I may state to all our friends, and to all our enemies, that we has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. And den didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of corn, ob cotton, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything? And den didn't the large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made? . . . I say they have grown rich, and my people is poor.

Bayley Wyatt, a freedman from Yorktown, Virginia in Roy Finkenbine (ed.), Sources of the African-American Past (London: Longman, 1993), p. 88.


Neoconservative activist David Horowitz's anti-reparations advertisement has provoked a storm of controversy on college campus from Maine to California. In the wake of multiracial student protests, many university newspapers have rightfully refused to run Horowitz's factually challenged ad. Despite his intentions, David Horowitz has helped move the issue of reparations for African Americans into the headlines and the consciousness of the American 
public. Although mainstream talk hows have merely provided Horowitz with a friendly forum in which to reiterate his simplistic and contradictory rant, his ad and appearances have reenergized student activism.

Ten Reasons why African Americans Deserve Reparations

To understand what's at stake requires we contextualize and thoroughly analyze Horowitz's "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Are a Bad Idea for Blacks----and Racist Too." It was first published as part of The Death of 
the Civil Rights Movement (Los Angeles: Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 2000). Death is a diatribe against Rev. Al Sharpton's "Redeem the Dream" March to end to racial profiling. Consequently, Death is a vociferous attack on Black activists and a fevered defense of racial profiling. For instance, Horowitz interprets Attorney Johnnie Cochran's, encouraging Blacks to join juries, as racist. Horowitz snidely sums up Cochran's point as "Get it, Whitey?" (P. 9). Knowing his audience facilitates unmasking his motivations. Horowitz's purpose is to spark racial hostility, to mobilize opposition to the elimination of discriminatory policies and practices. Thus, "Ten Reasons" first appeared as part of a pro-racial profiling pamphlet.

Horowitz's real purpose is to promote the notion that race, by which he means racism is dead. From this perverted position, he logically concludes that contemporary Black activism is unnecessary. Therefore, he portrays activists as self-serving con artists and the African American people as their dupes. In Horowitz's color-blind perspective, group parity is irrelevant, because race is a fiction. He wants the public to believe that because race is an unscientific concept that it is also a non-existent social reality. Horowitz is the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing. He is the protot
ypical color-blind liberal or neoconservative who would abolish the race concept, that is all racial classification; but would maintain the system and social relations produced by racial oppression.

As important, if not more so, is the moment during which Horowitz escalated his anti-reparations assault. Over the past few years, activists have pushed reparations to the center of discourse in the African American community. 
Moreover, it has recently burst into traditional politics. Several city councils, including Chicago, Dallas, and Detroit have passed pro-reparation resolutions. According to Horowitz, he launched his latest salvo because reparations "is fast becoming the next big 'civil rights' thing" (p. 30).

Horowitz frames his anti-reparations argument in the form of questions or assertions and responses. His opinions are devoid of data and deficient in historical evidence. Because they lack validity, his responses never rise to the level of "answers." What are Horowitz's specific arguments against African American reparations? The titles in the advertisement often differ from those in Death. Whereas the pamphlet targeted the racist right, the ad aimed for a mass audience; thus, Horowitz sanitized it of its more explicitly inflammatory titles. Consequently, because the titles in Death are generally more revealing of his racist motivations I have chosen to use them. Nevertheless, I engage his responses in both Death and the advertisement.

1. Who Owes the Debt?

Horowitz claims "There is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery" because of African and Arab involvement in the slave trade and 3,000 African American slaveholders. The problems with his presentation here pervades the rest of his discussion. This time his information is generally accurate but stripped from its sociohistorical and legal context, and the power relations of the slave(ry) trade its trivia, at best, and duplicitous, at worst. That is, without the context we do not know what this information means and when contextualized it generally does not mean what Horowitz implies. Scholars of the slave trade generally acknowledge the role of power relations as a coercive factor stimulating African participation. As Walter Rodney pointed out in his classic text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Europeans controlled the international slave trade. Without excusing the role of kings and other African elites, their involvement must be understood in the context of actual power relations.

Another example of how decontextualization distorts history is his discussion of Black slaveholders. First, according to census of 1830 there 3,777 Black slave owners, not 3,000 as Horowitz states (Christian, 1999, p. 100). Amazingly, his facts are wrong, even when they bolster his position! Nevertheless, the existence of 3,777 Black slaveholders is meaningless without knowing the total number of slaveholders. In 1850 there were 348,000 slave holding families (the Census Bureau collected the data on families, not individuals). Thus, the three thousand seventy-seven Black slaveholders comprised only about one percent of slaveholding families! Second, African American slave owners were a statistical reality that tells us nothing about actual relationships. Although many Black slave owners held others in bondage, that is they asserted rights of ownership and exploited slave labor, most did not. Most so-called Black slave owners are a statistical phenomenon. They were people of some means who purchased family and friends from bondage, but never imposed master-slave relationships.

Even given the role of Africans, Arabs, and African Americans Horowitz's conclusion is deceptive. He offers a negative conclusion, "no single group is responsible"; yet, this scenario cries out for a positive one, i.e., that several groups were responsible. Moreover, the participation of multiple ethnicities does not mean that all participated or benefited equally. Furthermore, African Americans seek recompense from the only governmental entity still in existence the United States, their government.

2. African Americans Have also Benefited from Slavery

Horowitz makes two comparative claims here. First, he argues that if the present wealth of the United States resulted from slavery, than African Americans as well as whites are beneficiaries of enslavement. Second, he offers an estimate of the difference between African Americans' and Africans' per capita incomes as evidence that African Americans benefited from slavery.

First, he proceeds as if wealth accumulation produces positive impacts across society. This illogical argument suggests that slaves of wealthy masters were better off than the slaves of poor ones. Relationships of domination and exploitation are parasitic, not mutually beneficial. That is, the slave trade and slavery enriched European nation-states and the U.S. (particularly the class of slaveholders, slave trading merchants and manufacturers) but impoverished Africans and African Americans. Horowitz can only make this argument in the abstract. Actual data reveals that African Americas' percentage of U.S. wealth has stayed roughly the same, about one percent since the ante-bellum period. Furthermore, he limits his discussion of "benefits" to a narrow economic argument. Thus, he circumvents discussing the effects of racial oppression, particularly racist violence in producing stressors that undermine Blacks' physical and psychological health.

His second assertion is also ahistorical and represents a false comparison. It is ahistorical because he ignores the role of five centuries of slave trading and colonialism in producing contemporary African poverty. Secondly, comparing the per capita income of African Americans to various African nationalities is spurious because of the vast differences in the gross national product of African nation-states and the U.S. This difference is largely the consequence of the slave trade and colonialism.

3. What About the Descendants of Union Soldiers Who Gave Their Lives To Free the Slaves?

Here Horowitz makes three assertions. First, he contends only a minority of whites nationally owned slaves. Second, he claims only one in five whites in the ante-bellum South was a slaveholder. Third, he posits that 350,000 Union soldiers "died in the war that freed the slaves" (p. 35). His first claim is correct; nationally, only a minority of U.S. families owned slaves. In 1790 23 percent of the U.S. families owned slaves and only 10 percent in 1850. However, his second claim is a blatant lie. In 1790 72 percent of southern families owned slaves. In 1850, in the South Atlantic and the East Central sub regions, 31 and 32 percent of families owned slaves (Census Bureau, 1979, p. 12)

In his third declaration, Horowitz deliberately misleads the reader by blurring the issue. Three hundred fifty thousand Union soldiers died in the Civil War and the war did precipitate slavery's abolition, but it was not fought to abolish slavery. The North fought to preserve the Union. It only became a war to end slavery when Lincoln realized that victory necessitated destroying the Confederacy's capacity to wage war, that is removing its most productive resource, Black slaves.

4. Most Whites Have No Connection to Slavery

Horowitz's main contention is that most contemporary U.S. citizens do not have a "lineal connection to slavery" (p. 35). His argument here is quite devious. First, he uses the ambiguity inherent in term "lineal" to manipulate the reader. Second, he cynically attempts to pit African Americans against recent immigrants of color and other oppressed ethnicities. Although Horowitz means a straight line for many readers lineal suggests a heredity relationship. Of course, most Americans are not biological descendants of slaveholders, but all white Americans have benefited from the legacy of racial oppression---white privilege and Black exploitation, exclusion and subordination. Planters, small slaveholders, and capitalist manufacturers, exporters, investors, and insurers of slave produced products benefited from the exploitation of slave labor. During the century from 1865 to 1965 the same groups, plus industrial capitalists benefited from the superexploitation of Black labor.

Third, he limits reparations to compensation for slavery. It is on this basis that he argues post-slavery immigrants are not liable for reparations. Although post slavery European immigrants were brutally exploited and endured ethnic discrimination, like the Irish and Germans before them they expressed their rage by replicating their treatment on Blacks. Even so, by World War II the Italians, Hungarians Greeks, and Poles had become "white" and have since enjoyed the full benefits of whiteness in a white supremacist country. Whether native or immigrant the vast majority of white middle and working class Americans, have benefited from the exclusion of Blacks from professional and civil service jobs, unions, and governmental programs. For instance, African Americans were denied the opportunity to participate in the 1962 Homestead Act that transferred hundreds of millions of acres to white citizens and European immigrants. Additionally, Blacks were practically excluded from the 1935 Social Security Act because almost all worked as farm laborers or domestics. Furthermore, from the 1940s to the early 1960s white homebuyers obtained low interest Federal Housing Authority loans, a program from which Blacks were excluded. Finally, as governmental data indicates whites continue to benefit from racial discrimination in employment, loans, housing, and healthcare. Consequently, activists demand reparations not just for enslavement, but for exclusion, discrimination, and the racial violence that characterized the era of segregation as well for contemporary disparities.

Finally, his argument here implicitly his contradicts the position presented in point two. There he argues that if the United States' wealth was partly created by slave labor, than African Americans, as inheritors of U.S. wealth, are also beneficiaries of slave-produced wealth. If he were right, wouldn't this situation also apply to all persons living in the U.S., including white Americans?

5. The Cases of Jewish and Japanese Reparations Are Not Comparable And Therefore Do Not Provide Precedents

Horowitz dismisses African Americans' reparation claims because unlike Jews and Japanese-Americans, he contends Blacks are not survivors of the wrongs for which they seek retribution. He frames his argument in what legal scholar Eric K. Yamamoto calls "traditional remedies law," which seeks to identify specific individual victims and abusers (Yamamoto, 1998, p. 488). However, Black demands for reparations are based on group, not individual rights.

From about 1641 to 1965, federal and state law classified individuals by race and distinguished rights and opportunities on that basis. Group membership, not individual merit, determined one's role, position, and status in the 
economy, polity, and civil society. Individuals assigned to the African category were treated as a separate and subordinate group. 

Moreover, since the establishment of the Indian Claims Commission in 1946, the U.S. federal government and numerous state governments have paid reparations to persons other than survivors or their immediate descendants. During the 1980s several Native American nations have received reparations in form of money and land for actions a century or more ago. For instance, in 1986 the Ottawas of Michigan received $32 million based on an 1836 Treaty.

6. What About Successful Blacks? What Is Their Economic Grievance?

Horowitz's major assertion is that slavery and subsequent racial discrimination were either non-existent or have been insufficient barriers to success. He make this point by contrasting the Black middle class, which he claims composes the majority of African Americans, and West Indian immigrants to the so-called "underclass."Except the disparities between African Americans' and West Indians' incomes, his assertions are unsupported. Moreover, his logic and conclusions are absurd. 

First, the minority of African Americans who attained middle class position, have generally done so by taking advantage of the fleeting opportunities available in the aftermath of successful collective Black struggles. Members of those classes best positioned previously have made the most advances. Moreover, that members of the Black middle and capitalist classes suffer racial discrimination is widely documented in past and current employment, housing, and loan discrimination suits. Horowitz's attempt to use Oprah Winfrey a

8. What About the Reparations That Have Already Been Paid?

Horowitz's contention that inclusion in Great Society social programs should count as reparations is absurd. He simply ignores the multiple roles social programs play in U.S. society. On the one hand, Great Society initiated programs were ostensibly designed to abolish poverty. Programs, such as AFDC and food stamps, were class-determined minimum subsistence programs. Whites have made up the overwhelming majority of aid recipients, and the proportion of African Americans has been disproportionate. Nevertheless, Horowitz's discussion rips them from their broader public policy context. Great Society programs were part of Keynesian economics, the country's policy of using governmental spending to stimulate economic growth-- employment and consumption. In addition to increasing levels of purchasing, these programs also created well paying government jobs for a predominately white middle class. On the other hand, some programs were designed specifically to address discrimination, racial, gender, ethnic, and religious. No government program has sought to solely benefit Blacks. Moreover, white women and white 
men over fifty-five, not Blacks, have been the major beneficiaries of affirmative action.

9. What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?

He continues to falsify history, here by distorting the history of the abolition movement, in both the U.S. and Britain. Two points are important: (1) his denial of Black agency; and (2) his crude one-sided interpretation of abolitionism, particularly in Britain. African slaves and quasi-free Blacks initiated the abolition movement. Horowitz omits any discussion of Black self-activity because his goal is to present African Americans as indebted, ungrateful children. Therefore, he mentions 3,000 Black slaveholders, but omits thousands of Black abolitionists, 186,000 Black Union soldiers, and numerous slave revolts for his account.

Continuing his manichaean view of history, he presents the British Anti-Slavery Movement as simply an exercise in humanism. He simply extends his argument concerning Union soldiers and Christian abolitionists in the U.S. to Britain. In reality, the British anti-slavery movement was a mixture of humanitarians and imperialists. More important, British abolitionism drew its impetus from a complex mixture of humanist sentiments, economic motivations, and fear of slave rebellions. Horowitz misses these nuances because his purpose is to exaggerate white humanitarianism and deny Black agency. Thus, he denigrates the life and death struggle waged by African Americans throughout U.S. history by calling hard-won rights gifts. In sum, this argument approximates those who called for compensation for the slaveholders!

10. Blacks are Virtually the Oldest Americans, Why Not Embrace Their American Destiny

His last assertions are as duplicitous and dumb as those that precede them. Essentially, he reiterates the tired assimilationist position. Consequently, he charges that pursuing reparations will only further isolate American Americans. First, as always he blames the oppressed for conditions created by the oppressor. Black isolation, geographically, socially, and politically is a consequence of white capitalist created ghettolization, ostracism, and 
racism.

Horowitz's one-sided analysis obscures the potentially positive aspects of reparations. Beginning with Presidential and congressional apologies (Congress apologized to Japanese-Americans in 1988 and to Hawaiians in 1993) the U.S. government and white Americans can initiate a sincere conversation on racial oppression. Finally, the payment of several hundred billion dollars in reparations would ultimately benefit all Americans. Reparations would enable the rebuilding of Black civil society, the transformation of inner city ghettoes, the rebuilding of urban infrastructure, and go along way toward eliminating poverty. Reparations represent a way to repair the past, a means "to rebuild relationships through attitudinal changes and institutional restucturing" (Yamamoto, p. 521).
Conclusion

Horowitz's argument is redundant, racist, ahistorical, and manipulative. In his zeal to discipline Blacks for challenging U.S. reality and for rejecting the hypocritical America dream, Horowitz fails to consider the debt America owes Blacks. Beyond apologies and the transfer of billions of resources for past and present oppression, the U.S., especially white Americans owe African Americans for forcing it toward its noblest ideals. The Black Freedom 
Movement has been at the crux of every progressive social change in the nation's history. African Americans have been the most thorough and determined fighters in the struggle to expand democracy and socioeconomic security beyond white male elites. The Black Freedom Movement has served as the inspiration and model for the new social movements that are challenging the nightmare. Horowitz wants to bury this legacy and possibility. Yet, ironically his actions have produced the opposite effect. His diatribe has energized a nascent Black student movement and transformed college campuses into sites of struggle. Furthermore, his ad has forced the mainstream media to remove the shroud covering the struggle for reparations, thus making audible the claims of our ancestors.

References

Marcellus Andrews, Political Economy Of Hope And Fear: Capitalism And The Black Condition In America (New York: New York University Press, 1999),

Ronald Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade. "Journal of Social Science History, 14: 3 (Fall 1990), pp. 373-414.

Roy L. Brooks (ed.), When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Bureau of the Census, The Secial and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States: An Historical View, 1790-1978 (Washington, D.C., Department of Commerce, 1979).

Charles M. Christian, Black saga: The African American Experience (A Chronology) Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1999).

Edward Countryman, Americans: A Collision of Histories (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).

Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).

Roy Finkenbine (ed.), Sources of the African-American Past (London: Longman, 1997).

C.L.R. James, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World," in C.L.R. James, The Future in the Present: Selected Writings 
(Westport, CN: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1977), pp. 235-64.

Edward Magdol, A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedman's Community 
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977),

Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane, "The Political Economy of the Black World: 
Origins of the Present Crisis," in African Sociology-Towards a Critical Perspective: The Collected essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), pp. 405-21.

Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

Roger L. Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981).

Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

Robert Westley, "Many Billions Gone: Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations," Boston College Law Review 40 (December 1998), pp. 429-76.

Eric k. Yamamoto, "Racial Reparations: Japanese Americans Redress and African American Claims," Boston College Law Review 40 (December 1998), pp. 477-523.

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