During the US National Student Strike in the spring
of 1970 — after the US Invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent
State University and Jackson State — there was a meeting of Illinois
"student leaders" in Chicago or Springfield or some such appropriate
place, and I went there as one of the representatives of the Graduate Student
Association of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Early in the meeting, an undergrad
got up and started making a speech, and, after a few minutes, I said something
like, "Point of order, sort of," at which the undergrad stopped and
told me he was making a speech. I replied that I understood that, that I'd
heard his speech from others, that I could make his speech myself. (It was
against the War and for peace and racial justice and other good things, and,
actually, I had made that speech or soon would.) I noted that there was a
useful custom in parliamentary procedure to start with someone's making a
motion, which usually gets seconded, and then
people start speechifying and debating and discussing: "Something specific! What do you want us
to do?"
The undergrads looked at me with
bemused disapproval as the graduate students in the room applauded. If you were
in "The Movement" and over 23, you'd heard The Speech and had
attended many too many meetings with people working on our consciousness and
enthusiasm and really just wanted to know what someone wanted you to do.
There was and is much to be said for
putting a motion on the floor to do
something and have the debate and arguments start there. Even if it's a bad
idea, if the motion is well stated, it focuses the discussion and can lead to a
better idea. In any event, having a motion on the floor — as they say in
parliamentary jargon — having something specific that at least a couple people
want done is a better place to start a practical political debate than
philosophical First Principles or appeals to shared sentiments.
If you’re the American Continental
Congress, first you decide whether or not you want independence, and then you
get some bright folk to come up with a Declaration proclaiming and justifying
the act.
Sooooo … So here I want to repeat a
suggestion from Ta-Nehisi Coates: "For the past 25 years, Congressman John
Conyers Jr. […] has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill
calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well
as recommendations for 'appropriate remedies.' […] A country curious about how
reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now
called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African
Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and
then assess the possible solutions," Coates adds, "But we are not
interested." We are not really interested, he says, in "The Case for Reparations" for "Two hundred fifty years of
slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.
Thirty-five years of racist housing policy," not interested even though, "Until
we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole" (Atlantic, 24 June 2014).
I'm
interested.
Partly
I'm interested because "the old schooling sticks,"
and I was brought up in the "Justice, justice shall you pursue" tradition;
and Justice, the Prophet Amos insisted,
should "flow forth like rivers / And righteousness as an every-flowing
stream," not trickle down drop by drop. Also, I'm interested in the debate
in itself and how simply — if honestly — pursuing a serious debate in itself ensures
this much justice: making us examine our history and
ourselves.
The
reparations issue is complex.
Women
as a very large group — a majority of the American population — have an
argument for money owed for uncompensated labor, and, God knows, if we are
going to talk about White Americans as receivers of stolen goods,
the descendants of peoples Europeans weirdly called "Indians" have
some bills to present for the deaths of a number of cultures and theft of two
continents.
(Minimally,
we might stop celebrating Columbus Day as a holiday: Matthew White estimates the death toll from
the "Conquest of the Americas" on at 15 million, making it #12 on his
list of the 100 worst mass homicides in recorded history, with about the same body
count as World War I, and nobody celebrates Kaiser Wilhelm.)
Irish
Americans might note that the word "plantation" comes from English
colonization of Ireland, and the descendants of poor Irish and English in
colonial America could argue that the high death rates among indentured
"servants" — contract slaves — was one of the reasons African slavery
got introduced and became, among the planter class, popular. Which gets us into
useful discussions of what I have called (following Steven Pinker) "the continuum of cruelty"
of which Black African chattel slavery in the New World was the most
horrifically extreme case.
Alternatively,
many of us Euro-Americans can argue that our ancestors weren't around during
the era of slavery but back in Europe getting the shit kicked out of us until the
family got over here (where we were usually just exploited for a couple
generations). My incandescent-White Scandinavian-American colleague who taught
a course in The Immigrant Experience pointed out that people doing well back in
The Old Country usually remained back in The Old Country; Americans generally are
the descendants of European losers. He could note that his ancestors managed to
fight on the defeated side in some six different wars; and I could note that my
grandparents fled the goddamn Russian Empire of the goddamn Romanoffs, with my
father's father one step ahead of a murder rap for killing the goddamn Cossack
who was raping my grandfather's sister during a pogrom.
"We
weren't even in America to profit!" is an argument we need to consider; one
kind of counter-argument, however, might remind me that I grew up in Chicago, "The City that
Works," and it worked better for me than it might have because it systematicallydidn't work well for Black people. Further, my family was in the car wash
business, and we made a higher profit than we might have because Black labor
was cheap, in part because Black workers were systematically betrayed by unions
that were supposed to represent them (and in one case would've been betrayed
worse if "the old schooling" hadn't stuck enough with my father that
he drew some lines when offered "sweetheart" contracts).
Another
counter-argument to "we just got here" suggests that that "one
nation" referred to in the Pledge of Allegiance has real existence and
duration over time and that Americans of all ethnicities in complex ways
participate in — are part of — that nation. If the nation as a whole owes some
debts and dues, we might all have obligations, if different ones, whenever our
ancestors arrived and however badly they were treated.
Now I
find the idea of America as "one nation" as overly abstract and
metaphysical and "one nation under God" —and given its unity by God —
downright mystical and vaguely blasphemous. But that's a minority view.
Further, I do believe in the American
Republic and have sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend it,"
insofar as it's most directly embodied in our evolving Constitution. So if not
a "nationalist," I'm a republican
(by God!) and would have to admit also to debts of honor
owed by the Republic.
And
so forth.
We may
decide that there's just no way we can work out an equivalent of "Forty
acres and a mule" nowadays, and what we will do about reparations is
nothing directly. But at least that would be a conscious decision — choosing
not to act is an ethical/political action — and the discussion would almost
certainly get the American government doing things we should be doing anyway to
mitigate present inequities, whatever their causes.
So, a
motion is on the floor, and I for one urge the Congress of the United States to
adopt House Resolution 40, or
whatever might be its current form. Serious talk aims at action or a decision
not to act, and establishing a serious Commission to Study
Reparations for African Americans is a
solid, sensible first step.
