "[g]reater than the Nazi Holocaust, the
Soviet gulag, the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian killing fields, the nightmare
in Rwanda[?] Or the slave trade in Africa itself"? (The sum-up comes from David
Horowitz.)
Why, America's crimes against blacks, of course.
According to Randall Robinson in The Debt, "The enslavement of blacks in America
lasted 246 years. It was followed by a century of legal racial segregation and
discrimination. The two periods, taken together, constitute the longest running
crime against humanity in the world over the last 500 years."
Beneath the "united we stand" wartime flag-waving,
you'll find some of the same old racial tinderboxes ready to burst. A new
lawsuit aims to make sure there's an explosion — and that as many as possible
will have to pay for it. Linda Chavez has said that the "reparations debate has
the potential of replacing affirmation action as the most volatile race issue in
America."
And it's that worldview — of offenses against
blacks as constituting the worst crime against humanity — that feeds the lawsuit
just brought in federal court against Aetna, FleetBoston, and CSX — companies
that, according to the suit, have profited from slave labor. The complaint was
filed by plaintiff Deadria Farmer-Paellmann on behalf of all blacks who are
descended from slaves — a group which, according to USA Today, would include
most of the nation's 36.4 million blacks. Prominent figures including Randall
Robinson, Johnnie Cochran, Harvard's Charles Ogletree, and Cornel West — who
help make up the Reparations Coordinating Committee — promise many more suits of
its kind.
David Horowitz got a crash course in the rabid
irrationality this debate evokes when he placed, or at least tried to place, an
ad in a series of college newspapers last spring. The advertisement was titled,
"Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea — and Racist too."
Forty-three percent of the papers rejected the ad immediately, many conceding
that it was simply a matter of content. On the 28 campuses where the ad did run,
protests were held, papers were stolen (a favorite tactic in silencing
conservative ideas on campus), and calls for were made for editors'
resignations. (Horowitz recounts the controversy in his recent book Uncivil
Wars.)
Horowitz notes that until late 2000, when the
Chicago city council voted 46 to 1 in favor of reparations for slavery, he "had
always regarded the reparations movement as an obscure fringe cause." Months
later, Horowitz noticed that the reparations idea was catching on like wildfire,
with conferences on the topic popping up at colleges from sea to shining sea.
And polls suggest it's not just on campus that
reparations are popular. One USA Today poll shows whites and blacks to be
sharply divided on the issue. Nine out of 10 whites polled said the government
should not make cash payments to slave descendants, while 6 percent said it
should. Among blacks, 55 percent said the government should pay reparations.
Although the poll indicates that slightly more whites favor having corporations
apologize and set up scholarship funds for the descendents of slaves, the sharp
racial divide remains.
More than 350,000 Americans died in the Civil War
fighting in the northern army. "Was this not a form of atonement?" Horowitz asks
in Uncivil Wars.
Statutes of limitations — and the fact that some of
the companies the Reparations Committee will eventually target no longer even
exist in their original form — make it likely that the cause will never see
legal victory. Nor is it catching on in Congress, where John Conyers has been
proposing sanctioning reparations for 13 years and counting. But that doesn't
really matter.
"Once the record is fleshed out and made fully
available to the American people, I think companies will feel some obligation"
to settle, Randall Robinson has told USA Today. So long as the reparations
activists can build up enough public pressure, we can expect companies to
eventually buckle and reach for their wallets.
Of course, if this really were about justice rather
than racial politics, reparations activists would spend more time worrying about
the slaves among us in 2002 than they do on the pain they claim to suffer from
the knowledge that their ancestors were slaves. Try telling a real-life African
slave of today that you feel his pain.
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