Revisiting Reparations

By Viraj Patel | Monday, April 1, 2002

In 1948 David Horowitz marched in his first political demonstration—one in support of Harry Truman's Fair Employment Practices Commission, which aimed to end discrimination against African-Americans in civil service. He later participated in many more civil rights demonstrations during the 1950s and 1960s and helped in Martin Luther King's movement. In the 1970s he became heavily involved with the Black Panther Party and worked with them to build an inner city school for disadvantaged children. More recently, he played an active role in campaigns to put African-Americans in public office, and, in 1997, created the charity organization, Hollywood Concerned, that is dedicated 'to helping charities that benefit minorities and poor people.'

Yet just last year Horowitz was vilified by college students, professors, and civil rights spokesmen across the country as 'racist' and 'anti-black,' a purveyor of 'hate speech' and 'Hitlerian' ideas. And all Horowitz did was place an advertisement entitled 'Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea—and Racist Too' in college newspapers across the country.

Reparations for slavery, once a fringe movement, is now gaining popular support. The movement demands that the United States government monetarily compensate all African-Americans for the injustices of slavery and its aftereffects, some of which, its supporters argue, are discrimination and economic disparity between blacks and whites. In his advertisement Horowitz reasons that, because there are no living former-slaves, the present-day Americans who would have to bear the brunt of the costs have no connection to slavery. And, during the slavery era some blacks were free men and even slave-holders themselves. Thus, reparations is no longer a good idea.

His arguments seem reasonable, yet in February 2001, just a few hours after the advertisements hit newstands at the University of California Berkeley, a group of forty angry black students accompanied by a African-American studies professor stormed the editorial offices of the Daily Californian accusing the editor Daniel Hernandez of running a 'racist' and 'incorrect' advertisement. Further, they demanded a printed apology and, before leaving, destroyed copies of the issue containing the advertisment. Hernandez submitted, and in the next day's issue of the Daily Californian, an apology appeared in which the editors regretted that they had 'allowed the Daily Cal to become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry.' Subsequently, Hernandez was inundated with thousands of letters criticizing him for surrendering free speech. Unsuccessful in appeasing the other side also, the radicals rebuked him for not being apologetic enough and not using a full-page to make his redress. The situation snowballed into a full-blown controversy as talk of the events spread to the national media.

At the colleges whose newspapers ran the advertisement, controversies also resulted. Almost half of the newspapers refused to run the ad, causing many to question the faithfulness of newspapers to their advertisement policies of not rejecting ads for political reasons. At the colleges where newspapers did decide to run the ad, outcries similar to the one at Berkeley resulted. Apologies generally followed, but students protesting the ad were not easily appeased. Reports of students stealing bundles of issues from the newsstands were not uncommon. At Brown University, where members of a group called the Coalition of Concerned Brown Students protested the advertisement and stole an entire edition—4,000 copies—of the Brown Daily Herald. Even college administrators became involved. At the University of Wisconsin, 72 faculty and staff signed a letter condemning the Badger Herald's decision to run the ad as 'destructive to our community and joint humanity.' Meanwhile Horowitz, often denied the opportunity to respond to libelous editorials in newspapers, undertook a national speaking tour to defend his views and himself. On tour he encountered many instances of verbal abuse, threats of violence, and boycotts.

Amidst all the turmoil, the debate over reparations seems to have gone astray. In Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery, Horowitz's account of the entire affair, he describes the current position of the debate: 'Despite all the ruckus that the ad had caused, its 'Ten Reasons' had not really been answered, or even addressed. Instead, its opponents had launched a vitriolic attack on the character of those who stood in their path.'

Despite often being offered chances to respond in newspapers who published the advertisement, protesters rarely took advantage. Instead, they took to the streets where they carried signs ranging from the non-sequitur, rabble-rousing, 'I am not three-fifths of a person!' to the unsubstantiated, 'It's all lies!' to, of course, the personal, 'David Horowitz is a racist!'

No single statement in the advertisement can be reasonably construed as racist. Whether some parts are needlessly provocative, though, is another question. Section IX of his ad, for example, is titled, 'What about the Debt Blacks Owe to America?' One might get the wrong idea about what Horowitz is suggesting, as writer for the Detroit News did when he characterized the advertisement as saying, 'slave shackles were lined with gold.' But the actual content of section is largely irrefutable since it mostly cites facts—for example, that '[s]lavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade, and in all societies. But in the thousand years of slavery's existence, there was never an anti-slavery movement until white Anglo-Saxon Christians created one' or that American blacks 'enjoy the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world, and indeed one of the highest standard of living of any people in the world.' Horowitz is suggesting that present-day blacks, like all Americans regardless of color, should be grateful that they 'enjoy the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights anywhere.'

Horowitz's 'Ten Reasons' are not ironclad. In Section III he argues that 'only a minority of white Americans owned slaves, while others gave their lives to free them' and adds in section IV that, 'most living Americans have no connection (direct or indirect) to slavery.' Essentially, all slave owners are now dead and many Americans such as immigrants and descendents of non-slave-owning whites have no connection to slavery whatsoever. Thus, current Americans cannot be held responsible for actions done more than one hundred and forty years ago solely because they are citizens of a government that sanctioned such actions. But there are many examples of situations existing in society today—most relevantly, the reparations paid to descendents of slave laborers of the Nazi Holocaust. German companies have been required to pay billions of dollars in restitution although the current executives and employees of those companies today did not themselves commit any heinous acts. Moreover, that there were a few conscientious objectors during the Hitler era has not released Germany and its companies from their obligation to those it abused. Regarding the argument that there are no longer any living direct descendents of slaves, the idea that only first-generation descendents of victims should be compensated, but not second-generation descendents is arbitrary at best and one that does not have historical precedence.

The weakest part of Horowitz's argument is where he fails to address a major argument of the pro-reparations faction—that reparations should be considered for those who suffered as a result of the hundred years of Jim Crow institutionalized segregation. There are still, after all, many living victims of that policy.

Nor have reparations for blacks always been a bad idea. Horowitz makes it clear that he is not against reparations for slaves: 'The refusal of President Andrew Johnson to honor the promise of '40 acres and a mule' to freed slaves when the war concluded was certainly an injustice—and a costly one.' He is against reparations today, and though some of his reasons are questionable, most are very good.

A poll of primarily blacks conducted at the website Black Voices suggests that those who would supposedly have the most to gain from reparations think that the positive effects would be few and the negative effects great. Only 7.1 percent of those polled thought that reparations 'would finally level the playing field as it pertains to economic standing,' and 51.5 percent thought that race relations would be negatively affected and that 'white and other minorities would resent blacks.'

Perhaps the most admirable attitude towards the circumstance of the black American is that of Zora Neale Hurston, who succeeded in becoming one of America's most respected novelists despite living in the era of Jim Crow segregation: 'Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory.'

Revisiting Reparations

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