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Letters to the Editor
Dear Mike,
Just got through reading your essay on Reparations and I too was left with more questions than answers. I have a few thoughts on the subject. I am a Native American or Indian as I prefer. I began writing to a Lakota woman and we became friends. She is an elder and has served on her Tribal Council for many years. Like many grandmothers these days she is raising a passel of grandkids. Through our writings I learned of how she lived, which was for all intents and purposes abject poverty. I don't know about those casinos and all the jazz. I began asking neighbors to help me to assemble used clothing, household items, and when I could afford to I'd send cash. This woman, Shirley Flute is a proud woman. But when I did send cash she would react like there was a halo over my head. And I'm talking $20 or $25. What does Shirley deserve? A lot better and a lot more than I could give.
Mike, I come from a family where abuse, physical and sexual were an everyday staple. There were times I did not know how my father hadn't killed one of us. I know I would love to hear "you know Susan, I did these horrible things, and I'm truly sorry and I hope I can rectify all the horrors I bestowed upon you". That would be a start. I liken our communities and the country to a dysfunctional family. Two years ago a drunk cop ran over and wiped out an entire family. At the next Community Board Meeting we were all told that this episode would not be up for discussion. Whoa, wait a fucking minute! What, act like it never happened? Well it got discussed that night whether the 72nd precinct wanted to talk about it or not. Being a Brooklyn girl, I know how to open my mouth. So maybe if we just started there, you know acknowledge the truth of what happened. Our President can't even do that.
One more thought. You questioned in the essay does a rapist serving 20 years help to make whole the woman he had raped. Of course not. But it will sure as shit keep whole the next woman he would of raped.
Thank you for all the hard work you do on the radio program and thank you for this lovely website.
Susan DeSocio
Dear Mike,
Good article. One thing you might consider is,
Them that ask may not get, but if they don't ask, they surely won't get.
The question (unfortunately) is not whether reparations are right or wrong, but who is demanding them and how strong a force can be exerted on their behalf. (Also known as the "How many divisions has the Pope?" question.)
All of the quite sensible reasons you listed to explain why the Jews or the Indians or the Koreans or the Japanese received this or that kind of monetary settlement or gift of land or apology or whatever are irrelevant. The amounts or other compensations granted were always in direct relation to the power at the disposal of those making the demands.
The Japanese internees receive $20,000 a family -- surely an insult, given the crime. But the Japanese are not a great force in this country.
After WW II, Israel received billions in reparations from the Germans (also a joke, considering the size of the crime), but that considerably larger sum had more to do with who won the war than with the rightness of the Jewish claim. The fact was that, since the Germans had lost, the Allies merely had to say pay up (after all, it was no skin off their nose, just as giving away Arab land to create Israel was also no skin off their nose), and the Germans paid up.
And even the billions the Jews are due to receive from Swiss banks will not (despite the long legal charade) be given to them for any real moral or legal reason (morality is never influential in international relations, and legal precedents in this case never really existed) but because powerful and influential Jewish interests mounted a huge and costly legal assault, backed by equally powerful forces in the US, who in turn twisted the arm of the US Government, which turn, behind the scenes, twisted the arm of the Swiss Government, which in turn called in the various Swiss bank presidents, etc.
Certainly one cannot stage a race in which one runner has been starved to the point of emaciation for a year, and then on the day of the race give him "the same meal as all the other runners" and call the resulting race "fair" in any sense of the word. Blacks have been physically, emotionally, and financially "emaciated" in this country for hundreds of years. This was not simply, or only, the result of individual or corporate malfeasance but was for many years the stated policy of the United States Government itself.
In Germany, those who were not born when the Nazis were in power are nevertheless still paying reparations to Israel, as stockholders in the Swiss banks who were not born during that time will soon be paying reparations to Jewish families in the U.S.. But the Germans own their country, and the Swiss purchased stock in those banks. And it is a clear legal principle in every land that when one purchases a company, for example, one also must assume that company's liabilities and debts along with its assets. We may not have chosen to be born in America, but we not only own it, we have also chosen to stick around and enjoy its assets. Therefore we must also (unless we choose not to stick around) assume its liabilities and debts as well.
Although the previous paragraph embodies very sound legal and moral positions, such positions will, as I implied above, have little to do with how the reparations issue is finally dealt with. The opposing powers in the argument will arrange themselves on one side or the other, they will take one another's measure, and then come to some satisfactory agreement based only on the force each is able to bring to bear -- and having nothing to do with whatever rationalizations the parties then choose to present to the public, after the fact, as the supposed reasons for their settlement.
That's my take on the situation,
Stephen M Brown
Mike:
I have not had the chance to read Robinson's book yet, though I did enjoy your essay and heard quite a bit about it (ad nauseum, in fact) on WBAI over the past few years. I was wondering if Robinson addressed anything that approached realpolitik in his tome--mainly, why would he expect a society that cares so little for African Americans (i.e., 'separate and unequal' schools, voting disenfranchisement, etc.) to care in the least about making reparations, whatever form they might take? Being that his book was published during the "Clinton-surplus" years, his book may very well be moot under the GW Bush "Untax-the-Rich and Spend" regime. Has Mr. Robinson updated his argument to fit the reality of the current political era in any other publications? Thanks.
Ken Silver
NYC
Hi Mike,
I'm writing this from work so I will not be able to express all my feelings or opinions about the reparation movement in this letter, but I thought I'd share some of my thoughts.
I'm a white working-class guy who has worked with a lot of white workers who have had some bad, or more appropriately, virulent, ideas about black people. I grew up in a multiethnic community comprised largely of Latinos along the Jersey side of the Hudson. I remember as a young boy developing racist ideas and attitudes toward Puerto Ricans and Cubans. I worked at the Javits Center for ten years and that's where I experienced the most deep-seated racism of other white people. Most of these guys were from Irish and Italian havens in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
I entered college not too long after beginning work and became politically active. I read some Marx, learned about working-class history in the US and Europe. Since that time, I've relied upon a class analysis, rather than a race analysis, of society and history. I know it is impossible to separate the two, but it seems to me that racism's underbelly is capitalism. I know a lot of people on the Left claim racism is more debilitating than class exploitation. But if class relations as we know today did not exist or have existed, racism and slavery would not have had the propulsion capitalism produced.
So my ideas of reparations are contradictory. I have never been black nor will ever be. Some may argue that fact alone will forever distort my views or understanding of the horrors of slavery. While it may be true that my anger over slavery may not be as a great as black people, I have had to work and sweat for white people as white as me. Most people think slavery is of the past, but what do we have in capitalist America and the world over? Wage slavery may be too harsh a word for the media to use, but it is our reality.
What I don't like about the thrust of the reparations movement is that the people who comprise it seem to lack a class understanding. Think about it: the immense, staggering, and abundance of wealth created by slave labor were to be paid back to the descendants, capitalism would collapse. And I don't think there is anyone in the American ruling class would let that happen. Also, I don't think it's a simplistic, but maybe an insensitive, argument to make that to ask the American government or capitalists for recompense is a copout. The implied message to the wealthy is: "When you oppress
us (working people), all you need to do is buy us out."
It seems to me that working people's struggles to makes their lives better, black and white, would be to overthrow those who make our lives harder and harder for their own enrichment.
Take care,
Marc Bussanich
Dear Mike,
A very thought provoking article indeed! I feel that direct compensation may not have the effect that most people would like it to have. There are already too many people who erroneously feel that minorities are receiving enormous amounts of help and welfare stipends at the expense of tax payers. These people would be shocked at the amount of corporate welfare that industries are given.
No, I feel that Americans need to be educated about the true extent of the atrocities committed against African Americans and the institutional racism that still exist today. I think a memorial is a moral imperative! I believe that most people believe that the Africans that were brought here were savage nomads that were basically uncivilized and cultureless. This could not be further from the truth! Actually the West African coast where most slaves were captured had thriving civilizations with many cultural advances that were stolen by the slave traders and credited to be European advances.
This is where the true crime is really taken place in this country. The culture that was stolen from African Americans and the achievements of their past have not been rightfully reinstated. Educate the oppressors and maybe real advances in racial justice can be achieved in this country.
Sincerely,
Richard Perro
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