THROUGH
A SHADED LENS
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
Ooops, I did it again! I promised myself, six months ago, that I
wouldn’t talk reparations with white people.
Why? They just don’t get it, the
argument gets heated, and my blood pressure rises. And, until more African American people support reparations (the
Congressional Black Caucus is not even unanimous on legislation to simply study
the issue), the reparations movement is likely to flounder.
But last year a Chicago alderman held a set of hearings on
reparations, and she followed up her hearings with a conference early this
Black History Month. In other cities, and in a couple of states, through books
and articles and a working group that includes star lawyers like Johnnie
Cochran and Harvard’s Charles Ogletree, the reparations issue is hot, hot,
hot. So what is a good-natured pundit
to do but weigh in on an issue that gaining space in the public discourse?
After all, how is it that African
Americans are 12 percent of the population and hold just 2 percent of the
nation’s wealth? Part of it has to do
with the unequal allocation of goods and services that we bring to the
table. We can’t earn interest if we
have no principal. Once upon a time,
when we had put nearly 200 years of labor into our nation, we wanted little
more than 40 acres and a mule. And we
got less than that – 40 lashes and the shaft.
We don’t have the wealth because we never had the basis. Slavery robbed us of the fruits of our
labor, but at the same time, the great migration empowered others. Here is what Dr. Martin Luther King said
about the years after slavery:
“In 1863 the Negro was told that he
was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham
Lincoln. But he was not given any land
to make that freedom meaningful. It was
something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly
discovering that this person is not guilty of the crime for which he was
convicted. And you just go up to him
and say, “Now you are free,” but you don’t give him any bus fare to get into
town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to
get on his feet again in life.”
King goes on to talk about ways our nation supported new
immigrants in the post-Civil War years, “At the same time the nation failed to
do anything for the black man, through an act of Congress it was giving away
millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest which meant it was
willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic
floor. But not only did it give the
land, it built land grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to
further their expertise in farming. And
to this very day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of
dollars in federal subsidies every year not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they
must lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.”
Reparations mean repair, fix, and
clean it up. Why does white America so
resist cleaning it up? I get letters
from folks who say, “get over it,” as if the indelible stain of our past is
something to get over. Or notes from
folks who tell me that their ancestors fought in the Civil War to free my
ancestors and that ought to be enough.
They use strong words; say black folks spit on their sacrifice if we
insist on reparations. They trample on
our broken dreams of 40 acres and a mule, and then they say we do not have the
right to repair. We do.
Here is what intrigues me most. Some folks see the reparations conversation as real and legitimate, or at least not offensive. Others are ready to throw down and say that any mention of reparations is an affront to them. I went on Fox News to talk with John Gibson and the conservative David Horowitz about the reparations issue on Monday, and in just 24 hours got about a dozen e-mails, almost divided 50-50. The white folks thought me angry and rabid, the black folks thought me reasonable and focused. How could two groups of folks see the same conversation so differently? Part of it has to do with the fact that some ears close and eyes narrow when the word “reparations” is mentioned. Do they think there is no reason to fix, repair, or make amends? Or, do they think that all is right between African Americans and whites in the 21st century?